School for Rich Kids Isn’t Charity
Grace Church, New York City (cc photo by Barbara Hanson)
Felix Salmon raises a long-time bugaboo of mine—the madness of giving private schools the same tax status as charities. It’s true, of course, that someplace like the schools I was sent to aren’t for-profit businesses. But they’re certainly not charities. And as best one can tell, their main impact on the common weal is negative, drawing parents with resources and social capital out of the public school system and contributing to its neglect.
You’d have to believe that New York City’s public schools would be both better funded and free of this kind of nonsense if a larger portion of the city’s elite were sending their kids to them. Arguably private school tuition ought to actually be taxed, but at a minimum for your donations to a school to count as charitable they school ought to be made to demonstrate that it’s providing a service to people in need (as many Catholic schools are) and not just to the small number of families who can afford the tuition. Gossip Girl is fun, but not in need of large implicit tax subsidies.
112 Responses to “School for Rich Kids Isn’t Charity”
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August 26th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Countdown to tiresome idiot smarmily suggesting Matt’s a hypocrite for having this opinion…3…2…
August 26th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Matt’s a hypocrite! Just kidding.
I agree completely. I also believe that there’s no reason for churches to be tax exempt and for contributions to churches to be deductible. Churches that do charitable can easily create separate tax-exempt entities for this (as many churches already do). Not that I expect any of this to change.
August 26th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
Matt,
You’re spot on. And the reasoning should extend to all charitable organizations. Only the portion of contributions which do not benefit the contributors in some way should be tax deductible.
For arts and culture organizations, that would mean that the portion of the budget spent visiting schools to awaken the love of classical music, dance, or theater could be written off. It’s reasonable to count the administrative costs and rehearsal space budget since without them nothing benefiting anyone would occur. But the direct costs of performances for which tickets are sold should not be, because the givers nearly all attend those performances.
Similarly, for churches, only the monies spent providing services to non-members should be counted. It’s probably fine to continue the practice of lowered real estate taxes, and again some reasonable amount for administration is necessary for any of those out of church services to occur. But the salaries of the ministers and donations for buildings should not be deductible against income taxes by the givers. Ministers are increasingly entertainers, not spiritual guides.
And don’t yell at me for being an atheist. I’m not; in fact I tithe to my church. But why should I get a tax benefit for going to services I choose to attend? Our church is pretty small so we don’t have a significant presence in the community. We really have very little redeeming social value other than to ourselves. So why should other people subsidize us? And even more so, why should people subsidize The Crystal Cathedral, or Saddleback Church, or any of the other mega-entertainment complexes incorporated as churches?
August 26th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
My parents moved me out of the public middle school because I wasn’t learning anything and into a private school, where I thrived, and they didn’t teach me (what I consider to be) lies. At that time they were in effect paying for me to go to two schools: The public school which they were still paying for via taxes, and the private school via tuition.
Letting the private school count as a charity, if it would lower tuition, would at least be a little bit fairer to such parents.
August 26th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
I’d be fascinated to hear you expand on this statement.
Full disclosure: I went to an Episcopalian private school from 5th~12th.
August 26th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Dude, I was failing in public school until my parents moved me to prep school, where as I finally found warm support from the staff I started to get straight A’s.
I suggest you tone down this nonsense a bit. If not for Dalton, you would never have gone to Harvard. Try competing with the 900-odd kids a year at Bronx Science or Stuy for that Harvard spot for a change.
What a pile of rubbish.
August 26th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
I completely agree with Matt. There is one side to the private school discussion that may be positive, however. Those who send their children to private school are also paying for public schools, yet they consume no resources there. This reduces public school costs and actually benefits the public schools. If a parent thinks that their public schools are weak, the answer is to campaign and get involved, not to give up and start paying for a private school.
In my neighborhood, many choose to send their children to private school, not for a better school or better teachers or a better education, but to ensure that their kids don’t go to school with poorly performing kids who just happen to be mostly poor, transient, and brown. I like to think that the joke is on these parents, and I appreciate the way in which they are subsidizing my kids’ educations.
August 26th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
We all appear to be Private Schoolers here, but…wouldn’t it have been nice if public schools didn’t suck? There’s no inherent reason they have to, and MattY is pointing out one of the reasons they do.
August 26th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
In my neighborhood, many choose to send their children to private school, not for a better school or better teachers or a better education, but to ensure that their kids don’t go to school with poorly performing kids who just happen to be mostly poor, transient, and brown.
They are also paying for their kids to not get completely, irrationally, and manically screwed by some minor infraction (in my case, substances and truancy etc.). It’s a good and rational call. Having a suspension on your transcript kills you forever.
August 26th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
# Matt Talamini Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
My parents moved me out of the public middle school because I wasn’t learning anything and into a private school, where I thrived, and they didn’t teach me (what I consider to be) lies. At that time they were in effect paying for me to go to two schools: The public school which they were still paying for via taxes, and the private school via tuition.
Letting the private school count as a charity, if it would lower tuition, would at least be a little bit fairer to such parents.
Your parents aren’t being taxes for YOU to go to school, they are being taxed to ensure schooling is available for everyone. It’s a public good and helps our country.
August 26th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Anandakos Says: It’s probably fine to continue the practice of lowered real estate taxes
Get rid of the real estate breaks too! Many towns’ budgets are hurting in this tough economy and not being able to collect property taxes on church-owned entities is a big problem.
August 26th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
We all appear to be Private Schoolers here, but…wouldn’t it have been nice if public schools didn’t suck?
This is the blog of a Dalton guy who went to Harvard, frequently referencing the likes of Wittgenstein. What did you think was going to be the crowd?
By the way, I thought it’s actually a nice anecdote for my hypothesis that the conveniences of the internet in no way diminishes the group sorting that happens in society.
August 26th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
Public schools suck because teachers get some good health insurance in exchange for their sucky pay? What exactly is so wrong in keep paying teachers with an alcohol adiction.
August 26th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
Here’s something else: Where are the best public schools? In the wealthy neighborhoods.
Let’s review. The wealthy have access to the best private schools. The wealthy have access to the best public schools.
What does that leave?
August 26th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
By the way, the whole discussion is a bit fatuous. You can’t tax preps and day preps without taxing private colleges, and taxing private colleges is a non-starter because as soon as a college is being taxed (Brown looks like a significant risk here) it moves down in prestige and rankings and student preference and just about every quantifiable measure of how elite a school is.
I should like to see Rhode Island picking up the pieces of their not having a real college once they start taxing Brown (and perhaps Rizdee).
August 26th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
Hilariously, Myles SG can’t seem to grasp the possibility that Matt might not consider “things that he personally benefits from” and “things that ought to count as charity” to be identical sets.
August 26th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
Having a suspension on your transcript kills you forever.
Uh, really? I thought all those threats about your “permanent record” were just used to get kids in line. I certainly never had any suspensions on my transcript. Does it get listed some places, and then colleges look at that and deny you because of it? That seems baffling to me.
