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public v private

public v private The Eternal Question: Public or Private Consider this, you drive into the parking lot of the public school and see the same five squad cars as every day, business as usual you think. You and your friends walk up to the door and wait in line for the metal detectors. You put your keys in the tray and walk through the detector, it goes off. Two cops walk up to check your backpack. Pager in the pocket got to go back to the car and put it away. Back through the metal detectors and they do not go off, thank God. You go to first period, sit in your seat and the teacher locks the door. The drug dogs must be coming today. Second period and the dogs are still here, there must be something wrong. Third period starts and the class files in. The teacher is about to start and in walks the cops, they walk straight in your direction and up to the kid next to you. The kid stands; the cop puts the hand cuffs on him and escorts him out. Oh, well! There goes another one. Next is gym where your locker has no pad lock because last week two girls got into a fight and one beat the other one with your lock. The rest of the day is pretty usual, a couple of fights and a test. Sound extreme? Not for the students of Bloom High School, this is a good day. In the same town a mile away there is a Private Catholic High School; this is their day. I drive to school and pull up; in my Mercedes in the parking lot, there is an Escalade in front of me and a Porche behind me, and I hate having a cheap car. I park the car and file into school, walk in the front door and to my locker to put my books away. There is the drug dealer with another customer at the locker next to me, "Hi, Andy". Oh, no! Here comes a nun, better tuck my shirt in. To late, another detention, but on the up side here comes Jon; he is so hot it is too bad he does steroids. I go through a usual day, some quizzes and a test. At 2:20pm, schools over, back outside to the car and drive to Andy's. I guess everyone is following me today. Hey look at all the squad cars at Bloom, I wonder who got busted today? I sit down on the couch and talk while everyone else smokes a blunt. Now it is time to go, I will see everyone at the party tonight. I have to go do homework; after all it is only Tuesday. So which is better for a student, private school or public school? I know first hand what it is like in these two schools because I went to that private school and my best friend went to that public school. This year at Marian there was a big deal with drugs; the school decided to do an unannounced drug bust. Through the day there were 150 students held and searched. By the end of the day there were four seniors and two freshman expelled. A police officer asked our principle if she would like a sweep of the entire school. Sister Mary Paul declined stating that she knew most of the students would not be back tomorrow if she did that. This is the most pathetic thing I have heard from an administrator. If she knows that her school is so bad why would she single out those six students? The answer is that Marian is getting so bad with drugs that she knew she had to do something to stop these problems, so she used these students as an example for the rest of us. Although private schools do have their down points I think they are the best option. My parents said they would never send their dog to Crete-Monee, our public school, let alone their daughter. My mother went to Marian and my father went to Bloom, the public school example, so they also know first hand the problems in these schools. Marian has just recently started with the drug problems though. Rita, my mother, said that there was never any problem at school when she went there; the gossip was always about what happened at Bloom today. The main factor in this transition is money. When my mom went there, parents had a lot of money but the children did not see a lot of it. Now, children flaunt their parents' money like it is their own. Marian has a big cocaine problem; it is a very expensive drug and everyone does large amounts of it. Bloom students have no where enough money to support a cocaine habit, therefore it is not as large of a problem. At school I have seen more drugs than my police officer father and that is horrible. Some other bad things about a private school are, "The quality of education varies a great deal from one private school or another…, many private schools have some particular religious bias, which may not be acceptable to the parents, and the parents usually must handle transportation…"(Pros and Cons 1). In the scheme of things these cons are quite trivial as compared to the pros of a private education. These pros are as follows, parents have input into teacher selection, school location, and curriculum values being taught, if a child is far from the norm private schools have programs that will adequately challenge them, and most students are there because they want to be not because they had no other option (Pros and Cons 1). Dress codes also play a role in private schools. To students this is a con but to parents and administrators this is a pro. At Marian we had a strict dress code; boys wear ties and button up shirts during the winter and polos during the summer; girls wear colored shirts, tucked in, and