#Private Schools

[odinsblog]

The phrase “defund the police” has become a lasting reminder of Congress’s colossal failure to address criminal justice reform. Even though the majority of Americans agreed that George Floyd’s death was a symptom of “an underlying racial injustice problem,” Congress failed to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which would enact structural changes to policing, introduce a method for transparency, and accountability.

So, why did “defund the police” get so much bad press when conservatives have been defunding public schools for years without so much as a peep from the other side of the aisle? Because Democrats have a horrible habit of responding to the right’s positions rather than taking on bad-faith talking points. But, letting conservatives’ hypocrisy dominate the narrative is dangerous. The debate over “defund the police” was never about public safety; it was about police controlling Black people in their communities.

Likewise, defunding public schools isn’t about providing parents with “choice.”

White students are not short on options for pursuing their education. America’s first school was whites-only, and only through Black parents’ advocacy over generations did that dynamic change. Attacking public school funding is a blatant attempt to deny Black, Latino, and other marginalized students equal opportunities as White students.

Approximately 64% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck and can’t possibly afford to send their children to private schools. Conservatives are trying to find a way around Brown v Board of Education, where they can still provide separate and unequal opportunities for Black students.

(continue reading) related↵ related↵

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Kiera Butler at Mother Jones:

Earlier this month, former President Donald Trump held his first campaign rally as a convicted felon at Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, hosted by the arch-conservative student group Turning Point USA. This wasn’t Trump’s first appearance at Dream City Church; he also held a rally there with Turning Point USA in 2020. For events like this, it’s an ideal venue: A weekly attendance of around 21,000 believers makes this one of the largest churches not just in Arizona but in the nation.

Dream City, which didn’t respond to my questions for this story, is a mecca for special guests who blur the line between religion and politics. Its annual conference has featured notables like musician and pastor Sean Feucht, who participated in a White House prayer session for President Trump in 2019 and is currently leading a tour of prayer rallies at state capitol buildings across the country. The lineup for this year’s event also included David Barton, whose organization, WallBuilders, teaches K-12 students about the supposed Christian origins of America; Jürgen Mathesius, a pastor at San Diego’s far-right Awaken Church, which has become a stop on Mike Flynn’s ReAwaken America tour; and Jentezen Franklin, a televangelist who also spoke at the 2022 Pray Vote Stand Summit, which mobilizes conservative Christian voters to engage in political activism.

In addition to its thrumming weekly worship sessions and its blockbuster events, the church has another project: Dream City Christian Academy. The K-12 private school, which serves nearly 800 students, is part of Turning Point USA’s Turning Point Academy program, a network of 41 schools that describes itself as “an educational movement that exists to glorify God and preserve the founding principles of the United States through influencing and inspiring the formation of the next generation.” Dream City Christian Academy promises to “Protect our campus from the infiltration of unethical agendas by rejecting all ‘woke’ and untruthful ideologies being pushed on students.” This politically charged approach to education likely isn’t for everyone—and because it’s a private school, it doesn’t have to be. Except for one thing: Dream City Christian Academy is one of a growing number of religious schools that are supported by public funds.

In 2022, Arizona became the first state in which all students are allowed to use state vouchers to cover a portion of tuition at any private school, secular or religious. Through Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, each participating family receives about 90 percent of the money the state would have spent on the child’s public school education—around $7,000 per student per year—for private school tuition. For the 2024-2025 school year, the Dream City Christian Academy annual tuition ranges from $10,450 in elementary school to $13,999 in high school—so families of the school’s nearly 800 students can use state funds to pay for between half and two-thirds of their tuition bill. Dream City Christian Academy received almost $1 million in tuition voucher money last year, the Arizona Republic recently reported.