August 26th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
Your parents aren’t being taxes for YOU to go to school, they are being taxed to ensure schooling is available for everyone. It’s a public good and helps our country.
Thank you, yes. I don’t have kids, don’t expect to, and live in a town with ridiculously high school taxes, and I don’t complain about them. (Now the town’s garbage contract, that’s another story.)
BTW, at least one of us is not a private schooler — public school K-12, and Harvard afterward. But they were decent publc schools, and both my parents were teachers which helped.
August 26th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
RE “Gossip Girl is fun, but not in need of large implicit tax subsidies. ”
———–
Er.. exactly HOW do you think people get RICH to begin with?
1) Did Dick Cheney get $45 Million as Halliburton CEO because customers Exxon and Chevron needed his advice on how to drill oil wells?
2) How long would Big Oil’s foreign assets last if they were not subsidized by the public — a $600 Billion per YEAR military budget to protect them?
3) Speaking of defense contractors, where does Lockheed’s $30 Billion per year in revenue come from?
5) Can you say $24 TRILLION financial industry bailout?
6) Where would Big Pharma’s profits go if not for the long patent rights and Taxpayer subsidized research?
7) Where would healthcare’s profits go if they were not protected by enormous amounts of government regulation and restrictions on supply. It takes the US Army Special Forces a year to create a doctor — why does it take the medical system 10 years or so?
Need more?
August 26th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
No colleges are taxed except for a few upstart for-profits. If colleges were no longer considered non-taxable, then they would all be on the same playing field with their status being only a quirk of American tax laws when compared to international universities.
No one seems to be raising the point that the government treats all non-profits equally. Wasting time trying to figure out which non-profits are charities and which parts of a non-profit qualify as charity and which don’t is setting ourselves up for a big bureaucratic mess. The country has enough problems with poor oversight of non-profits exploiting their status for tax loopholes as it is.
August 26th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
There is also the not-insignificant contingent of kids who are on financial aid at elite prep schools (Exeter comes to mind), which surely counts as serving people in need.
I am fairly convinced in having a certain semblance to an elite system is good for society. Leaders need to have perspective, and intelligence aside, a kid at Trinity or Browning or Collegiate or Choate or Deerfield will have a wider perspective than kids at Stuy or Bronx Science.
August 26th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
BH wrote:
I went to public schools, but understand why parents in some areas pay to send kids to private schools even if that is not the right move to improve public schools. Schools can change for the better but not overnight.
August 26th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Count me as a guy who went to a good public school and benefitted from it. And one of the things that made it a good school was that many well-off parents who could have afforded to send their kids to private school considered it a matter of civic responsibility to support the public schools. This led to a positive feedback loop—the more educated parents sent their kids to the publics, the better the publics were, and the more comfortable people felt with sending their kids there.
By the way, is the main argument Myles is making for private schools really that they’ll overlook infractions that poorer kids would get busted for, because private schools don’t want to risk losing your money? That would certainly fit Myles’s pattern.
August 26th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
“Leaders need to have perspective, and intelligence aside, a kid at Trinity or Browning or Collegiate or Choate or Deerfield will have a wider perspective than kids at Stuy or Bronx Science.”
A wider perspective…because they’ll be interacting with a much narrower range of students? Whatever you say.
August 26th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
I hate this idea. Parents are not a resource to be exploited. If a school is too weak and incompetent to provide adequate services, they should not be implicitly claiming that it is the parents’ fault for not being “involved.” The #1 priority of parents is always going to be doing what is best for their children and do not want to be guilt tripped into campaigning and “getting involved” because the school is not up to snuff. Any one who lives in DC should quickly realize that the school system is simply bigger than you are and there is no point in waiting 10 years for the schools to marginally improve while you children have to deal with the present mess.
August 26th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
If colleges were no longer considered non-taxable, then they would all be on the same playing field with their status being only a quirk of American tax laws when compared to international universities.
Not really. Taxing colleges would be state law, not federal law. What would happen if Brown starts getting taxed on its (low by Ivy standards) endowment? It would probably end up in a few decades basically implicitly ejected from the Ivy League for all intents and purposes (sort of like the Little Three, where Wesleyan is unfortunately no longer viewed as being comparable to Amherst/Williams except in the most old-money circles.)
Or take Harvard. If taxing Harvard goes through (extremely unlikely, pretty much a long-shot tail risk), Harvard would probably end up ceasing to be considered peer institutions of Princeton and Yale. It could very well end up a Cornell peer, or even less, perhaps an Emory peer. What would happen is simply the brightest kids as well as the most connected ones would simply move Harvard down the list of preference, behind over Ivies.
August 26th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
That generally happens when the schools are very good. It is easy to talk about your “civic responsibility” to send your children to public school when it is Bethesda/Chevy Chase High School.
Social problems and school problems are bigger than any one person, claims that “one person can make a difference” aside. Parents could keep their children in a public school for their entire career without a single dent being made in the quality and culture of the school system. How does that help the student?
August 26th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
If a parent thinks that their public schools are weak, the answer is to campaign and get involved, not to give up and start paying for a private school.
That’s the push factor; you need the pull factor too, which is pulling the kid out of the school.
Both push and pull need to be effected to accomplish meaningful change.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
I went to public school my entire life and so did everyone in my family. Public schools don’t suck. Some public schools suck. As Roddy implies, these are the ones that serve mostly poor students. These schools face tremendous problem, most of which are completely outside of their control. However, most public schools are excellent and the vast majority of Americans in all income brackets attend public school.
And Matt Talamini, I have no children and yet I have been paying school taxes for my entire adult life. What sort of discount do I get for that? These people crying because they’re supposedly paying for school twice when they send their kids to private school make me sick. As lfv says, public school taxes are a public good, not a users’ fee.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
It is easy to talk about your “civic responsibility” to send your children to public school when it is Bethesda/Chevy Chase High School.
Not to mention that when it comes to Bethesda, public and private are essentially interchangeable. I know kids who went to prep there who had siblings who went to pubics because they didn’t want to go private. It’s completely a personal call.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
JustMe, I’m definitely not arguing that parents should never send their kids to private school. The first priority has to be making sure the child gets a good education, and there is definitely a limit on what one parent’s involvement can achieve. But the private schools in my area were more uniformly good than the publics, and still parents 1) sent their kids to publics, and 2) saw very good results from it. I believe in sending kids to privates when the publics are a total lost cause, not just to achieve Optimum Learning.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
Myles SG Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
There is also the not-insignificant contingent of kids who are on financial aid at elite prep schools (Exeter comes to mind), which surely counts as serving people in need.
Football and basketball players don’t count.
I am fairly convinced in having a certain semblance to an elite system is good for society. Leaders need to have perspective, and intelligence aside, a kid at Trinity or Browning or Collegiate or Choate or Deerfield will have a wider perspective than kids at Stuy or Bronx Science.
No they don’t. I went to both public and private schools because my mother wanted me to have a wider perspective. I would say that the public middle school that I went had much more variety there were children of prominent doctors and businessmen as well as kids living below poverty line.
