Re: [Phys-L] Private schools

[Ze'ev Wurman <zeev@ieee.org>]

I will not respond to most of your comments and I'll let the readers 
judge for themselves. But I wanted to clarify the costs and "fringe" issue.

The nationwide average cost per student in a comprehensive K-12 private 
school is $9.2K and in public K-12 school it is $10.3K (2007-8 data). 
This is as close to apples-to-apples comparison as one can get. Both 
populations include SWD (sp. ed.) students. Incidentally, the fraction 
of SWD in public schools with serious handicaps is 2-3%, quite similar 
to the >2% of SWD in the private school universe that need to go to 
specialized schools. In general the cost for ELL students is quite 
similar to cost of regular students. You can follow the links I provided 
how these are calculated if you want to know more.

I called the "fringe effect" the problems caused by students not coming 
in packages of 20 (or 25, or 28, or whatever the school or district 
consider a standard class size). Perhaps on this forum I should have 
called it the modulo effect, or the residuum effect (smile). Typically 
districts have an average number target, with minimum and maximum 
specified for a class. As an example, in K-2 it can be 22 as a target, 
with 16 and 25 as the extremes. In high school it could be 28 with 10 & 
35 as extremes. Administrators face this daily and they often solve this 
problem by moving a few students across schools in the same district. 
Small districts, obviously, have less flexibility -- they will sometimes 
make a multi-grade class to solve such problems. Depending on the 
situation, reducing enrollment by just a handful of student may sometime 
eliminate the need of a whole class, or not. But on the average the 
number of students and the number of classes are directly proportional.

Ze'ev

On 7/11/2012 4:51 PM, ron mcdermott wrote:
> Skipping over the philosophical arguments since we have little ground in
> common on this point, and focussing on your responses to me...
>
> In 1. below, It is most certainly NOT a "red herring", nor does what you
> wrote invalidate what I wrote as near as I can tell.  If you would clarify
> exactly how this "average cost per student" in private schools was
> calculated, perhaps you can convince me of its validity.  But if all that
> was done was to total up costs and divide by students, this does not
> represent a rebuttal of my point.  If you're saying that we take the
> average cost of one class in each grade (with the same number of students),
> total the costs and divide by total students, it's closer, but it is
> unlikely that anyone went to that kind of trouble to do.  And in any case
> ignores the ADDITIONAL fact that the population of students that public
> schools must teach MUST cost more since public schools, on average, have
> more students who demand extra funding (SE, ESL, etc).  They must also meet
> unfunded mandates which most private schools can ignore to some extent.
> In 2 below, you suggest that volunteer work by parents in public schools
> somehow equates (in value) to teaching and administrative staff working for
> free in some private schools.  THAT is most certainly not true, and IS a
> red herring.  Nor is it true that public schools receive anything like the
> monetary gifts many private schools enjoy, but you didn't exactly address
> that issue.
>
> ...
>
> Your response in 6 totally baffles me...  You barely acknowedge the
> validity of my argument, which, btw, would almost universally be the case,
> as being a "fringe effect"?!  You then suggest your own example of removing
> 4-5 students from a cohort of 28-30 and suggest that this will somehow
> allow a class (and teacher) to be eliminated?  HOW?  Are you envisioning
> two classes with 15 students each (talk about FRINGE!) and later combining
> them into a single class of 25?  You see this as a likely case?  You think
> that this will maybe impact the classes that just went from 15 kids to 25?