They’re called “segregation academies,” private schools set up to siphon off state education money to support discriminatory policies. If you live in an area with many black students, somebody will create a school with enrollment that excludes the kinds of people you don’t like, often to make sure only white students get in, or students with particular religious beliefs, and then it’s a double-win: they get to take in state money through voucher programs, and they get to charge their ignorant, bigoted parents excessive fees. It’s an “elite” school, after all. Pay up!
ProPublica examined the effects of these voucher programs on a set of private academies in North Carolina. These schools have a specific purpose, and it’s exactly the purpose that has inflamed the electorate in recent years: isolationism, racism, and ignorance.
Back when segregation academies opened, some white leaders proudly declared their goal of preserving segregation. Others shrouded their racist motivations. Some white parents complained about federal government overreach and what they deemed social agendas and indoctrination in public schools. Even as violent backlash against integration erupted across the region, many white parents framed their decisions as quests for quality education, morality and Christian education, newspaper coverage and school advertisements from the time show.
They’re sucking up a tremendous amount of state education funds. You know that if a local creepy throwback of an academy in a region is getting millions of dollars, that money is coming out of a pool of cash earmarked for general education…and that means the public schools, which are free to the public, get less. And it’s a scam.
Opportunity Scholarships don’t always live up to their name for Black children. Private schools don’t have to admit all comers. Nor do they have to provide busing or free meals. Due to income disparities, Black parents also are less likely to be able to afford the difference between a voucher that pays at most $7,468 a year and an annual tuition bill that can top $10,000 or even $20,000.
So your choices are to send your child to a public school that doesn’t charge tuition, or accept a $5000 voucher to send them to a private school that demands that you pay them an additional $10,000. The private school isn’t necessarily better, but it does provide the helpful service of preventing your child from rubbing elbows with brown children, and may offer the bonus of teaching them more Sunday School-style Jesus.
This is how the Republicans aim to destroy education. They’re going to offer more and more “alternatives” that don’t improve anything, but do pander to the biases of their voters, and that have the advantage of also wrecking public schools. Even if they are building good schools (they probably aren’t), they’re making sure that the non-Republican electorate has fewer opportunities, is less qualified for higher education and upscale work, and are effectively poisoning the minds of the citizenry.
They’ve got at least four more years of running rampant and wrecking institutions. Perhaps some of you figure you can weather a few years and rebuild to come roaring back with progressive values, but you know who can’t handle four more years of ruined education? Kids. Childhood is short, the educational curriculum has year-by-year goals and standards, and if you tear out that foundation, there’s nothing to build on later.
I still recall my 3rd grade year, when I had a couple of weeks of school lost to acute appendicitis, and I came back to discover that I’d missed out on some basic stuff that my peers had already mostly mastered (was it fractions? I recall being bewildered by numerators and denominators for a while). I had to struggle to catch up, and it wasn’t fun — but I was motivated by being already academically inclined, so I had to do the work. Imagine if I missed a year, or two years, though. I probably would have just given up.
An even better example of institutional failure: in general, our current public school system does a poor job of educating students in math, and that has a ripple effect on our colleges. In Europe, most universities offer a complete degree program in three years; here in the USA, it’s usually four years. A lot of that difference is because so many students are ready for calculus when they enroll; some high school programs barely teach algebra. Seriously. I advise so many students who want to get a science degree, and their first year is spent teaching them remedial algebra so that they can do basic stoichiometry in their first chemistry class, or understand elementary concepts in biochemistry for their first biology class.
And Republicans think it more important that no brown people pollute their high school dance, that they don’t get exposed to evilution, or that their history classes don’t mention slavery, or that they learn the highest moral value is to attend church on Sunday? Those are omissions from their education that we will pay for at the college level and beyond.
I just checked the tuition for our local Xian private school.
$8,500 for grades 1-6 primary school.
$10,500 for grades 9-12 high school.
It’s probably not a terrible education but it is no better than the local public schools, which are well supported by bond levies and as good as they get.
Being a smaller private school, they lack a lot of facilities of the public schools. A lot fewer sports offered, no access to a pool for swimming classes and swim team, fewer music and art classes, etc..
On the other hand, they have a chapel so you can pray any time you want.
How did I miss that in high school? Of course, you can pray anytime you want any way since it doesn’t…require a chapel for that.