In my private prep school it was just full of kids that thought their parents achievements were theirs and looked down at poor people, some were actually shocked to learn that there were people (like myself) without at least a condo on the beach and that had never traveled to Europe.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
In my private prep school it was just full of kids that thought their parents achievements were theirs and looked down at poor people, some were actually shocked to learn that there were people (like myself) without at least a condo on the beach and that had never traveled to Europe.
I meant perspective as in philosophical perspective. Not perspective as in “I know both rich and poor people” perspective. To have philosophical perspective, to be able to cast your eyes beyond the tumults of the momentary present, requires a certain degree of apartness not possible if you are constantly worrying about being screwed by some public-school teacher.
This, actually, is why the Secretary of Education is a Friends alum.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
I recognize that my contention that “If a parent thinks that their public schools are weak, the answer is to campaign and get involved, not to give up and start paying for a private school.” only applies within certain bounds. Schools that have issues with safety and violence or that are so far gone that they cannot retain competent staff can justify a parent’s move to go private or exploit a public school choice initiative (if available).
My experience here in suburban Atlanta is that parents don’t understand how to evaluate school quality. They think that test scores represent some multiplier against every child’s performance rather than the reality, which is that most children do well, and the others struggle. I still believe that, in general, schools and school systems fail if the community fails. Funding votes, school board elections, and parental involvement levels all have a tremendous impact over time. Kids without parents who are focused on education will always tend to struggle, regardless of the system.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
In my private prep school it was just full of kids that thought their parents achievements were theirs and looked down at poor people, some were actually shocked to learn that there were people (like myself) without at least a condo on the beach and that had never traveled to Europe.
Which sort of nicely illustrates my point. If you haven’t been to Europe, then you have less perspective, as a matter of necessity, than the kid who has. And a mingling of people with greater perspectives and those with lesser perspectives doesn’t result in greater perspective for the greater-perspective kids; it only widens though with comparably narrower perspectives.
To say that one widens one’s perspective at a school means to socialize with people who have more perspective, for example, having to Europe.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
They think that test scores represent some multiplier against every child’s performance rather than the reality, which is that most children do well, and the others struggle.
The difference could still be between going to Univ. of Georgia and then a mediocre grad school, or going to community college.
I should think the choice would be easy enough if you are the parent.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Re tomemos at 23: “By the way, is the main argument Myles is making for private schools really that they’ll overlook infractions that poorer kids would get busted for, because private schools don’t want to risk losing your money? That would certainly fit Myles’s pattern.”
—————–
That’s NOT true of the top preps –because they have big endowments and can ignore any one parent if they want to.
Their rep is based on what kind of kids they turn out. Character,etc.
My son’s first year roommate at Exeter went there for 4 years and GOT KICKED OUT two weeks before graduation. For possession of pot. It screwed up his admission to Tufts but things were eventually sorted out. (At nontrivial expense,from what I heard).
My understanding is that Exeter was a haven for potheads in the 1970s but cracked down because they were ruining its academic reputation. Plus conservative New Hampshire now has a law requiring that educational institutions report drug discoveries to the local police — which opens the institution up to outside police investigations. (Andover, by contrast, is in Massachusetts.)
But Exeter may also have been trying to do the kid a favor — the kid was from Manhattan, wealthy and kinda spoiled and drifting along as a budding Master of the Universe. He knew the rules, he accepted admission and he broke them.
The school does give free admission to kids from families under $75,000 income. But to be admitted under those conditions it obviously helps if the kid is an academic superstar who will reflect glory on the school — and will
lift the school’s median SAT score. But the school does do a good job, in my opinion, of making everyone welcome and on equal standing.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
My son’s first year roommate at Exeter went there for 4 years and GOT KICKED OUT two weeks before graduation. For possession of pot.
The expulsions usually happen after kids get their college acceptances, not before. Unless a college wants to go through pretty nasty fights, rescission is usually not a possibility, so the damage tends to be minimal. My guess is that Tufts here let this one through, although I might be wrong.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
Going to a top prep school HURTS a kid’s chances of getting into a competitive university, in my opinion.
Admissions committees (with middle class admin staff) tend to favor the kid who makes good in poor environments over someone who does OK in a rich environment.
Class standing is a major admissions factor and Someone who would be valedictorian in many suburban public schools will only be in the middle of the pack at a top prep. Plus universities seems to have a quota on how many kids they want from a prep — and the quota is much smaller today than it was 100 years ago.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
That’s NOT true of the top preps –because they have big endowments and can ignore any one parent if they want to.
To an extent. The prep community is a close-knit one, and being complete assholes (like Andover sometimes has a reputation of being) is going to come back to bite you in one or another. Parents are going to be hesitant to send their kids to a school where they are gonna be treated like shit, and that hurts donations too.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
Going to a top prep school HURTS a kid’s chances of getting into a competitive university, in my opinion.
It does, that’s true, unfortunately, but it does make up for it in safety admits (Trinity, Colby, Tufts).
There is also the matter that a lot of the kids there aren’t relying on school but on legacies.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
It is amazing how rarely the people on this blog actually take a look at themselves to see if they, even remotely, resemble your average American.
No, instead you all party like Hahvahd is the only respectable school in the country. Most of us didn’t get sweetheart deals because mommy and daddy had money.
Hell, most of you haven’t even set foot in a public school. Yet you all love to pretend to know all about them, and declare that they all suck. They must, after all, people like you don’t go to them!
You should remember this when you talk about what is ‘politically possible”. You have no actual experience with reality. You don’t know what’s possible or impossible. you only know what your wealth, upper-class friends think. That isn’t reality.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Re Myles “Unless a college wants to go through pretty nasty fights, rescission is usually not a possibility, so the damage tends to be minimal.”
———-
Rescinding admission is not difficult if the kid does not have a secondary school diploma.
Tufts eventually let him in but –like a NASCAR race– it wasn’t pretty.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
“To have philosophical perspective, to be able to cast your eyes beyond the tumults of the momentary present, requires a certain degree of apartness …”
That’s a nice little version of Plato’s Republic you’re living out there, Myles.
“If you haven’t been to Europe, then you have less perspective, as a matter of necessity, than the kid who has.”
By the same token, if you’ve never known anyone who hasn’t been to Europe…
August 26th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Rescinding admission is not difficult if the kid does not have a secondary school diploma.
Tufts eventually let him in but –like a NASCAR race– it wasn’t pretty.
True enough. And I mean, I feel for the kid (can you imagine what his senior summer must be like? Practically on hot coals every single day). My point however was they colleges tend not to want to seriously rescind in the first place. In this case, it’s fortunate that everything worked out, but yeah, I can imagine how nasty it must have been.
I had a friend who was rescinded from his early admission school, for some minor offense. There must have been at least a 100 phone calls made before he was re-instated.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
“The expulsions usually happen after kids get their college acceptances, not before.”
So, you really are saying that the advantage of privates is they prevent the sons of privilege from suffering the consequences of their actions. Is this what you mean by “casting your eyes beyond the tumult”?