Since Arizona passed its universal voucher law, 10 more states have followed suit. According to an analysis by Education Week, 29 states currently have programs that provide such assistance to a variety of different students many of whom attend local public schools that perform poorly. It also targets those with a disability that requires specialized education and those whose families earn significantly less than the federal poverty level. More programs are in the works: Lawmakers in both Louisiana and South Carolina recently advanced bills that would create programs like Arizona’s that are open to all students. When state funds are available for private school choice programs, a recent Washington Post analysis found that religious schools receive upwards of 90 percent of that money.

[...] A prerequisite for students and their families to attend some of the schools that currently receive voucher money is that they accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior. In March, the education blog Notes from the Chalkboard highlighted one such school. Students attending North Carolina’s Daniel Christian Academy, are trained to “enter the Seven Mountains of Influence,” a main tenet of a Christian Nationalist movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation. Its adherents believe that the faithful are called to seek Christian control of the “seven mountains” of society: family, education, media, government, business, arts & entertainment, and religion. Many New Apostolic Reformation followers believe that waging “spiritual warfare” is justified in achieving these goals, though Daniel Christian Academy specifies that its endorsement of the Seven Mountains Mandate “in no way includes violence or manipulation at any level.”

Americans United for Separation of Church and State’s Laser worries that the proliferation of private school voucher programs will open the door to even more permissive rules around the use of public education dollars to teach religion. She points to a suite of bills that would allow public schools to employ chaplains, and even more remarkably, to an Oklahoma Catholic school called St. Isidore of Seville, which is set to become the nation’s first Christian public charter school this fall. The overarching goal of these initiatives, she says, is to “bestow a power and privilege on Christians in our country, at the expense of all the other religions in America.” Meanwhile, public education is robbed  “of the funding that it’s entitled to.”

Mother Jones reports on the disturbing trend of Christian Nationalists opening taxpayer-funded private schools with the intention to indoctrinate students with right-wing politics and a Christian Nationalist worldview.

[saint-augustines-pears]

I wonder how homeschooling is actually viewed nowadays, because at this point homeschooling can be way better than public schooling depending on where you live and what materials you use. Homeschooling groups can be massive and well put together to the point where they provide actual skills and a stronger support system than brick and mortar schools. Homeschooling curriculums can be teaching worthwhile things while also providing a different way of learning. I don’t know. Seems weird that we could still be stuck in the idea that all homeschooling is misinformed and all homeschoolers are weird and stupid and socially inept.

[eaglesnick]

“‘Private education is not fair. Those who provide it know it. Those who pay for it know it. Those who have to sacrifice in order to purchase it know it. And those who receive it know it, or should. And if their education ends without it dawning on them, then that education has been wasted.”  - Alan Bennett.

One year ago almost to the day, Sir Kier Starmer, our new prime minister, promised to end the “snobbery” that surrounds academic vs vocational education. Speaking in Gillingham Kent, he said the ‘class ceiling' needed to be broken and he vowed to fight the existing reality that social background - and by default, economic background  - determines a child’s future opportunities.

This pledge was part of his fifth mission statement where he promised to “break down the barriers of opportunity at every stage for every child.”  More importantly he emphasised:

“This mission is my core purpose and my personal cause: to fight, at every stage, for every child, the pernicious idea that background equals destiny, that your circumstances, who you are, where you come from, who you know, might shape your life more than your talent, effort and enterprise.

“No, breaking that link, that’s what Labour is for. I have always felt that. It runs deep for me.” (Keir Starmer:05/07/23)

Starmer is absolutely right when he says a child’s socio-economic background determines the opportunities open to them. Money buys privilege. One reason private schools are so popular among better off parents, especially the very rich, is that class sizes are so much smaller than in the state sector, and as is well known, “smaller classes lead to higher quality education”. From early years of prep schooling right through to the elite universities such as Oxford and Cambridge, money buys academic success. It is no accident that 60% of top university student intake is private school educated, while just 25% is from state schools: the rest being overseas students.

But it is not only the quality of education than counts when it comes to future opportunities – social networking also plays a major role. Sending your child to a private school not only increases their chances of academic success, it also builds up “social capital".