That is a low cost for private schools on the West coast. Others are higher.
Two kids is over $20,000, about the cost of a new compact car every year.
There are a lot of advantages to public schools. They are essentially free to the parents of those kids.
The cost is paid by people without small children like me. Old people, young people without children, the 20% of the US population that is childless. The taxpayers.
It’s part of the cost of our society, producing educated people as citizens and workers.
In CZ all schools, even private or religious ones, must strictly adhere to a government-issued curriculum and there is minimal leeway. I have heard it said that European high school education is stricter and more thorough than the US one, math-wise, even from people who have had direct experience with both. I do not have a personal experience in this regard.
But what seems obvious from my observations of US culture and US politics online is the following – Republicans seem to revel in their own ignorance and they see willful stupidity and blindness to reality as a virtue, not as a drawback. And they want to foist that ignorance on everyone else, because when everyone is ignorant and stupid, there is nobody around to point out that embarrassing fact.
I studied almost as much calculus in my final two years of school (in the UK) in the 1980s as I did in my first year of college. Two-thirds of that first year was really a recap, because the British system at the time was to have secondary-education public examinations managed by regional exam boards, so in my case the Cambridge exam board set the curriculum for the subject and wrote (and marked and graded) the exams for the end of that two-year period year to test achievement against that period’s curriculum. Many of my college friends had studied a different curriculum from a different exam board and saw a different (but overlapping) two-thirds of the year as a recap. We all had the basics in common, which could be reviewed quickly to make sure no-one had forgotten or misunderstood the underlying principles that would be expanded upon later, and then a range of recaps or introductions to new material as necessary.
The British system at the time (and it mostly holds true today as well) allowed for specialisation from the age of 16, so someone who hadn’t chosen mathematics (and hadn’t been required to take a supplementary maths course because they’d chosen a science specialisation) would only know the very basic introductory calculus they might have been taught at 15 (again, it’d be down to the regional exam board if this was on the curriculum). Few people who’d taken humanities courses would ever have needed more maths than that, until maybe postgraduate level in which case their college’s Research Methods module would provide it.
The USA is not the only place this happens. Federal and state governments in Australia very generously overfund private religious schools. My so went to a state high school with 800 students. They were constantly battling to provide for their students. The science curriculum was almost non-existent in one year the only experiment my son did was to get a “license” to light a bunsen burner and this was a technical high school which was supposed to specialise in science and technology. It had over 800 students 200 of which were refugee and migrant children doing intensive English so it was a school within a school. The school hall was too small to hold assemblies which were held outdoors and dependent on the weather. The school had to sequester $800,000 out of its budget to fund expanding the hall and upgrading the facilities. Meanwhile the local Christian college with 300 students and small classes where each student was confined to a study carrel and had to put the Australian flag on a shelf so the teacher could see if they needed help received $3 million to build its assembly hall. The disgusting thing is that the government puts more taxpayer welfare into elite and very expensive private schools than it does into essential funding for disadvantaged public schools and of course to further subsidise the privileged class the private school fees are claimable by the parents as a tax deduction.
I have a brother who started school in the mid-70s which is about the time Florida was finally forced to actually desegregate public schools…you know, a mere 20 years after the Brown vs Board of Education decision in 1954. The wheels of progress grind slow.
As soon as public schools began desegregating, “church schools” began popping up. We called them “church schools” because they were started by churches which in the South were generally associated with neighborhoods. Because neighborhoods were racially segregated, the schools were segregated. Insidious.
My parents sent my brother to a “church school” briefly. I suspect they stopped because it was expensive and it was difficult to get him to the school since the school wasn’t in the neighborhood where they lived. You weren’t required to attend the church or live in the neighborhood to get into the school. I assume the only criteria for admission was being white and being willing to pay a hefty tuition.
So here we are 70 years after the Brown decision and folks are still fretting over sending their kids to ethnically diverse schools. I think that qualifies as a societal disease.
PZ, my understanding is that in many countries college education has fewer requirements outside of one’s major compared to US colleges. In fact, in many places students choose their major at the time of college application and are accepted directly to that major. The requirement that all students regardless of major take some classes in the humanities, some in social sciences, and some in natural sciences is one of the reasons US college education takes 4 years.