August 26th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
By the same token, if you’ve never known anyone who hasn’t been to Europe…
The philosophical perspective lies in Europe, not in the person who hasn’t been there. It is seeing the Baroque buildings and appreciating the fruits and wonders of civilization, of traveling people who live in a completely different culture, of appreciating in person the strains of civilized enlightenment that has shaped society.
It is not drawn from being among those who reside in a less luxurious version of the same culture and society.
And yes, it is Platonian.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
Public schools don’t have to suck. I went to a great one (Nova). It was started in the 60s as an “experimental” school. Most of the experimental went by the wayside, but it was still a great school and still free. There was a waiting list, but anyone in the county could get on it. There were very rich kids and very poor kids. There were great teachers and administrators who (while not so great) didn’t completely tie teachers hands behind their back.
Redirecting resources to private schools and providing tax benefits to them isn’t helping matters at all. It’s just one more thing that ensures privilege continues generation after generation.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
@soullite
Fwiw, I went to public schools through the Ph.D. I’m from a 50th percentile income family. The K-12 schools were OK–neither good nor bad. I made of university education what I could make of it. Now, some of my colleagues went to Exeter and Andover. I guess I’d prefer to have done it my way, but then again, they probably prefer their path.
Anyway, not all of us are rich, private-school types.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
Myles “I feel for the kid “.
———
Yeah — he wasn’t a bad kid, just a little spoiled.
On the other hand, a corrective slap on the nuts when he was young might have steered him away from worst disasters later on.
He and his parents did complain to the dorm mother about my son’s housekeeping. That was probably a mistake.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
Um, Myles. From a middle-class public-school kid:
“Platonic.”
August 26th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
Hell, most of you haven’t even set foot in a public school.
Soullite, 12 of the 20 distinct commenters here so far say they went to public school for at least part of their education. The other eight don’t say. So you’re full of shit.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
I went to public school, Europe and visited the family in Africa. I’m the king of perspective! What’s my prize?
BTW, only a prep school kid would think that being in a sheltered, largely homogeneous community offers greater perspective.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
The inability to understand the basics of costs, incomes, budgeting, and how typical people live seems to me to be indicative of a lack of perspective. I have been to Europe many many times. My ability to comment and understand policy issues is much improved since I have had to grapple with the inherent limitations one confronts when trying to figure out how to afford a trip to Europe while also trying to pay a mortgage and save for retirement and figure out how to start a small business while affording health coverage.
You know what’s missing there? The concerns and struggles of everyday people.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Myles at 47: “The philosophical perspective lies in Europe, not in the person who hasn’t been there. It is seeing the Baroque buildings and appreciating the fruits and wonders of civilization, of traveling people who live in a completely different culture, of appreciating in person the strains of civilized enlightenment that has shaped society.”
——
Yes, the architecture at Auschwitz is lovely.
And amid the olive groves and villas on the heights of Fiesole above Florence, they are excavating the bones of the thousands of Germanic invaders who were trapped there and forced to die of thirst and starvation in the later stages of the Roman Empire.
Lovely country.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
He and his parents did complain to the dorm mother about my son’s housekeeping. That was probably a mistake.
That’s quite declasse. A very unfortunate mistake, is nothing else for indicating a smallness of mind. His mother got in on the act? Yikes.
Still, a corrective slap.
“Platonic.”
Always found the usage in “Platonic love” a bit nervous, so was looking for an alternative. Oh well, guess that’s a mistake.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
“BTW, only a prep school kid would think that being in a sheltered, largely homogeneous community offers greater perspective.”
Just awesome.
August 26th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
@Myles
Yeah, it is overused there. But “Platonic” is the normal adjectival form.
___
Speaking of perspective, I’m in Sweden right now for the summer. Wtf are we doing back in the States? Though I’ll take Americans in public anyday. I also prefer American behavior around alcohol.
August 26th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
“You know what’s missing there? The concerns and struggles of everyday people.”
Pish posh. That’s merely the tumult of the momentary present, far below the interest of future leaders of men.
August 26th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
I’ve been to both – some public schools are better than some private schools and vice versa. Class plays a huge part in it – a class full of upper middle class kids is going to do well, regardless of whether it’s public or private; the real issue is what happens when all of the sudden all the upper middle class kids leave – given how much students learn from each other. At the same time, I know that it’s not as simple as that – my dad’s own research (ironically done at my high school among other places) showed that a lot of elite high schools are actually worse for a lot of students because they focus all of their efforts on the top of the class and put huge amounts of pressure on the middle to either shape up or drop down into the lower tracks so that they can keep their records.
The larger issue of creating greater social mobility by decreasing class privilege is a much harder nut to crack.
August 26th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Speaking of perspective, I’m in Sweden right now for the summer. Wtf are we doing back in the States? Though I’ll take Americans in public anyday. I also prefer American behavior around alcohol.
Yep. I hear the Swedes are like Russians when it comes to boozing. It’s kind of frightening.
August 26th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
“I’ve been to both – some public schools are better than some private schools and vice versa. ”
———
Sure. Thomas Jefferson in Fairfax County, Virginia has an enormous rep. Although I’m not sure that the magnet schools in wealthy suburbs are really public.
August 26th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
@Myles
I don’t think there is the problem with alcoholism here that you have in Russia (but I haven’t looked at the numbers). But yeah, all the pent-up inhibitions come rushing out when they drink.
August 26th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
But yeah, all the pent-up inhibitions come rushing out when they drink.
Precisment. Although I do wonder what female Swedes turn into when they are that smashed; it should be a spectacle if the slutdom quite outpaces what happens at fraternity parties around the U.S.A. that I have had the luck to have seen.
August 26th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
I saw soulite’s comment as directed toward Don and Myles’s martini-sipping be-monocled country club conversation about Exteter and Tufts.
The vast majority of college grads attended public university. And I would wager that a majority of those attended community college at some point. Let’s keep things in perspective.
August 26th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Matt, I think there is something missing in your post. Tuition is not tax deductible. Only “donations” are.
Tuition generally does not cover costs at elite schools. The deficit is made up by donations.
Are you saying that educational (and cultural) institutions should not be supported through the tax code? Are only charities to be supported in that way?
BTW, I went to, and have sent my children to private schoolsno. I now send them to public ones (admittedly inone of the best districts in the country)
August 26th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
@Myles
I’ve heard that sexual inhibitions drop, too. But I haven’t seen that. Maybe I need different friends.
August 26th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
I’ve heard that sexual inhibitions drop, too. But I haven’t seen that. Maybe I need different friends.
Well, it’s not like female Swedes have a great deal of sexual inhibition comparatively to drop in the first place. Ha.
August 26th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
I saw soulite’s comment as directed toward Don and Myles’s martini-sipping be-monocled country club conversation about Exteter and Tufts.
Quit the class warfare, will you? Don Williams cared enough about his kid to send him to Exeter; I say it’s a good call.
It’s not the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
August 26th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
By the way, Don Williams, did you son play any varsity sports at Exeter? They are known to have some fairly good programs. Definitely Ivies recruitment.
August 26th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
Seems like a lot of folks here went to private school.
