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.
The public school system in Pittsburgh got taken over by an incompetent and corrupt clique in the late 90s/early 00s, and got cut off of various state and federal funding streams after some awful scandals. The authorities above the school board did … basically not much, certainly didn’t rush to fix anything and get funding back.
Result: everyone worth two cents spend both those cents on private schools, which caused some hardship in middle-income families, and terrible educational outcomes in lower-income families stuck in the failing public schools.
And now, a generation later, the tradition is well established that kids go to private school unless they chose their parents badly.
This is the future the GOP wants.
I was an Army brat, which meant I went to lots of schools, occasionally changing school mid-semester. This is why I entered algebra class six weeks late, but I did catch up.
I had a child who was non-verbal when he was three years old and required special ed, including speech/language services. Which was available in our local public school due to the Individual with Disabilities Education Act. (thirty years later it turns out he is autistic, but does speak… though it takes a bit of patience to understand him).
When my younger kid was at a preschooler soccer class I sat in the playground with another mother. She had three/four year old whose speech seemed just as delayed as my older child. I told her about him, and she scoffed at me by telling me the religious school she sends her older child was fantastic and would be fine for her younger son. Also his doctor said he was fine.
Three years later I saw her taking that child to the speech/language pathologist’s at my son’s school. She was livid because that “fantastic” private school refused to admit the child with an obvious speech disorder.
I fear what kind of damage the right wing elites will do to disabled students.
Destruction of public education has been the plan since 1954.
I am not often proud of Kentucky but we did resoundingly defeat by a 2 to 1 margin the kind of republican educational system that you described so there is hope. On the other hand, I do not think that they will give up and will probably continue to reword and obfuscate these constitutional amendments until they get one through. Kentuckians did approve an amendment that would ban non-citizens from voting so our educational system still has a long way to go.
Maybe not “elite,” but it’s definitely “mainstream dominant.” It’s about acceptance into the status quo. It’s not about melanin.
Jews are sometimes white people today, but it varies. A few generations ago the Irish weren’t white but they are now. A few more generations ago and the Germans weren’t white yet. (Ben Franklin couldn’t stand them) I would not be surprised if some or all Asians were white before I die.
About 2 generations ago Hispanics were white, then the term “Hispanic” was invoked and they weren’t anymore.
Denying the meaning of white, ignoring it, means you aren’t fighting it. If, instead, you point out to people how it’s used, what it means, and how it’s changed, people can’t help but think it’s silly. Actual examples will be more persuasive to non-liberals than your dogma about downtrodden people.
@garydargan, I very much agree that Australia has the same problem, and it is very hard to change.
I mostly went to school in the UK, to a private school that wasn’t government funded (or at least was far less government funded). It provided a great education, but it wasn’t available to people whose parents couldn’t pay for it – and I recognise that’s a problem and needs changing.
I was talking to a friend who otherwise has fairly progressive values about how Australia should stop funding private schools, and he was horrified – he went to a subsidised private school that he very much enjoyed, and he said that it wouldn’t be able to exist without government funding, because many parents wouldn’t be able to afford the increased fees. The part he couldn’t seem to grasp was that government funding for private schools allowed his parents to send their children to one, but there are plenty of parents who can’t afford private schools even with government support, and funding private schools takes away from their education.
mathscatherine@12–
Perhaps your friend might be persuaded by some observations. I watched all this happen from the time John Howard developed his “welfare for the rich” model of conservatism that won him so many votes from middle Australia. The justification for all the federal spending on schools was that it would help make private schools more affordable, thus increasing accessibility and reducing the load on the public school sector.
Of course, this was hogwash. The increased funding went directly to the schools themselves rather than as a rebate for the parents, which meant the schools got a huge direct injection of cash, which of course they used not to lower fees but to build infrastructure, thus making them more rather than less exclusive. Elite private schools started buying up properties around the school, often in very expensive suburbs, and building facilities such as Olympic-standard swimming pools. This led not to savings but to massively increased school fees fuelled by a spiraling gap in the quality of facilities.
The system is deliberately opaque, making it almost impossible to work out the procedural reasons for variations in funding even within the private school sector — many private schools are overfunded by the federal government, and surprise, surprise, the most lavishly overfunded private schools are almost entirely the elite schools that are only affordable to parents with dual >$100k incomes. As per the Guardian, ‘Five private schools spent as much on new facilities in one year as 3,000 Australian public schools’ in 2021.
The official stats are also downplayed.The Federal Department of Education’s webpage on the subject will tell you, “In 2024, recurrent funding for schools is estimated to total $29.2 billion. This includes $11.3 billion to government schools, $9.9 billion to Catholic schools and $8.1 billion to independent schools.” Which doesn’t look so bad until you realise that Catholic schools are also part of the non-government sector, and the number of students in each sector is 2.61m, 0.81m, and 0.67m respectively, which means that per student the federal government disburses roughly $4,300 to public schools compared to a little over $12,000 to Catholic and private schools. Notice how this information is not provided directly and requires trawling webpages from two different departments to work out.
When you see these figures, it becomes clear that the policy fails miserably at its expressed goal while creating a publicly-funded bonus to wealthy families while locking the benefits away from poorer families.
I remember.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Student_Wellbeing_Program
I went to fundamentalist Christian private schools all my life. The education was definitely sub-standard. I had to take 2 years of remedial classes to get through college, making it take 6 years instead of 4. I really resented my parents and educators for giving me a sub-standard education. Ultimately, the indoctrination didn’t stick, either.
Seedye @ 15
This system ensures that USA will be dependent on well-educated foreign students to fill enough positions with competent people. But who the hell will want to go to USA if they have better prospects in Japan, China or Europe? Especially if the atmosphere in USA gets increasingly xenophobic.
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We saw how things got in the UK after the Brexit referendum- the local klansmen wannabees felt vindicated and the hostility started an exodus that included immigrants that could have stayed if they had chosen to.
Now Britistan suffers a shortage of qualified nurses because brown people are not welcome.