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Re: [Phys-L] Private schools



On 07/09/2012 06:47 AM, Jeff Bigler wrote:

As I occasionally say to my students, "Where's That From?"--acronym
intended.

ROTFL here. That's a keeper.

I'm finding that,
compared with the charter school, my public-school students ........

I realize it is conventional to speak of charter schools as being disjoint
from the public schools, but one could argue for the following taxonomy
instead:

schools
/ \
/ \
/ \
publicly private
funded & \
tested \
/ \ \
/ \ \
/ \ \
district charter truly
public public private
schools schools schools

(see also below)

As always, I don't want to argue about the terminology, and I would be
delighted if somebody could suggest some better terminology, but the
underlying point remains: I find it helpful to distinguish charter
schools from _district_ schools (rather than from "public" schools).
*) In some ways, the charter schools are unlike the district schools,
for instance in having more selective admissions and selective
retention. This is an important distinction; however ...
*) In some ways, charter schools *are* public schools; they are just
not district schools. They are public schools in the sense that
a) they are publicly funded, and
b) they are subjected to the same state-mandated high-stakes trivia
test, and have been all along (even well before NCLB came along)
http://www.doe.mass.edu/mcas/participation/



On 07/09/2012 07:33 AM, Marty Weiss wrote:
One major difference is that in my district and most others in this
State the students are much more polite and well behaved in the
charter schools for the simple reason that IF THEY DO NOT BEHAVE OR
DISOBEY THE DRESS CODE OR OTHER MYRIAD OF RULES THEY ARE EXPELLED AND
SENT BACK TO THEIR SENDING SCHOOL (which would be my old school).
HUGE DIFFERENCE!!!! and one which allows the charters to claim they
put out much better behaved students.

Indeed!

Note that the same logic that applies to private schools and charter
schools also applies to magnet schools within a district: selective
enrollment is a sure-fire way to make (almost) everything better in
the selective school ... and worse everywhere else. So a more complete
taxonomy might be:

schools
/ \
/ \
/ \
publicly private
funded & \
tested \
/ \ \
/ \ \
/ \ \
district charter truly
public public private
schools schools schools
/ \
/ \
/ \
"generic" magnet
public schools
schools

|_________| |__________________________|
non-selective selective


One often hears the suggestion that the less-successful schools should
just emulate the more-successful schools. This is obviously ridiculous,
because (except maybe in Lake Wobegon) there is no way to make all the
schools highly selective ... unless you want to leave some huge fraction
of the population with no schools at all.

It's a classic market-segmentation / arbitrage opportunity. Businessmen
love love love this sort of thing. It gives a tremendous advantage to the
first mover: Segment the market and take the good segment for yourself,
leaving the other segments to your competition. The classic example is
selling health insurance to young, healthy people ... and then dropping
their coverage if they ever get sick.

Let's analyze this in the obvious way:
a) Segmentation means the selective schools are more profitable and less
trouble-prone.
b) Segmentation increases the costs an the troubles at the less-selective
and non-selective schools.
c) NCLB _takes funding away_ from the troubled schools, i.e. from the ones
that are guaranteed, by market forces, to need /more/ funding.

You don't need to be an MBA and/or a rocket scientist to see how this plays
out. The non-selective schools will go bankrupt.