Matt – any interest in putting up polls on your site to get an idea of the demographics of your readers. Might be interesting for you and for us.
August 26th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
I can’t say anything Myles has said here is too surprising. I can’t see any point in arguing this point, though, since his position is a natural extension of his basic views.
I don’t think there is fundamentally anything wrong with taxing private school tuition or not. You could argue that folks are already paying for public school, but so are people without kids. But ultimately, there is no natural ‘default’ arrangement to consider as normal, so that kind of back and forth doesn’t help as much. I would even be willing to trade a stipend for those kids if we could move away from locally funded schools (the rich neighborhoods shouldn’t get the most money for their public schools!).
August 26th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Private school tuition is taxed… like most things you pay for, it comes out of your after-tax income. Donations to private schools aren’t taxed, like donations to all non-profits, and private schools don’t pay property taxes, like all properties owned by non-profits not used for profit-making business ventures.
August 26th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
Re Myles at 70: “By the way, Don Williams, did you son play any varsity sports at Exeter? They are known to have some fairly good programs. Definitely Ivies recruitment.”
————
He played some sports but I don’t think at the varsity level. It was kinda comical to read in the Philly paper about inner city schools here not having sufficient textbooks and then get a fundraising letter from Exeter bemoaning their shortage of squash courts. Everything is relative, I guess.
On the other hand, the mother of his best friend died in Lower year. The ensuing sadness hurt the kid’s grades at a critical time and his admission to university. Tragedy strikes the rich and poor alike.
The Ivies are kinda the Special Olympics of American athletic competition and I was amused at how the preps promote exotic sports requiring expensive equipment to duck competition from the rabble. On the other hand, some members of the Exeter Water Polo team have gone into the Navy Seals.
August 26th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
As a public school graduate (in a smallish city in NY state) I have to say I was shocked when I got to my extremely elite college to discover that the Andover/Brearley etc. crowd were (generally speaking) no better educated than I was. And in a few cases, far worse!
Frankly, my kids attend public school in DC because I want them to see how the real world lives, something that was sorely lacking in the private/prep school kids (even the scholarship ones who mostly came from lower middle class families financially but upper class families culturally — i.e. parents classical musicians, low level college professors, playwrights etc.)
The best part of public school in a big city (not a homogenous suburb) is the mix of kids/social class groups. The second best part is that my kids understand that they have to work at their education as nothing will be handed to them on a platter. Some of their teachers are fabulous, some mediocre and a few, less than stellar. Even my child who is not particularly motivated understands that it is up to him to go to the math center and get help if he has the inadequate teacher that year. This teaches them a personal responsibility that is priceless.
They also have a firm grasp of why poor people are poor (and no, it’s not bc. they are lazy but bc. they lack the support system of middle class families and the public safety net is not adequate). This strongly contributes to their support for public health insurance and all sorts of social justice issues.
And yes, at 14 and 16, they are well aware of these issues and have been for years. Frankly, the public schools are the last bastion of American democracy. Once they go, democracy will disappear.
August 26th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
[...] public schools, pupil, school spending, schooling, spending per student Matt Yglesias has a post today about how private schools should not be granted non profit status because their main impact [...]
August 26th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
On the other hand, the mother of his best friend died in Lower year. The ensuing sadness hurt the kid’s grades at a critical time and his admission to university. Tragedy strikes the rich and poor alike.
That’s definitely really sad and unfortunate. I mean your mother outweighs your school, definitely. But I guess the college counselor could have done a better job representing what sort of hurt this kid was going through.
The Ivies are kinda the Special Olympics of American athletic competition and I was amused at how the preps promote exotic sports requiring expensive equipment to duck competition from the rabble.
It works both ways. If not for the special recruiting, the social life at Ivies would get very much unbearable. Think U of Chicago to the factor of 10.
August 26th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
tory, it sounds like you are being very up front about the idea that you’re giving your children a worse education because you feel it will be “good for them.”
I would think that most parents would want their children to have better access to families who came from different financial backgrounds but were more likely to be “upper class culturally.” That’s a feature, not a bug. You want your children, even if your family isn’t wealthy, to absorb a good cultural value system.
Not all children are naturally bright or academically inclined. I really do not see the benefit of placing them in a situation where academic excellent is not considered the norm. What you are doing is placing your children in a situation where they run the risk of normalizes on a set of values which are rather antithetical to learning.
August 26th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
tory, it sounds like you are being very up front about the idea that you’re giving your children a worse education because you feel it will be “good for them.
Education? That’s not what schools are about. Tory obviously believes that schools are about making certain that your children are brought up to be good little liberals.
August 26th, 2009 at 8:40 pm
Some private schools go to great lengths to raise money for need-based scholarships in addition to raising money for capital projects and to close the gap between tuition and costs. Some of the costs of running a prep school include relative luxuries like top of the line computers and facilities, but taxing contributions to the school will simply shift some of the donated money from a charitable purpose to the general or capital budget of the school so to maintain those relative luxuries. Great. Less need based scholarships wasn’t the point, was it?
Granted, not all private schools will go to the lengths that my alma mater does in this regard; although it has a rather conservative reputation, I believe it tries harder than most. Can we successfully sort out private schools that have more public-minded attitudes? Or at least those that try to recruit and retain some socioeconomically disadvantaged students? Maybe we could. The UK is trying to do just that.
In Britain they have recently required that independent (private) schools show that they are contributing to the public good in order to retain their tax status. The criterion are fuzzy; government officials will look at each school on a case to case basis. There is some fear that schools that lose their tax status will pass on their higher costs in the form of tuition and effectively abandon any attempt at educating non-wealthy pupils. In other words, a policy born of egalitarian ideals might have the net effect of pushing more middle class students back to the public sector and making the class differences between the public and private worlds even wider. It isn’t clear if that will happen in practice — it could also have the effect of pushing private schools to open up their facilities, build a proper scholarship program, and adopt other more community-friendly policies.
I suppose some people would prefer socioeconomically disadvantaged but gifted students to attend their local public school and make it marginally better, taking diversity away from the elite environment and further limiting our already limited social mobility. Maybe fewer scholarships for needy students IS the point of Matt’s post.
And I question whether we can sort things out fairly. Another complication is tax-free donations to PUBLIC schools.
If donations to private schools are to be taxed because the education of rich kids isn’t charity, then donations to wealthy public schools should be treated the same. Right? Students at Churchill HS in Potomac, MD are no more charity cases than students at a private school.
Like many public schools, the school where I teach supplements its revenue with parent-initiated fundraising. Several hundred thousand dollars are raised each year for all sorts of things that the predominantly upper-middle class community wants but hardly needs. Of course, the smaller number of working class and poor kids that also go here benefit from going to an excellent school with extras funded by parent contributions.
This socioeconomic diversity within a school isn’t common but it isn’t rare, either. I see no way of sorting out which donations are going to truly charitable purposes without a school-by-school audit that would be costly, political, and a big ideological distraction from more pressing structural problems.
