The worth of private school

[Alerik the Fortunate]

I went to public high school in Littlerock,California. It was about 40% Hispanic and located in the traditional black ghetto of the Antelope Valley, deliberately sited with six miles of desert on all sides (once you got out of the immediate neighborhood) so that students tempted to be truant would have nowhere to go. The largest building in Littlerock, aside from the school, is Hick's Mortuary.
It was possible to get a decent education (though not really an exceptional one) if you were in the AP program. There were no IB classes. My senior year the only physics teacher left, and was replaced in three days notice by a biology teacher. There was no AP physics. The AP english teacher had a baby and had to be replaced somewhat last minute as well. The calculus teacher left and had to be replaced at the last minute by an algebra teacher who took refresher calculus over the summer. I think they put the calculus and trig/precalculus classes together, so the teacher taught the pre-calculus class while the calculus students worked through themselves. Although the school had a rather bad reputation, and we had a few deaths my senior year, I never feared for my safety. Perhaps it helped to be a nerdy recluse and school celebrity in the form of my alter-ego, String Man. It seems, altogether, to have been inferior to the private school my cousin attended in San Diego. Still, I think education is largely what the students and their parents make of it, and learning outside of the classroom is at least as big an influence as what's in.

[Prozac the Robert]

I find the people who look down on state schools to be annoying. Sure, private schools might sometimes be better, maybe by a lot in some cases, but unless there a special circumstances or it happens to be a really bad school there is no reason to shudder in horror at the though of having gone to a state run school.

To be fair, my school wasn't that great. It could have used more money in a few places, and a few of the teachers were awful. On the other hand, some of the teachers were pretty good too. There were no problems with drugs, knives etc. (Oddly enough, the worst school for drugs in my area was apparently the catholic school. It wasn't exactly a big problem there either.)

I think the main problem was that being there doesn't entirely encourage ambition. At a grammar school you might be pressed to get all As and go to a good uni, perhaps Cambridge or Oxford if they thought you might be good enough. At my school they were far less like that. Sure, they did encourage us to go to uni, but often spent time with stupid things like general studies, which are of no real use to most of the best universities.

On the other hand, people from private schools can drop out anyway, and you paying money for their education won't automatically make your kids want to do any better. And some people might do better without being pushed so hard anyway.

Anyway, I got some good A levels and am now at a good University, so it certainly turned out ok. Maybe I would have done a little better at a grammar school, but I don't think I suffered for going where I did.

If money is likely to be a problem, then think of what else you might perhaps be better spending it on. Family holidays (they say travel is the best education. I doubt they meant package holidays, but it still broadens the mind to some extent), money for a better university (I suspect this matters more than the choice of school by a fair bit), maybe help them a bit with a car or driving lessons when they are old enough, music lessons or other extra-curricular things, books, computers, etc.

[The Dark]

On the other hand, if you are General Education or less, or an ESL, you were screwed.

ESL kids were screwed where you came from? That's a shame. I live in Northern California, and by the time I was in high school, there was a staff of more than a dozen dedicated to ESL students. Albeit, it was a bit late for most of them, but at least they got something. They get classes dedicated to helping them read, write, and fluently speak english.

Beyond that, I don't know much about it.

ESOL (English as a Secondary or Other Language - same as ESL, just the "or Other" tossed in) was a waste around here also. The problem was, the only primary language it was rigged to handle was Spanish. Which is all fine and dandy, except that ignores the Vietnamese, Tagalog, German, Norwegian, Arabic, and other language groups that exist in Orlando. Plus there was the problem that they didn't actually end up teaching English, they just taught the same courses in Spanish, so you ended up with a bunch of graduates who couldn't speak the linuga franca.