Public schools vs. private schools

I live in Chicago. 2nd (fuck you L.A., we're still second, more of our people are citizens) largest city in the United States of America. I've went to both private and public schools growing up, one of the former being the University of Chicago Lab Schools, and one of the latter being Walter Payton College prep. I have groups of friends in both categories. I even went halfsies in college going to SIU Carbondale then Iona College in New Rochelle. From 1st grade to 8th grade I bounced around for reasons I can't even get into right now. My family did not move once.

Here is first thing I know of as fact for the kids that stayed in private school in Chicago: They got to the harder drugs sooner and more often than the public school kids. Drinking also for the most part. The public kids had access to them, they just didn't give a fuck about trying them and were perfectly cool with weed, if they did that. This also reached into college. The kids I knew that tried X were always from private schools.

The second thing when it came to academic success between the two schools, in Chicago, 80% of the schools private and public, hover in the "its up to the student/parents" bracket. 10% of the schools absolutely suck, 10% of the schools are fucking great. I know kids that went to public schools that got into Harvard, and ones that went to private school that got into Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford. The thing they had in common is that they were determined to do their work and get good grades. If that came from within or parents, that ultimately is the deciding factor. Teachers that give a shit help, but the teacher I knew that gave the biggest fuck was my band teacher.

I might not have the largest sample here, but I went to a 7th and 8th grade school that has a "gifted" and regular class. I was not in the "gifted" program. I know kids that got to college, got fucked up on drugs, and not doing shit with their lives. The overall picture, I sucked at school averaging a C-, failing quite a few classes in high school (mostly math) then got to one college, and went Beast Mode. Then I transferred to another school kept up Beast Mode averaging a 3.5, then went to graduate school for my masters after that. Not to stroke myself too much here, I'm doing better than a lot of kids that went to private schools their entire lives. Hell I'm doing better than some kids that went to better colleges than I did. What I did have was my parents encouraging me (see: beating my ass) to make sure I got where I needed to be, maybe they'd be better off if they had the same.

tl:dr Maybe the school/teacher/facilities doesn't matter if the student/parent is determined to do their best and get their shit going.

 

Wait. So we're now advocating private school because it's less safe? This thread is weird.

You may live in some imaginary universe where fights are less common in public schools than private schools, but I guarantee you this is not the real world in 99% of the US and Canada.

It's adorable that you think Catholic schools encourage that. I was thrown out of class at least once for suggesting that perhaps there were flaws in Catholic ethical reasoning on a topic. I'd be willing to place bets on which is closer to the average Catholic school experience.

 

This is categorically untrue. Don't know (or honestly care) where you went to Catholic schools, but I went to three different ones, one of which was one of those "bad" schools where we had a school dance cancelled because CrimeStoppers got a call about a gang shooting. If you were involved in fighting, it was primarily because of your extra-curricular activities and not because you were in a Catholic school.

Oh, and everything else you said about how separate schools treat religion and the amount of debate allowed is the diametric opposite of my experience. That being, in my experience, they did our best to not tell us other religions existed, and made us write and deliver speeches as to why we thought euthanesia, cloning, stem cell research and abortion were bad.

 

As I've stated here before, I grew up in Wyoming and with a few exceptions, there is no option to attend a private school. Our town had one private school but it was awful and generally for kids who had been kicked out of the public school system. That said, my brother attended several schools both private and public around the country while playing hockey. Not only did the private schools boast some of the most impressive lists of colleges visiting campus which students regularly attended (All of the Ivies, Stanford, Berkeley, BC, BU), but most of the teachers had master's degrees and many had doctorate degrees.

At one private school the kids were very sheltered. They lived in a private school bubble and were not exposed to people outside of other affluent white kids. It's the social aspect that worries me most about private education. I place more blame on the parents than the school for this problem but I do think the school has something to do with it. If I could afford it, I would send my kids to private school but I would work hard to give them a wide range of experiences so that they know there's more to life than BMWs, lacrosse, and other WASPY shit.

I attribute private school to my brother's success in college because he actually knows how to work hard and get shit done. At private school the teachers actually gave a shit and held him to a standard that I was never held to. He was often studying more in high school than I was in college. I look at the difference between our performance during our freshmen year of college and am amazed. I had a 2.5 during mine and he has 3.5 at a much better school. His study habits are far greater than mine were at the same age. The rigor of the education he received in high school definitely had something to do with this.