This interesting headline says it all:

Getting the job: it's not just who you know, its how you know them" (nature: 23/1022)

If you know them from public school, especially boarding school, then you are recognised as "one of us" and you reap the advantages.

The dominance of the privately educated throughout Britain’s "upper echelons of power" was recognised by the conservative Prime Minister John Major, who was shocked at the difference a private education made to opportunities for success.

Starmer’s ambition to end the disadvantage of being a state educated pupil by raising educational standards in state schools is admirable but it is not enough. In a report into who gets the top jobs published in 2013 the researchers came to this depressing conclusion.

.”Our work discounts the notion that higher education levels the playing field between students of differing socio-economic backgrounds. Beyond academic achievement, our analysis suggests there are other reasons why wealthier and more advantaged students, and particularly those who attend a private school, are significantly more likely to secure a top job."  ( Macmillian, Tyler and Vignoles:“Who gets the Top Jobs? The role of family background and networks in recent graduates’ access to high status professions.” ; IOE December 2013)

Nothing has changed since 2013. In 2019 Statistica carried this headline:

“The UK's top jobs are dominated by the privately educated…our report shows, the most influential people across sport, politics, the media, film and TV, are five times as likely to have attended a fee-paying school.”  (Statistica: 25/06/19)

And in 2023 we had this report:

“Private school alumni…gain a disproportionate share, relative to their small numbers, of highly influential jobs in British public life and in business. (UCL: Private schools and British Society: 29/11/23)

Given Starmer’s “mission” to break the ‘class ceiling” is at the ‘core’ of his being, then he has gotten off to a very poor start in trying to remedy this gross social inequality. Originally he promised to strip private schools of their charity status.

“Keir Starmer vows to scrap charitable status for private schools” (LBC: 28/11/22)

Less than a year later, like so many of Starmer’s pledges, this plan was abandoned.

According to The Conversation (27/06/22) charitable status for private schools is worth “£3 billion a year”. It is certainly true that Rugby School is “raking in millions a year thanks to London rental property”. (Coventry Live: 06/04/2025).  Eton College, Britain’s most famous private school and the provider of 20 British prime ministers, has been described as having:

“…huge investments in securities and property - £568mn at August 2022 – chipping in handy amounts each year, tax-free thanks to its charitable status”. (Financial Times: 29/09/23)

Under Starmer the privilege provided by private education is to continue. Money buys smaller class sizes, better academic attainment and a build up of social capital through networking with others from wealthy families. Hiding behind the bogus claim of charitable status these schools for the privileged save millions of pounds in tax relief while the state sector is starved of sufficient funding. Rather than doing yet another U-turn, Starmer should have been planning to  close  private schools altogether.

If he is willing to surrender so easily to privilege and wealth on his “core” beliefs then he has no right to be Prime Minister, and his claims that his administration is all about "change" is just hollow rhetoric.

[bretzkysbs]

[infographicjournal]

Which U.S. States Have the Highest and Lowest Percentage of Students in Private Schools?

Having trouble reading infographic here?

Check out the full size infographic at - https://infographicjournal.com/which-u-s-states-have-the-highest-and-lowest-percentage-of-students-in-private-schools/

[toenzy]

Somehow Jonathan here has missed arguably the most important thread linking these two, though the thread is admittedly not particularly common (hold your laughter please), which is that they both went to private fee-paying secondary schools which cost between approx. £17,000 and £25,000 a year (for day pupils, I have not bothered adding up the boarding fees).

When I started in the civil service in 2023 I was earning significantly less a year than it cost to send Jack Draper to school for a year.

But please Jonathan, tell me about the difficulties they've overcome.

[dragoneyes618]

The thing with private schools is that people assume they're fancy wealthy schools for rich kids, but often they're not. They're not government funded, so sometimes they have less money than the public schools.