All things considered this strikes me as less about the unfairness of the tax code than a generalization about the motives of private school parents leading to a general judgment about the social utility of the private institutions in question. Unfortunately for MY’s premise, there is a huge range of demography and philosophy within both the public and private education sectors.
August 26th, 2009 at 10:47 pm
I guessed you guys missed my point. My kids are not getting a ‘worse education’, rather they are getting exactly the same academics the private school kids get but they are also getting the benefit of being in a richly diverse environment. They also have culturally rich and materially poor kids at public school you know. They just also have kids who have the misfortune (or perhaps it is merely misjudgement) to be born into families that have not had any opportunity to become either materially or culturally rich. And if it is somehow ‘liberal’ to know that not everyone in the US starts out on a level playing field, well, I am happy for my kids to be liberal.
I am always astonished that people make the assumption that public school education can’t compete with private education, but as my first ‘graph pointed out, at my college (yes, one of the top 2 in the US), I discovered I was as well prepared as any of the private school kids and better than some.
Frankly, this is true of my kids preparation also: our school sends the same number of kids to Ivies as the private schools in the area. (It is the same number but obviously, a smaller percentage of the graduating class precisely bc. the school has a wider range of kids with a wider range of backgrounds, abilities, and ambitions.)
And if you think that the values of the private schools in DC are so vastly superior to the values of the public school kids, well, you are naive. My kids can tell you the names of the drug dealers in their schools but they can also tell you the names of the drug dealers at Sidwell and GDS. The difference is only in the social class of the dealers. The Sidwell kids are less likely to get caught, and when they are, well, they definitely get treated differently. But I suppose that is alright by you bc. after all, the kids come from a social class with ’superior’ values.
August 27th, 2009 at 7:39 am
tory, I can only work off what you yourself said about your school: namely that some (many?) teachers are mediocre or not very good, but that you think this is a good experience for your child to go through and that placing your children in an environment in which even though the students might have a lot of different economic backgrounds, the students almost overwhelmingly come from a “culturally rich” environment is a negative. Many parents, by contrast, would want to place their children in an environment where the overwhelming cultural attitude is one in which education is valued and considered important, rather than one in which many teachers and students might not value it.
I might also add that one of the big, stated goals of improving education — smaller class size — is always present in a private school and that by contrast, even the very best public schools tend to have class sizes of 30 or more. This makes it difficult for teachers to grade lots of writing assignments, for example, which is necessary for becoming a good writer.
On the other hand, you may be sending your children to a charter school in which many issues with respect to class size and student motivation (given that they’re self-selected for students who want to be there), but as I said, I can only work off what you described, which was that the school quality was at best “mixed,” but that you thought this would be good for them.
August 27th, 2009 at 8:08 am
I think something should be mentioned here that no one has yet brought to anyone’s attention. Public schools often provide substandard education, and, yes, private schools are not at all charities. Further, it is true that private schools siphon money from the public school system that could otherwise improve education in them. However, what about teachers? Many teachers very much enjoy teaching in private schools. Many of these teachers have been to school for six to eight years of post-graduate study (i.e., they have Ph.Ds) and are almost 30 or over 30, have families, and are restless to begin the process of of paying off debt and becoming wealthy enough to no longer eat Ramen every night. Why would they want to get a job teaching for 28,000 a year when a private school can offer much, much more. Also, why would they want to deal with the endless bureaucratic nightmare that is teaching under the NCLB system, where the pressure to teach to a test is so soul-deadening and miserable that many teachers quit the school system all together? Who wants to spend hours and hours babysitting impossible kids whose parents could care less while more gifted children who need education no less than others languish and become jaded?
Private school exist for more than just the wealthy children who attend them.
August 27th, 2009 at 11:38 am
I went to Grace Church School just like Matt, and then went to Stuyvesant High School, a public magnet school. On average, the kids at Stuyvesant were smarter, harder-working, and from FAR more diverse backgrounds. A large percentage of them grew up in communist USSR, China, or other parts of the world. I think someone who lived under communism and american capitalism has FAR more perspective than someone who visited Europe for their summer vacations.
Funny thing, the private school kids got into much better colleges by and large, due to the cozy relationships between college admissions officers and the various prep schools.
August 27th, 2009 at 11:40 am
I taught a class at a DC public school for one year. I went to crappy and underfunded Florida public schools. I’m also familiar with NYC public schools. Nothing prepared me for DC public schools. I would never send my child there. They spend the vast majority of their time on discipline. The teachers have very little support, and it is hard to see why most of them even got into teaching in the first place. The bureaucracy is burdensome. The facilities are a disgrace. Overall, it’s a complete nightmare. There are no good lessons to be learned. Sending your child to one is not insight into poverty. It is insight into how dysfunctional a school system can be.
Some school districts make private schools more of a necessity than optional, especially when they get into the middle school years where behavior can become a major impediment to academic success.
August 27th, 2009 at 12:17 pm
Okay, Just Me, let’s just start at the beginning. First of all I said that some NOT many teachers are less than stellar. Guess what, the same holds true for private schools (ask the parents of any kids at local DC private schools — they have had their share of ‘mediocre’ and less than stellar teachers also).
I certainly never claimed that being in school with children from culturally rich backgrounds was a negative. I did indeed imply that only associating with people from the same ‘cultural’ social class was limiting and I still believe that.
If you had ever even entered a DCPS you would know that the vast majority of teachers/administrators value education and a large percentage of the children do also. Indeed, as pointed out by Hyperbole above, a great many public school students work incredibly hard, often without the advantages of educated parents, plentiful books and materials in the home, and money for extra enriching experiences. I find that it is beneficial for my children to witness this work ethic (and yes, adopt it themselves). Again, you are naive if you think that all the students at private schools are highly motivated and value education.
Your assertion that even the very best public schools have class size of more than thirty is simply factually inaccurate. DCPS (like most public schools) has specific guidelines on class size (which varies with the age/grade of the students.) Certainly my sons’ class sizes have always been below thirty and usually substantially so (this is over a twelve year period in DCPS). And no, they are not in a charter school and never have been. As for writing assignments, well, I have never seen a dearth of them.
Bperk, I am sorry your single year of experience in DC was so dismal. Part of the role of a middle class within a public school system is to make sure that things don’t come to a nighmarish pass. Unfortunately, DC is a very impoverished city and the state of schools within the most impoverished neighborhoods reflects the lack of a parent body with the interest, clout, and political ability to fix things.
I am not sure why some commenters are so threatened/offended by my choice to send my kids to public school. Every family makes the choices that reflect their own values/situations. I was simply trying to explain my own thinking and experience in the context of a discussion of public and private schools. Make your own choice but don’t do so without at least investigating your own public schools and talking to some families who have chosen them.
August 27th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
I wasn’t threatened, and it wasn’t about sending your kids to a public school. I merely thought your choice was a poor one, particularly given the reasons you provided: an environment where teachers weren’t necessarily good (you saw this as a good point, compared to the private school where good teaching was “having things handed to them on a silver platter”) and the social problems of poverty without contervailing cultural values were a constant backdrop (because being surrounded by students who had these cultural values wasn’t as valuable as an environment where it was not the norm).