 

I went to a private international school that cost $20K+ per year. Since most of the good has already been covered, I'm going to lay out some of the drawbacks from my experience.

Piles of unnecessary busy work gets dumped on the kids. Some is just pounding facts into your head for regurgitation, and some is completely useless like staying after school almost every day for three weeks so you can build Animal Farm in the classroom, or bugging family and friends to take the 4th psychology experiment you designed to prove memory is fallible. My private school expected kids to give their childhood to the place. School, sports, homework, extracurricular activities, etc. That was supposed to be your life. Free time wasn't highly valued. A lot of students had private tutors in addition to school (I was in Asia).
It breeds an army of narcissists. From the moment kids entered they were told they were better and smarter than everyone else. The social elite. Naturally, most kids like hearing that.
Like Caseykasem said, sheltered lives. I erred to the side of too many experiences as a teenager, but was by far the exception at my school. On a school trip me and my friends were telling stories for 3 hours. What did the kids we were talking to say they did on Friday nights? "Nothing." That was their verbatim response, and we didn't get much more out of them other than watch a movie, or attend lame events their parents would drag them to. I don't want to portray the kids as devoid of personality, but private school made them mature much faster in some ways, and much slower in others.
The teachers are much more assertive, the networking is great, and your kid won't want to be a lazy dipship because that makes him a pariah. If you're on the financial fence it's probably not worth the money. You can learn almost as much in a public school, and your achievements in high school don't mean shit in the long run.

 

It really fucking depends. There are a million attributes on which to compare the two types of schools, so I will mainly focus on those having to do with raw education. Connections and behavior is important too, but I could rate pages and pages on each.

There are some really good (relatively speaking, of course), first-rate public magnet schools (obviously, something like Thomas Jefferson in Virginia is comparable to a Philips Exeter or Andover in terms of education, opportunities, atmosphere, etc.), but I would say the vast majority (90+%) suck.

Similarly, there are some fantastic private schools, but a smaller majority (let's say 70%, based on my experience) suck, too. Probably not quite as much, but still.

I went to public school from Kindergarten to 8th grade. They were garbage. Lots of disruptive students and shitty teachers. I experienced boredom; there were few attempts at even disguising the shit we were doing as "learning", and I had nothing to do in class. I also knew way more math than my teachers in 7th and 8th grade. Nevertheless, I wasn't allowed to skip grades to take more advanced subjects.

Keep in mind that my elementary and junior high were supposedly well-ranked, too.

Then, I went to a private high school with a heavy focus on math and science. I was able to skip multiple years in math, I took 15 APs, there were a bunch of extracurriculars for math and science, fellow nerds to engage in these passions with, etc.

Then again, I had friends who went to public high schools and received a similar level of education and opportunities as I did. Then again, all these public schools I have in mind are perennially ranked in the top 100 nationally, so again, they're not representative of the average.

Of course, when I was deciding upon a private high school to attend (there were a few that accepted me and one even offered me a scholarship), I noted that some of them offered educations that were only slightly better than the awfulness one typically finds in a public institution.

This is an extremely general question; it depends on the specific public and private schools and what each offers.

In general though, I would say that a private school is less likely to suck. But again, there are public schools that are better than private ones.

 

I went to a public school through fourth grade, then private for middle and high school.

I was too young to understand the subtleties of public education at the time I received it. I went to a suburban school in a large metropolitan system; the student body consisted of equal parts inner city kids, backwoods rednecks, and white-collar offspring, as this was a time when busing was still considered the elixir for all society's ills. It was also the dawn of our modern understanding of self-esteem, specifically how it is a delicate flower not to be perturbed by the slightest inkling of inadequacy. The environment, put mildly, was not conducive to learning.

Probably the most significant complaint I have in retrospect for my public school experience was the propensity for half-assed experimentation. In five years, I suffered through various revolutionary attempts to drag the American educational system, scratching and clawing, out of the dark ages, rarely with success.

