It tends to vary from state to state and even town to town, so it’s extra complicated. I haven’t seen the statistics in a while, but some states do (or did when I saw the statistics) have average education quality that is equivalent (or at least in the ballpark) of what you’d fine on some of the wealthier countries in Europe and Asia. Needless to say, it’s the blue states that tend to do better in this regard, with the bluer the state, the better it tends to be.
Curt Schilling (yes, he turned out to be an asshole, but that’s besides the point here) told the story of what happened with his kids when he joined the Red Sox. At least for the first few years in Boston, he spent the baseball season in Massachusetts and went back to Arizona for the off-season. He talked about how the Massachusetts schools were so much more advanced than the Arizona schools and how his kids were actually set back when they returned to Massachusetts after spending the off-season in Arizona.
It turns out that the district I happen to live in scores pretty well compared to the world at large. However, a random district in Arizona (Avondale Elementary in Maricopa County) scores quite poorly.
One thing I think is important nobodies mentioned is the people who consume loads of news. News being fox and talk radio.
While they tell what is technically the truth, like, the facts they say like, names, places and, dates etc. are accurate. They’re just so huge on spin and opinion that in the eyes of the consumers of this propaganda, they’re the good guys.
In their own minds they’re not against PoC, they’re only against illegal immigration. It’s frustrating to talk about, and write about and it’s a part of why I’ve taken a step back lately.
The things people said in 2016 were true. I’m tired of fighting with family. It’s easier to just leave.
Probably a lot like I did when I moved to Virginia and was told I didn’t have to go to school any more if I didn’t want to and get a ‘Standard’ diploma with a 10th grade education from a pretty average surburban New York school.
It’s not just between “Blue” states and “Red” States. When I graduated from my private Jewish Day School in 8th grade, and went to a public high school in 9th grade, I was advanced in enough subjects that the guidance counselor asked my parents and me if I wanted to skip a year and come into the school as a sophomore.
Ultimately, we decided I should enter as a freshman and just take advanced classes, but this wasn’t a rural Virginia school, this was a very well off suburban school outside of Albany, NY, that had won the Blue Ribbon School of Excellence, for whatever that’s worth.
Additionally, in my old Hebrew Day School, we spend half the day on Hebrew and Biblical subjects and the other half of the day on “normal” subjects. People from my Jewish Day School literally spent half as much time on English, Social Studies, Math, Sciences, etc, but most of us were still advanced compared to our still-good public school counterparts. It really makes me wonder what the public schools are doing wrong/differently.
It’s a whole mix of things. One factor that tends to drag nearly all public schools down is that by law they need to accept all comers: special needs students, the physically and mentally challenged, discipline problems, impoverished students, etc.
Private schools can pretty much pick and choose who they want. They also generally have students with higher income families as you need some more income to be able to afford tuition, etc.
There are only so many resources to go around for public schools and having to also deal with students who, by their very nature, need more resources and support than average doesn’t help.
I totally get all that, and that’s a huge and legitimate difference. At the same time though, I literally spent half my school day learning Hebrew and studying the Talmud, and I still came out ahead of my public school counterparts. The gap just seems to be too big.
Well, your Hebrew Day School just might have been that awesome too. I went to a private Catholic school for grades 2-5 and it held me back relative to the public schools in my town. Part of the issue was that the school was so small (only one class per grade level) that they really couldn’t do much to differentiate students based on their skill levels: everyone pretty much learned at the pace of the slowest students in class.
I have a distinct memory of my first class at Boston Latin in 9th grade being World History and having come from 8 grades of Catholic school, realizing that they hadn’t discussed the origin of humanity beyond the Garden of Eden. My teacher was graceful enough in handling it, saying that the Garden of Eden may well have been in Africa, but I was definitely behind in that aspect. I also never ever got good at writing papers/essays longer than a page unless I was particularly passionate about a project because in Catholic school I had literally never done so, and Boston Latin assumed you knew going in.
The Talmud and learning Hebrew might have been an advantage. Correct me if I’m wrong but the Talmud is full of philosophical, ethical, legal etc… ponderings of rabbis and not just here’s the rules deal with it and so builds a foundation of thinking and consideration instead of acceptance. And the advantages of learning another language at a young age is widely known.
Were the class sizes comparable to public schools?
Were the quality of learning materials (text books and such) of comparable quality?
Was there a culture of school being important in both places?
I’ve been to quite a few schools, public and private, though never religious. One thing that struck me at all the american schools I went to was this ‘too cool for school’ attitude that got you in with the cool kids. It was more prevalent at my public middle school than at my magnet middle school.
At my public high school, the school was so big, you could get lost. Like literally I could skip class bu just like, walking around. I’d never see the same person twice and everyone’d just assume I was on my way to a bathroom.
My high school had about 750 students, so less than 200 students per grade. That’s pretty small. The quality of the learning materials was pretty high. Like I wrote, I went to a pretty middle to upper-middle class suburban high school in New York. We’re not talking about Kansas here. The culture WAS incredibly different though, and I remember the sheer force of that culture shock hitting me like a brick wall my first day in 9th grade.
That all being said, my point in talking about my own school experience wasn’t to compare private schools with public schools, because ultimately that’s apples to oranges, but to point out that even in “Blue” states like NY, schools aren’t always great. It’s not just a “Red” state problem, the entire public education system in the US could be improved, better funded, etc.
No, you’re correct. I don’t want to get into the differences between the major religions, but Judaism does have a long-standing tradition of questioning things, and encouraging critical thinking, instead of just relying on dogma. My parents used to joke that they knew that I would become a lawyer because of all the arguments I used to get into with the Rabbis teaching my classes about Talmudic law, etc.
Yeah, my second highscool had about 450 students when I graduated. Has about 650 now. My graduating class was 86…
Had a prestigious sounding name: Academy of Information Technology and Engineering (AITE) in reality it was just a really small highscool using a magnet system.
I knew every single student. I knew every single teacher. I knew every singe administrator. It was like a small town. You’d hear about everything everyone did.
I got my CCNA in highscool, class size 5, and one of those was a TA… My largest class at AITE was like maybe 15 for like English. With everyone in everyone’s business it was hard not to have pressure on you from all sides to keep your grades decent.
There are obviously a very large number of reasons, none of which individually account for the difference in education. You could even have huge differences within the same grade in the same school if one teacher is much better than another.
The one thing I don’t see mentioned often enough is simply that to a large extent, students will learn what you teach them. If you teach calculus in 10th grade instead of 12th grade or college, you’ll have 10th graders that know calculus. Not everyone’s going to get an A, but some will. You obviously can’t teach calculus in Kindergarten, but the capabilities of children are still vastly underestimated.
“On Thursday, the D.C. City Council Committee on the Judiciary and Public safety unanimously voted to send the Youth Vote Amendment Act of 2018 to the full council. The bill would make D.C. the fifth city in the country to grant voting rights to 16- and 17-year-olds, and the first to allow voters under 18 to cast a ballot in federal elections.”
I remember watching a documentary a while back and one scene was of a Rabbinical school in Israel that basically consisted of the younger students in, often very heated and loud, debates with their older teachers. The Rabbi giving the tour of the school to the documentary’s host was like, “Not only was this normal, this was expected and desired at a Rabbinical school.”