Quote:
Originally posted by baltassoc
I want to be clear: I'm not slamming Catholic schools. Quite the opposite. I've got a lot of respect for the Catholic system of schools, especially as run by the Jesuits. I just don't think those schools are going to be the primary beneficiaries of voucher programs.
I'm talking about the Podunk Christian Academies. These places are good in the "got into Oral Roberts University and I didn't" kind of way.
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I've seen both. I've seen entire communities deluded into thinking Podunk Christian Academy is some miracle of education and discipline for wayward teens, when in fact it is a hotbed of abusive freakazoids producing illiterates. I've also seen parochial schools sneered at for producing dim, obedient papists when they actually produce students who learned stuff like history, as in what events actually happened (as opposed to the PC revisionist BS I learned at my, unarguably, excellent public school). I agree that a some parents would use vouchers to move their kids into strange, inadequate schools for bizarre reasons. But I still believe that the main beneficiaries of vouchers are poor families stuck in completely fucked school districts.
In any event, I don't think anyone can escape their own school experiences in thinking about the debate, rendering every view annecdotal and relatively worthless. My public schools were superb. The products of a lot of of the supposedly elite private schools on the east coast that I met in my (supposedly) elite east coast university were about on a par with our remedial-track kids. Where I grew up, private school (parochial, military or otherwise) was for the backwards kids with social problems, not the smart, able, well adjusted ones.
However, the next school district over was a complete basket case, despite having about the same per-head funding (though they had a more economically and socially mixed population). In fact, that district was so bad that it was studied by some friends in city planning as the classic example of how to totally fuck up a school system (their conclusion: let the teachers run it; salary demands took precedence over books & plant, seniority trumped ability, social goals trumped educational goals). And the poorer kids livng in that district were absolutely trapped there, and absolutely fucked. Even if only the "cherries" of the bunch could have escaped, however, be it to my district, private school, or into the arms of the Jesus freaks, I think it would have been supremely worthwhile.
IMHO, of course, which is probably worth a pitcher of warm spit.
