Public or Private School

I used to blog for my old company, but they took the blog down. I am
not actually allowed to own the writings I put up on that blog, but as
I reference them on occasion in my writing I am putting those articles
up in my archives here for reference sake. I'll put the tag GS on those
articles noting that they were originally published on the http://schoolfinder.globalscholar.com/blog/

Public or Private School

June 4, 2008 – 3:41 am by Brendan

For most of us the debate about public or private school was mostly about how much money are you willing to spend on education. There was no question that private schools were better, sometimes much better, at educating our students. Would you believe me if I told you that assumption was wrong? Like someone somewhere once said when you assume you make an ‘a–’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’.

According to the article “What Do We Know About School Effectiveness?” in the May 2008 issue of Phi Delta Kappan – The Journal For Education, an evaluation of data collected by National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) collected in 2000 and again in 2003 suggest that, when students with the same background factors were considered, public school students preformed better than private school students.

I wrote before in “How Do You Learn in This Kind of Environment” students in our public schools are facing difficulties that are almost unimaginable to the majority of America. Somehow though the majority of them find a way to get an education.

There is no doubt that work has to be done to improve education in the United States. The problem though is not necessarily the current system. The system has it’s flaws I know, but it is actually working better than than can possibly be expected, if you factor in other influences. To truly create change in the quality of education (at least for the most at-risk students) in the United States requires changes in factors outside of how we educate children.