• When I was in first grade, I attended an alternative class with eight to ten other "gifted" students where, instead of piddling through flash cards and picture books, we made zoetropes and wrote haiku. It lasted for one glorious month until it was pulled for a dearth of funding.
• Later that year, I was sent to a third-grade class for reading. This in itself was a challenging and productive experience, except for the fact that I had to leave by myself in the middle of class, while my teacher explained where I was going, only to return with chapter books to read in the middle of "rest time" after I'd already gotten to miss math. I did not earn the respect and admiration of my peers.
• In the second grade, I was placed in a "multi-age" class with second and first grades under a single teacher. I'm still not sure what the point of this was other than a roughly 50% reduction in staffing overhead. There was also a roughly 50% reduction in learning, which I assume was considered a positive side effect by the school board.
• In the third grade, once the teachers found out I'd already had reading at that level once, I was sent back to the first grade to show flash cards to students. Thus the circle remained unbroken.
• Also beginning in the third grade, some graduate students from a local university came over to test their groundbreaking and innovative teaching method on some guinea pigs. The system consisted of pairing up and reading books to each other. If one member of the pair missed a word, we had to follow a scripted procedure that stopped their progress when they missed it (not before or after), gave them four (not five or three) seconds to figure the word out, then repeated it twice (not once or thrice). I hated this. I was sent to the principal's office for absolutely refusing to participate. My mother, on several occasions, had to leave work to come to the school because I was defying the establishment. I still have nightmares about it. I'm dead serious. I, as a grown-ass man, will wake up in a sweat in the middle of the night because I dreamt that I was having to read off a sheet of paper every three seconds when the person reading a book I've read twenty times screws up a sentence.
• In the fourth grade, because it was such a wild success, the program was expanded to math and spelling, nearly half the school day. I then experienced the wild joy of following a scripted procedure that stopped my partner's progress when they misspelled a word or multiplied two numbers incorrectly, (not before or after), gave them four (not five or three) seconds to figure the word or equation out, then repeated the correct answer twice (not once or thrice). If I ever find the grad students who wrote their thesis on this inhuman torture, I will shove the leather-bound volume up their corduroy-draped ass twice (not once or thrice) and throw them to the most ornery review panel Satan could possibly conjure for all eternity (not eternity plus or minus one unit of time).

I want to say my private school education was more fulfilling, but I went to a small, relatively cheap Christian school. We had good teachers (the sophomore English teacher clandestinely let us write on Vonnegut) and bad (I and a friend taught AP Calculus to six other students because our teacher hadn't had the subject since he left college for his service in Korea and he didn't remember how to do any of it). I spent an hour a day on Bible studies, which would have been intellectually stimulating if it had been based on the historical and philosophical background of the Book and hadn't alternated between Sunday school for kindergarteners and a comprehensive list of activities worthy of eternal damnation. Sex education was a video of childbirth and the highest concentration of the word "no" attainable in a classroom setting. And God help you if you wanted to learn the natural sciences. I spent a night peeling "HIC SVNT DRACONES" stickers off a chapter on evolution to study for a test only to find the next morning it was in a true/false format and consisted entirely of Bible verses.*

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My saving grace was my parents, who threatened me with unimaginable pain and suffering should I lapse in my studies. Unfortunately for me, I only found out in college that those threats were largely empty, and best challenged with contingency plans in place (such as distance, student loans, and a dorm room in which to sleep). But in seeing the difference between myself and my high school friends, whose parents didn't take an active role (or any role) in their studies, I also learned a valuable lesson about parental involvement in a child's education, particularly where the former is paying for the latter.

The largest impediment to a child's education is apathy, not by them but by the parents. Public or private is largely irrelevant. If you don't give a shit, your child doesn't give a shit. I know, you're busy, the hot dog stand stays open late, wah, wah, wah. Get involved. If your kid's education is fucked up, unfuck it. Join the PTA and meet their teacher. Then meet them again. Make them do their homework and help them if they're having trouble. And for the love of God, stay on their ass and make them very uncomfortable with the idea of intellectual sloth.

Some people might balk at my ideas for education reform, and a lot more might burn me at the stake for them. But if I could change just one thing, I would make the parents directly pay for their child's education. I don't care if the government cuts a check to the school board, and the only role of the parent is to physically deliver the piece of paper to the school. I want the parents to see the money, to feel it in their hand, and to see it exchanged for their child's education. I think then many of them would take a more active role in making sure they get their money's worth.

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* I'm not joking.**

** About the test, not the stickers.***

*** Though I might order the stickers off CafePress anyway.