Then again, my value system is one that is focused on the academic quality of the education and an environment where that value system is considered the norm, not one of many value options. Environments like Stuyvesant which was mentioned above provide an experience in which people come from lots of different backgrounds but have a strong focus on academics and a culture that is normalized on academic achievement. If you believe that it’s a more valuable education experience for children to be exposed to an environment where this is not the norm, then I can’t agree with that: it’s sending a set of mixed messages, when the focus should be on academics.
Not necessarily, but the culture of the many private schools normalize on at least professional achievement and the expectation of attending college (YMMV). Not everyone’s an academic superstar, but they have a lot of academic expectations they have to meet.
It just seems that, from my personal value system, a school environment where the overwhelming norm was a student culture focused on academics and an adherence to higher cultural and social norms would be preferable to one that was not. You seem to have a rose-colored view of “motivated working class kids just trying to get a break in life” which is, let’s face it, much more applicable to the environment you’d find at Stuy than at DCPS… but then again, you’d wince at a school full of people with their homogeneous “value systems” that valued education and learning.
I’m not trying to be mean, but I think your mindset it very, very naive. I see it in a lot of well-meaning parents, and I just don’t buy into the idea: particularly for kids that aren’t naturally bright and motivated, when they have a choice of cultural norms to take part in, they run the risk of deciding that “school isn’t for them” (because their school’s culture is an environment where learning and academics aren’t for everyone).
No, part of the role of a public school system is to nurture and cater to the academic needs of the middle class, because if it doesn’t, they all leave, and the school ends up in a nightmarish pass.
It’s understandable if a parent wants to send a kid to Stuyvesant instead of Dalton because she thinks that the overall environment at Stuy will be better. That simply doesn’t apply to DCPS, and you’re actually arguing that a worse academic environment will be better for the kids. I just don’t buy it.
August 27th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Funny thing, the private school kids got into much better colleges by and large, due to the cozy relationships between college admissions officers and the various prep schools.
Not really cozy as much as being based on long-standing trust. A school that has a long history of feeding kids that perform well at Stanford is going to have a much easier time getting kids into Stanford. Proven track record and whatnot, enables admissions to actually make a realistic judgment from the school transcript and recommendations.
I knew a girl who was at a shit public school, worked pretty hard and pretty easily was valedictorian, and got everyone in the school up to the principal to write a rec letter for her. She honestly wasn’t very smart, and her SAT score was fairly mediocre, and frankly she would have gotten a pretty mediocre mark at my prep school (say goodbye to Ivies, and say hello to WUSTL in middle-of-nowhere), but she got into Penn.
Predictably (from my viewpoint), she was mediocre at Penn. And I don’t think Penn ever took any kid from her school ever after, because they cottoned on to the fact that everything was a joke.
That’s why long-standing relationships between admission and counseling officers are so important.
August 27th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
She wanted to actually get into Princeton, but of course Princeton was super sketchy about taking an unknown quantity from an unknown (and probably shit, as far as they can tell) school, and so they just gave her the waitlist treatment.
Guess that’s what separates Tier I and Tier II Ivies.
August 27th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Funny thing, the private school kids got into much better colleges by and large, due to the cozy relationships between college admissions officers and the various prep schools.
There is also the matter of self-selection. A great deal of super legacies self-select to go to privates in the first place. One person I known whose family had gone to Harvard to generations, who grew up in NYC, was saying that for him to go to Stuy or any competitive public was pretty much unthinkable is his family. Even if his parents had (hypothetically) been in tight financial straits, grandparents or uncles would have paid. That is how strong the taboo is.
August 27th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
(say goodbye to Ivies, and say hello to WUSTL in middle-of-nowhere),
In case you need to be reminded, you go to Wesleyan. Stones and glass houses, and all that.
August 27th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
In case you need to be reminded, you go to Wesleyan. Stones and glass houses, and all that.
Dude, nine kids got into WUSTL from my school. Thirteen applied. That’s more than one-fifteenth of the graduating class. It was an utter joke. It actually proved to be less selective than UVA or Cal Berkeley, both publics. I don’t know how it plays out with other schools, but at my school WUSTL was pretty desperate.
Speaking of joke admissions, every single kid who applied (I did not and would not have gone) to Univ. of Chicago got in. Infer from that what you will, but Chicago certainly seemed desperate for prep school kids. It was so bad that the counseling department started telling would-be Ivy Leaguers willing to bust their balls (and GPA’s) to use Chicago as the last-resort back-up.
The mind reels at how US News does their college rankings.
August 28th, 2009 at 4:19 am
I found this post very interesting because I personally attended a Catholic Middle School. The teachers at that school were not as dedicated as my teachers are at my current public high school. It seems as if the teachers at my middle school did not really care if i got the material unlike my public high school teachers. My teachers in my high school spent extra time on subjects when i needed it and it helped me grasp the concepts better.
August 28th, 2009 at 5:52 am
i had the same experience as Brandon. Public schools can often be of a superior quality in terms of what you actually learn. Which is, of course, all that really matters long-term
Derek
payday loans
August 28th, 2009 at 7:25 am
[...] organization and begins taxing private schools who don’t “do a bit more to earn it.” Matt Yglesias agrees that private schools are mooching deadbeats and ups the ante, calling them actively harmful [...]
August 29th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
Should giving to public schools be considered charity? What about selective public schools? If you want kids to come to public schools, the answer is simple, make them like private schools. In places with highly selective (non-lottery) public high schools, the demand for private high schools is greatly reduced. On the other hand, people are willing to pay a fair amount to get their kid out of a school with a lot of bad students.
I think the concept of what a “good school” is must be revisited. The same school is not good for all students. Just looking at test scores and college admissions tells you nothing about the school, only about the students that go there. If you look at longitudinal data, the truly star schools, with effective learning, are the ones that do the best for their students. This is why no child left behind and reducing the “achievement gap” are both nonsensical approaches to improving schools.
August 29th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
Although they appear to be missing from this discussion, a large segment of the private schools in this country are small, church-affiliated schools which struggle to pay their teachers even as much as the local public schools do. These schools often serve much lower-class students than do the private schools this post features. Taxing donations to these schools would have the consequence of forcing them to close or to drastically increase their tuition, surely not the intended end. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a junior at a school of this type. Most of my classmates’ families, including my own, would not be able to afford tuition much higher than it is now, about $4,000 for a high school student. We are not privileged; our parents are sacrificing a lot to give us a decent education. Certainly it is a much better education than we would get at a local public school, which are generally terrible.
August 30th, 2009 at 12:39 am
And as best one can tell, their main impact on the common weal is negative, drawing parents with resources and social capital out of the public school system and contributing to its neglect.
I have to take strong issue with this statement. In the event that there were no private schools, you could be damn certain that the parents of the wealthy would be using their social capital to re-arrange the public schools in a way to benefit their children.
