June 19, 2005
PUSH US, PULL THEM:
Best, brightest pushed into private schools (Peter A. Brown, May 13, 2005, Orlando Sentinel)
[Harvard President Larry] Summers spoke about schools at a reunion of Neiman Fellows, alumni of a Harvard program that selects 12 American and 12 non-American midcareer journalists for a paid year of study.In his remarks, Summers explained why the national interest requires that more attention and resources be poured into public schools to improve learning, especially among historically lower-achieving groups.
Hooding Carter III, State Department spokesman during the Iranian hostage crisis, asked Summers to square that notion with the reality that most of those in the room, and a majority of Harvard faculty, send their kids to private schools.
Summers paused, then talked about how parents must do what is best for their children, which is both obvious and beside the point.
In fact, increasing numbers of parents are sending their children to private schools, according to a U.S. Department of Education study. A number choose home-schooling for reasons of finances or faith.
However, many top students attend academically rigorous private schools out of parental concerns that the public schools do not sufficiently challenge them, because of the attention rightly focused on poor learners.
Summers, a public-school product, is one of those parents. While Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, he sent his three children, two of whom are now in high school and the third in middle school, to a public school in D.C.'s suburbs. After he became president of Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., in 2001, however, he put them in a private school.
Summers said that when he used to attend meetings of senior Clinton aides, he was one of only two sending their kids to public schools. Clinton, you may remember, disappointed many supporters, who see private education as somehow un-American, when he chose to send his daughter, Chelsea, to a private school.
Summers said he recently talked to the other official, whom he did not identify, who had been sending his kids to public school. Summers said that man was reconsidering his decision, because the reading requirement in his son's honors English course had been cut in half to make it possible to triple the number of students able to take the course.
Some may wonder why the country should care if those with the financial means to afford private education do so.
Obviously, any child attending private school is one fewer to be educated on the taxpayer's dime.
Yet it is not just the wealthy who are sending their children to such private schools. I am among the many middle/upper-middle-class parents, some receiving financial aid, who are investing in their children, even though they would rather spend the money on a new car or nice vacation.
Why not pull everyone via vouchers? Posted by Orrin Judd at June 19, 2005 12:09 AM
As a couple of different recent posts have made clear, the curriculum only starts to matter in high school. The only point of elementary school is indoctrination and assimilation. That the public schools have refused that assignment -- which could be done competently by any adult able to hold a job -- betrays union feather-bedding and sheer incompetence that are, on their own terms, awesome to behold. We'd be better off if we got our teachers like we get jurors.
Posted by: David Cohen at June 19, 2005 11:27 AMJurors do such a wonderful job as we've seen this week in Santa Barbara.
Teachers want standards. The problem is that the politicians don't because having a standard means that some people will fail. And those people are known as voters. When some creative demagogue can find a disproportionate number of failures coming from specific races and ethnicities, he can make political hay by dumbing down the schools even further.
The curriculum matters early. That is why things like serious science, foreign language and math instruction start at about age 10 in East Asia and in much of Eastern Europe.
Posted by: bart at June 19, 2005 11:35 AMJurors, taken as a group, do a better job than teachers taken as a group. (And it's not at all clear that the Jackson jury was wrong, other than on the misdemeanor "contributing to the delinquency" charge.)
Asia has a homogenous population and a different education system. It includes not learning anything after high school. We've got a heterogenous population and college as trade school. Comparing their elementary school curriculum with ours and saying theirs is better because of what they know by age ten is like saying that an Indy car would be a better street car than a Honda because it can go from 0-60 in much less time.
Posted by: David Cohen at June 19, 2005 11:46 AMWhich of course explains why graduates of Asian universities dominate American grad schools in the sciences, math and engineering.
Juries are a disgrace and should be eliminated and replaced by professional triers of fact.
Posted by: bart at June 19, 2005 11:55 AMAsian students pay full tuition so of course they dominate grad schools.
Jurors are a foundation of freedom. "Professional triers of fact"? Why would establishment of a new clique help anything? Judges who hold bench trials are no better than juries at finding fact.
Bob: It's the French way.
My father had a pithy response to this suggestion: People who prefer judges to juries haven't met enough judges.
Posted by: David Cohen at June 19, 2005 1:25 PMSomeday the rest of the country will wake up to the scam the public education establishment has been running. Urban public schools are so bad that anyone who possible can pulls his or her kids out. The result of course is that the system is taxing everyone just to educate the children of those unable to get their children out. The "surplus value," if you will, is used to finance redundant levels of administrative overhead, not to mention all the "pay-to-play" contracts being handed out. If some day the Cardinal got up and said, "O.K., that's it, you win, our schools are closed," the system would immediately crash. 2014 can't come soon enough. e
Posted by: Lou Gots at June 19, 2005 4:40 PM"Asian students pay full tuition so of course they dominate grad schools."
Grad students in the sciences do not generally pay tuition. They are low wage labor who serve as TAs for the intro courses, so that any ability of american students to learn science or math is destroyed by having techers who cannot explain things in English. More importantly, they serve as low wage labor in the labs that their employers really care about.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at June 19, 2005 9:54 PM--I am among the many middle/upper-middle-class parents, some receiving financial aid, who are investing in their children, even though they would rather spend the money on a new car or nice vacation.---
Is this person a boomer?
Robert,
Once again you have stumbled onto the truth.
David,
I've met a fair amount of arbitrators in my time and they are better than jurors. Most intellgent decision-making today requires some level of expertise and the homemakers, welfare recipients and old folks who make up our juries simply don't cut it in most circumstances. As a lawyer, you may prefer dealing with the ignorant but those of us who are concerned with getting accurate results which have some reflection of real life do not. Consider the raft of wacky judgments in PI or malpractice cases, let alone class action idiocy like the tobacco litigation.
Posted by: bart at June 20, 2005 8:57 AMNo one understands issues less well than experts.
Posted by: oj at June 20, 2005 9:08 AMSpoken like a true liberal arts major.
Posted by: bart at June 20, 2005 9:29 AM