[lbo-talk] Recipe for "privatizing" schools

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Tue Nov 10 04:09:21 PST 2009


At 01:27 AM 11/10/2009, wrobert at uci.edu wrote:
>If I remember correctly, charters tend to not to do as well as public
>schools in most areas... Interestingly, the former administration
>supported both charters and the testing regimes which have introduced a
>particularly unproductive homogeneity to the public school system. robert
>wood

the people I know who study this issue are opposed to charters because they only perform well under certain criteria -- but these criteria aren't confined to charters, so you obtain these conditions in conventional public school settings. When I get a chance later this week (?), i'm going to write about Gerry Grant's new book, Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh. As I mentioned earlier, the approach taken by Raleigh schools was to treat class as a salient cultural difference -- and Walter Benjamin thinks that's a no-no. I, of course, have deep disagreements with Grant in the sense that he's a Liberal and I'm a Marxist, but if you're going to stay within a Liberal framework.

the other thing is, private schools do well _because_ they have resources. When you take private catholic schools as the proxy for how private schools might perform under ordinary circumstances -- without huge wads of cash and high tuition -- then Catholic schools barely do better than public schools and sometimes perform worse. That's data from an old study, though, so maybe they've updated it. shag



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