Expect money that is currently going to remedial programs and tutoring that benefit marginal students to be drained in favor of programs that are going to be of interest to the wealthy. Mandarin immersion anyone? Back to heavy streaming? Zero tolerance and strict discipline to quickly and permanently remove any students that endangers the academic focus of his peers?
The wealthy have the social connections and determination to make it happen.
No, I’m not certain at all that all but a small percentage of the poor would benefit if the wealthy were added to the schools. In all likelihood it would mean the schools would shortly be remolded to ensure the needs of the wealthier would be met at the expense of the very different needs of the poor.
August 30th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
You really don’t understand economics at all, do you? Tax TUITION? Tuition is “sales”, not “profit” or “income”. There are expenses that must be taken out of tuition and no private school runs entirely on its tuition; they all need subsidizing from donations, or, if they are parochial, from church coffers. Private schools aren’t like government-run schools that basically have an unlimited base to steal from via taxes. Private schools could go through the whole tax-form-filling-out process, only to owe no taxes at the end because there was NO income.
Also, your point about how their “impact on the common weal” is negative (as if people’s money is meant to be spent on the “common weal”) because of the lost social opportunity of rich people making public schools better–do you realize how this one sentence utterly destroys your cherished concept of how the government is the solution to all ills? What you OUGHT to be saying is that private schools NEED the presence of the product of government schools in order to fix THEM, but since that would be laughable, you have proven right there how government CAN and DOES offer no solution at all. So your answer to that is to steal YET more tax money to pour down this same government rat hole.
August 30th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
[...] post on the rampant fraud of the Detroit Public School system, a reader sent me this post by Matthew Yglesias. He advocates the idea that people who refuse to send their kids to public [...]
August 30th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Matt,
By what stretch of the imagination do you honestly believe that you have the authority to dictate to others how they should educate their children? What is there about liberty that appalls you so and what makes you think you even can begin to have the slightest bit of knowledge to make these sweeping pronouncements as to how other peoples children are educated? Have you no sense? Have you no shame?
V Terranova
August 30th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Oh my goodness, what happened here …looks as though a mass flight of commentators occurred as soon as this execrable post was properly assessed by Karen De Coster @ LRC blog.
Come back, you bitingly witty progressive commentators: we want to read more about the prestigious institutions of higher learning you attended and your love for the little guy from behind the locked gates of your communities !
August 30th, 2009 at 6:32 pm
“Frankly, the public schools are the last bastion of American democracy. Once they go, democracy will disappear.”
THANK GOD!!!!
August 30th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
Wow. Another brilliant and innovative idea from the left. Let’s raise taxes and stifle private enterprise. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
The amount of money thrown at these schools is astronomical already. And in the case of inner cities most of it is coming from the burbs to begin with. It seems to me the massive redistribution scheme has failed and the only answer these idiots can come up with is to take MORE.
And this idea that churches should be taxed truly shows the real colors of socialist/communists. Freedom lovers believe we have been given certain unalienable rights from our creator. Socialist reject our creator and seek salvation through the state…they worship the state and seek to create a heaven on earth.
August 30th, 2009 at 8:30 pm
The taxes these people would pay most likely would not even go to schools, which are generally paid for by property taxes and lotteries and such. This is a typical socialist argument, devoid of thought and parasitic to the core. These people sending their kids somewhere besides public “schools” still pay for them, and in fact benefit them even more by creating productive children who will be able to be soaked later in life based on that productivity. Nothing in the world that can be done by the State can’t also be done by private citizens, by definition. Therefore, instead of crying because other people aren’t paying for whatever you want to happen, put up or shut up. YOU pay for it if YOU want it! If this idiot wants public schools to have more money, DONATE to them! VOLUNTEER! Quit begging the State to use violence to force others to pay for what you want (yes, taxes are collected through implicit violence, and if people wanted the “services” rendered, they wouldn’t have to be funded through taxes- they would be paid for), pay for it yourself.
Also, check where the politicians send their kids. And then you appeal to them to make others do what they don’t even do?
Finally, if you’re going to make a two paragraph post (especially on schooling), for god’s sake, please take the time to edit it. “…donations to a school to count as charitable they school ought to be made to demonstrate…” I really feel like I just took ten minutes out of my life to argue with my nephew why a car can’t really transform into a robot and fly into space. But at least he would have had an excuse. And if there are any typos in this comment, it’s because it wasn’t even worth going back to read it.
August 30th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
Public schools can’t be improved because the sole reason they exist is so that plutocratic socialist parasites can dumb people and children down so they won’t be critically minded enough to realize what B.S. the plutocrats feed them is. Seperation of church and state worked because churches were places of learning and having that in the control of the State makes it dangerous just as how public schooling is dangerous and much of our society’s ills stem frmo them and their dumbing down of our children.
August 30th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
Public schools are immoral because they operate on stolen money. Public schools have no proprietary interest. They can continue to steal money for their operation. They don’t have to make a profit in order to stay in business like true private schools.
All public schools are members of the parasite class. They can not operate without stealing money from the citizens. Plus, unlike free enterprise, they can keep getting worse and worse academically while charging more and more.
Free enterprise schools must keep getting better and offering more value or they will go out of business. Just the opposite of socialist public schools.
It seems simple. I don’t see why most of Boobus Ameicanas doesn’t get that. I guess my physics professor was right. The simplier thinks are, the harder they are to understand.
August 30th, 2009 at 11:21 pm
[...] danger, and inferior education. I am not kidding. This is sickeningly evil. And look at his cackling fiendish friends, saying “Countdown to tiresome idiot smarmily suggesting Matt’s a hypocrite for [...]
August 31st, 2009 at 6:45 am
We are already paying $2000 a year in school board taxes in addition to my daughter’s tuition at a private Christian school. We should be commended and encouraged for educating her in the best environment for her.
Why should I pay more to educate other people’s children in largely substandard schools? Throwing money at them won’t help them when the education establishment philosophies are the main reason for the decline of public schools.
August 31st, 2009 at 8:14 pm
This column contains perhaps the most backward logic I have ever read. It is, de facto, the best argument I can think of AGAINST a public school education.
To wit:
1. Those who send their children to private schools pay twice. They pay private school tuition as well as property taxes to support the failing public school down the road.
2 The failure of public education is due not to a lack of funding. Public schools in the US are among the best funded schools in the history of the world. The failure is due to a failed ideology.
Nobody can be given an education. An education is something that the student needs to actively pursue. Your column is a thinly veiled attack on religion, nothing more. It’s not even a good one. Buck up, Sonny, and maybe someday you will be good at your craft, in spite of the disadvantage of your education.
September 1st, 2009 at 11:50 am
All charities should be eliminated and their functions taken over by the government. Any participation by private entities detracts from the efforts of government. The State should have sole authority over all private activities. In fact all private activities detract from the positive efforts of government to make life good for everyone. Any interference by private entities either individual or organizational should be penalized. At the very least individuals need to be re-educated in a structured way to achieve the results required by the public good.
September 1st, 2009 at 5:37 pm
That’s exactly why none of our progressive politician’s send their kids to private schools.
Oh,…wait.