Re: [Phys-L] US schools

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

But the number of students who attend private schools is below 10%.  This is
because private schools tend to be smaller than public schools.  In TX
public schools are enormous, and studies have shown that when you get over
150 students per cohort that the problems increase quite a lot.  So the size
of public schools may one one factor in the misbehavior problem.  If you
divided them into smaller schools they may work a lot better.  The ideal
size would have only 150 students in the graduating class.  This research
was done in the '70s and nobody seems to pay much attention to it.  But the
middle school my children atteded subdivided the school in separate sections
of 150 students, while the HS is a huge open campus run almost like a
college.

One thing that puzzles me is that Catholic schools are not included as
private schools.  Why are they singled out Catholic schools when Lutheran
and Episcopal schools are not.  The most prestigious school in Houston is
nominally Episcopal.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX 

> I was curious about how many schools are in the US.
>
> From Wikipedia entry ("Education in the United States"):
>
> In 2010, there were 3,823,142 teachers in public, charter, 
> private, and
> Catholic elementary and secondary schools. They taught a total of
> 55,203,000 students, who attended one of 132,656 schools.
>
> 5,072,451 students attended 33,740 private elementary and secondary
> schools in 2007
>
> So private schools make up about 25% of the total.
>
>
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