The private school I went to as a kid, which is also the one I currently work in, is always strapped for cash. The building it's in is a former office building, and you can absolutely tell it was not originally meant as a school building, because they just stick in classrooms whereever they have room. The teachers' room and two of the administrators' offices were all originally one big room that was walled off to make one small teachers' room and two tiny offices. They did the same thing with the lunchroom once - at one point they walled off half of it and used one half for classrooms because they had nowhere else to put them. There are only five people working in the school that still worked there when I was a student, including the principal, because the staff turnover rate is pretty high, because they pay, well, a livable wage, but not much more than that. Also I haven't been paid since April.

[cryingwanker]

Private schools are incredibly unfair. No one should have to grow up with a worse education just because they did not grow up rich.

[nicklloydnow]

“Mr. Garland’s memo did acknowledge that “spirited debate about policy matters is protected under our Constitution.” That is true but doesn’t go nearly far enough. Education is mostly speech, and parents have a constitutional right to choose the speech with which their children will be educated. They therefore cannot constitutionally be compelled, or even pressured, to make their children a captive audience for government indoctrination.

Public education in America has always attempted to homogenize and mold the identity of children. Since its largely nativist beginnings around 1840, public education has been valued for corralling most of the poor and middle class into institutions where their religious and ethnic differences could be ironed out in pursuit of common “American” values.

The goal was not merely a shared civic culture. Well into the 20th century, much of the political support for public schooling was driven by a fear of Catholicism and an ambition to Protestantize Catholic children. Many Catholics and other minorities escaped the indoctrination of their children by sending them to private schools.

Nativists found that intolerable. Beginning around 1920, they organized to force Catholic children into public education. The success of such a measure in Oregon (with Democratic votes and Ku Klux Klan leadership) prompted the Supreme Court to hold compulsory public education unconstitutional.

The case, Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), was brought by a religious school, not a parent. The justices therefore framed their ruling around the threat to the school’s economic rights. But Pierce says that parents can educate their children outside state schools in accord with the parents’ moral and religious views.

Although the exact nature of this parental freedom is much disputed, it is grounded in the First Amendment. When religious parents claim the freedom, religious liberty seems an especially strong foundation. But the freedom of parents in educating their children belongs to all parents, not only the faithful. Freedom of speech more completely explains this educational liberty.

(…)

The public school system, by design, pressures parents to substitute government educational speech for their own. Public education is a benefit tied to an unconstitutional condition. Parents get subsidized education on the condition that they accept government educational speech in lieu of home or private schooling.

(…)

To be sure, Pierce doesn’t guarantee private education. It merely acknowledges the right of parents to provide it with their own resources. And one may protest that economic pressure is not force. But the Supreme Court has often ruled otherwise.

(…)

When government makes education compulsory and offers it free of charge, it crowds out parental freedom in educational speech. The poorer the parents, the more profound the pressure—and that is by design. Nativists intended to pressure poor and middle-class parents into substituting government educational speech for their own, and their unconstitutional project largely succeeded.

Most parents can’t afford to turn down public schooling. They therefore can’t adopt speech expressive of their own views in educating their children, whether by paying for a private school or dropping out of work to home-school. So they are constrained to adopt government educational speech in place of their own, in violation of the First Amendment.

A long line of Establishment Clause decisions recognize the risk of coercion in public-school messages. In Grand Rapids School District v. Ball (1985), the high court condemned private religious teaching in rooms leased from public schools. “Such indoctrination, if permitted to occur, would have devastating effects on the right of each individual voluntarily to determine what to believe (and what not to believe) free of any coercive pressures from the State,” Justice William Brennan wrote for the majority.

Coercion seemed central in such cases because of the vulnerability of children to indoctrination. Summarizing the court’s jurisprudence, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, concurring in Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), observed that “when government-sponsored religious exercises are directed at impressionable children who are required to attend school, . . . government endorsement is much more likely to result in coerced religious beliefs.”

