6 responses to “Lower Education”

1. 

   dwp

   Fri 20 January 2006

   Two points:

   1) At least some private schools have endowments, which they use to some extent to subsidize tuition. I wonder what the effective average rate is once that subsidy is taken into account.

   2) Private school children are a highly self-selected group, which I think positively affects their performance in at least two ways:
   a) Their parents are wealthy enough to pay for private school. That means (on average) that the parents are more intelligent, which in turn means that the kids have a higher IQ.
   b) Their parents care enough about their education to pay for private school. Likely those same parents care enough to push their kids to work hard and succeed, and to supply them with resources that they need to do so.

   I suspect (but of course can’t prove) that if we abolished private schools, we’d see about the same distribution of success and failure as we do today, though perhaps with more spending on education due to monopoly waste.

2. 

   Jonah

   Fri 20 January 2006

   1) Almost ALL private schools have endowments, grants, or some sort of gifts given to them. None are supported by tuition alone. But people give money to them because they can afford to be generous and think the school is doing a good job. Better than me being forced to give money to the local school district, I think.

   2) We would (half) joke about our local Christian school as the place where parents sent their problem children.
   a) My parents were not at all wealthy when I started first grade at our church’s school. Our church subsidized it. I know of many other unwealthy families who have been able to get scholarships to send their kids to private school.
   b) I also know of plenty of unwealthy parents who can’t afford to send their kids to private school but care about them just as much as those who can.

   My point is that throwing money at the problem does not solve it. I never attended public school, nor did my sister or brother. Yet my parents have paid property taxes that whole time, They paid for our educations out of their own pocket. I bet we could have bought way cooler chemistry sets with vouchers.

3. 

   dwp

   Sat 21 January 2006

   My major point on 1) was that the $4,689 number is probably too low, when you take the total resources of the private school into account. That’s important to making an apples-to-apples financial comparison, since the numbers for public schools reflect expenditures, rather than a single source of income.

   I don’t know what the extent of the tuition subsidy is. It could be dramatic; the scuttlebutt around Rice was that our tuition was more than half subsidized by the endowment.

4. 

   Jonah

   Sat 21 January 2006

   Yes, I’m sure $4,689 is less than what is ACTUALLY spent per student in the average private school. Yet Utah manages to get its kids educated with $15 LESS than that (probably because the Mormons send their kids to LDS schools or homeschool, leaving their public schools smaller). The beauty of private institutions of learning is that they benefit from both the free market and the American version of an aristocracy: people are willing to pay more for a higher quality product; the better schools get more money; and the billionaire who’s keen about the liberal arts can support a school stressing the liberal arts.

   Should we do away with public education? I don’t think so. But privatization and competition do amazing things to an industry while monopolization is horrendous.

5. 

   Syd

   Sun 22 January 2006

   I’m actually mostly with Jonah on this one. She’s right that it’s been pretty much proven that throwing money at the problem DOES NOT HELP. Of course, one of the problems with this is where the money goes–most of it does not go to teachers, but instead to upgrade equipment, build a new building, etc, etc.

   Private and charter schools spend more, on average, on teacher salaries than public schools. This does help them to recruit better teachers. I think the main thing that private and charter schools are able to do, though, is have a little maneuvering room to try new methods of teaching.

   Public schools are stuck between the teachers’ unions and the government. Teachers are stuck between the unions and the schools. And nothing’s getting better.

6. 

   Syd

   Sun 22 January 2006

   Oops…I accidentally cut off the last half of my comment:

   I think giving a GOOD vouchers program a try is a good idea. I agree with Jonah that opening schools up to competition might be a good idea–even competition BETWEEN public schools would be good. Why shouldn’t parents be able to choose where their kids go to school? If you remember a few years back, our parents lied about Berck’s address so that he could go to a different public high school.

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