What is it like being an alumni of a school that’s underfunded or neglected? Even if the school is “good” (as in well funded or private), does the learning environment reflect that? Also, the dark side of American schools (shootings) dampens peace of mind for parents since at any given moment some gun wielding individual can storm in murdering those inside (students, teachers, custodians, etc.)
It’s a total mixed bag. You can easily have the best school and the worst school just miles apart. The best school imaginable is probably in an affluent area, in a progressive state, and is private. The worst is probably in a public school in a low-income rural area in a red state. The country is so huge you’re going to have the whole spectrum of school quality, it’s the social inequality that’s the hallmark of American education
its kinda funny because I live in a suburb with good schools with no kids and yeah our taxes are high but my brother in law lives way out where the schools are crap and his taxes are lower but not lower than his taxes plus his private school tuition of just one kid. Its like the tax difference between crap schools and great schools is not all that much. In both cases the schools are the majority of the cost but turns out its fairly expensive to have anything at all but having a bit more quality is not that much more.
I interned at a private school for a few months. The quality of education difference is not that stark. Most of the money is spent on non-educational luxuries such as fancy sports facilities, libraries, school plays put on by professional theatre companies, and lavish trips abroad for the students (spend a semester studying in Paris).
I encountered all the same issues with disinterested students multiple grade levels behind on reading and math that I’ve seen at public schools. The difference is that these students take month long vacations with their families and play extracurricular sports in fancy gyms, rather than struggling with issues at home (both parents working, needing to care for young siblings instead of studying, addiction to social media, etc).
I did also encounter really advanced students at the private school who were placed in special classes with fewer than 10 students per teacher and fancy giant touchscreens in the classrooms instead of whiteboards. How much did they benefit from that? Very little, I imagine, as in my experience the best students I’ve met were all extremely self-motivated and needed few resources other than writing materials and a large supply of challenging assignments to work on. I’ve seen those students everywhere and the ones at the private school weren’t getting much out of all the fancy stuff.
A funny thing when I went to college. I was sorta funny. Had like half accelerated courses and half not. I could get sorta screwed in the accelerated because in the normal courses I was A/B with A being pretty likely and in accelerated I was B/C with C being likely. So because of the rules an A was a 5, a B was a 4, and a C was a 2 grade point average wise. Anyway that is all sorta an aside. When I got to college I started out strong but semester by semester was burning out. You could sorta see a semester to semester drop such that like my first semester was all A+ and by the time I graduated I had a D or two and boy did I ever need to graduate while my gpa was still decent. I had this friend and he had screwed around in high school so he had to come in as a PE major as he did not have the gpa or test scores to get into some of the more prestigeous colleges at the university. He worked his ass off and was just getting his paces. Eventually he transfered into my major and as we got near the end we compared transcripts. His was the opposite. His grades got better and better each semester. So in the end I had some of those fancy classes and came out at a pretty respectable rank and a pretty respectable high school. He came out of a typical high school (could not claim highly ranked or anything) at a pretty typical level. We ended up with the exact same degrees at the exact same institution for our bachelors with pretty close to the same gpa.
It’s almost like profit-driven businesses cost customers more so the owners can get more money. It’s almost as if the saying “private businesses are incentivised to cost customers less” is complete horseshit
Ding ding ding!
My high school was in the nicer part of town, literally separated by a river from the rest of the city. Back then for second languages our school had Spanish, French, ASL, German, and even Latin! Our school had science teachers that won statewide awards, our football team was very competitive, the marching band (and music program in general) was phenomenal.
This was just a public school, and I’ve more than come to terms that the experience I had is nowhere near the norm compared to the rest of the country.