(…)

Rights are “exceptions” to power, James Madison observed. That is, rights defeat power. But contemporary judicial doctrine allows power to defeat rights—at least when government asserts what is called a compelling interest. One might think that a state’s compelling interest in public education overpowers any parental speech right. Yet because such analysis allows power to subdue rights, it is important to evaluate whether the claimed government interest is really compelling.

The U.S. was founded in an era when almost all schooling was private and religious, and that already suggests that any government interest in public education is neither necessary nor compelling. Further, the idea that public education is a central government interest was popularized by anti-Catholic nativists. Beginning in the mid-19th century, they elevated the public school as a key American institution in their campaign against Catholicism.

In their vision, public schools were essential for inculcating American principles so that children could become independent-minded citizens and thinking voters. The education reformer and politician Horace Mann said that without public schools, American politics would bend toward “those whom ignorance and imbecility have prepared to become slaves.”

That sounds wholesome in the abstract. In practice, it meant that Catholics were mentally enslaved to their priests, and public education was necessary to get to the next generation, imbuing them with Protestant-style ideas so that when they reached adulthood, they would vote more like Protestants.

(…)

The inevitably homogenizing, even indoctrinating, effect of public schools confirms the danger of finding a compelling government interest in them. A 1904 nativist tract grimly declared that the public school is “a great paper mill, into which are cast rags of all kinds and colors, but which lose their special identity and come out white paper, having a common identity. So we want the children of the state, of whatever nationality, color or religion, to pass through this great moral, intellectual and patriotic mill, or transforming process.”

The idea of a common civic culture among children is appealing when it develops voluntarily, but not when state-approved identities and messages are “stamped upon their minds,” as the 1904 tract put it. Far from being a compelling government interest, the project of pressing children into a majority or government mold is a path toward tyranny.

The shared civic culture of 18th-century America was highly civilized, and it developed entirely in private schools. The schools, like the parents who supported them, were diverse in curriculum and their religious outlook, including every shade of Protestantism, plus Judaism, Catholicism, deism and religious indifference.

In their freedom, the 18th-century schools established a common culture. In contrast, public-school coercion has always stimulated division. It was long used to grind down the papalism of Catholic children into something more like Protestantism. Since then, there has been a shift in the beliefs that public schools seek to eradicate. But the schools remain a means by which some Americans force their beliefs on others. That’s why they are still a source of discord. The temptation to indoctrinate the children of others—to impose a common culture by coercion—is an obstacle to working out a genuine common culture.

There is no excuse for maintaining the nativist fiction that public schools are the glue that hold the nation together. They have become the focal point for all that is tearing the nation apart. However good some public schools may be, the system as a whole, being coercive, is a threat to our ability to find common ground. That is the opposite of a compelling government interest.

The public school system therefore is unconstitutional, at least as applied to parents who are pressured to abandon their own educational speech choices and instead adopt the government’s.

Parents should begin by asking judges to recognize—at least in declaratory judgments—that the current system is profoundly unconstitutional. Once that is clear, states will be obliged to figure out solutions. Some may choose to offer tax exemptions for dissenting parents; others may provide vouchers. Either way, states cannot deprive parents of their right to educational speech by pushing children into government schools.”

[acti-veg]

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/taskmasters-alex-horne-i-wish-there-wasnt-a-private-school-system-6h0vhn8h9

what do you think about this

You can find the text here as the article is behind a paywall. I don't think that anyone can make a fair argument that better education should only be accessible for a select few. In the UK, both Houses in Parliament are dominated by private school graduates, as are most of the top positions in UK corporations. It's a system that is designed to keep working class people from positions of power, and is utterly indefensible on that basis.

As for people who want to go into artistic pursuits, I think that's more about the privilege of having money to mess around with art in the first place without having to worrry about feeding yourself, and the connections people make in private schools. They just shouldn't exist, essentially.

[asagi-asagiri]

Banning private and home schooling would be a good step. Also no more input from parents on school boards.