slacks all year round. This takes away any chance to have gang colors/clothing or anything else deemed inappropriate. Private schools also have more money to invest in the education and activities of their students. A private school has the luxury of being able to raise the tuition based on need, which a public school does not. Parents of students are also more willing to donate their time and money to the school. Private schools also have the advantage of asking any student to leave without a lengthy legal process we do not have any sort of tolerance in the school. Bloom on the other hand has an alternate school, like many other public schools, where they send their trouble makers instead of having to deal with the expulsion process. I do not know the hard facts about Marian but I do know that my class started out with 425 students and we graduated with 386 students, so supposing that those students did indeed drop out we would have a ninety-one percent graduation rate. That number is very rough, because private students can leave and go to a public school, but most students who leave a public school are not doing so to go to a private school. Another advantage to the private school system is the curriculum. At Marian we had four levels I could take B (basic), A (advanced), H (honors), and AP (advanced placement), Marian is strictly college repertory. Most students were in the advanced track and those who were in the basic track were looked down upon. At Bloom, like most public schools, there are below average classes as well as vocational classes to take. I have a cousin Michael who is the prime example for the difference in education between the schools. Mike came to Marian hating every minute of it and in turn he got D's and F's on his report card. Before his junior year my aunt and uncle decided it was time to pull Mike out and send him to Bloom. I know Mike did not get smarter over night but suddenly he is getting A's and B's. At Marian you have to work hard to get the grades and the teachers not only help you get into college, but they help you stay there as well. There are numerous students who get 3.5 grade point averages in a public high school and get into University of Illinois, for example, and fail out in a semester. These students have taken spots away from students who are more apt to stay in college than drop out. The public school, Bloom, obviously has many problems stemming from numerous areas. Bloom has always had a problem with violence going back to the days of the death of Martin Luther King Jr. Van, my father, went to Bloom from 1965-1969 and he said that there was this line that separated the whites from the blacks after the death of Martin Luther King Jr. He recalls the day after the death as a moment he will never forget. The cafeteria was seriously lacking in the black population when the students heard singing coming from down the hall. As the voices got closer, he said, you could make out that they were singing "We Shall Overcome". There were 500 whites that met eye to eye with 500 blacks at the door to the cafeteria. He does not remember what ignited the fight, but by the end there were blacks, whites, and teachers on their way to the hospital. The next day there were squad cars bumper to bumper around the perimeter of the school and there were fifty to sixty police officers in the halls and it stayed that way until he graduated. Even with these officers there, there were two to three fights a week. There were 4,000 students in one school which creates a problem in itself, there was more time spent policing the classroom than teaching. Bloom does have a high number of black students but it does not have anything to do with race, but rather economic class. Forty-three percent of students are from low-income families, way above the state average of thirty-seven percent (Bloom 1). There is no emphasis on education in a family where the parents have none themselves and do not aspire to attain any. Bloom has a graduation rate of sixty percent where the states' is eighty-three percent. Almost half of the students are dropping out to do what? Another public school in the surrounding area is Lincoln-Way Central where most students are from a high social and economic class. The graduation rate of this school is ninety-three percent and the percent of low-income families is two (Lincoln 1). Most of the students of Lincoln-Way have parents who have master's degrees and doctorates. Students in Bloom are also being taught by teachers who forty-seven of have a bachelor's degree and only fifty-two have a master's degree (Bloom 2), whereas Lincoln-Way teachers have thirty-three percent holding bachelor's degrees and sixty-eight percent holding doctorates (Lincoln 2). Of course students who are being taught by a better caliber of teachers are going to achieve more and score higher. The average score on the ACT for Lincoln-Way was a twenty-three (Lincoln 1) as opposed to Bloom's eighteen (Bloom 1). There also has to be some blame placed on the teacher when the students do not score high on these tests. As stated by Anyon, teachers in 'working class school' do not show students how to do anything, they simply shout out orders on the procedure of things. A student can not be expected to perform well in high school if their ground structure is shaky. There are some advantages of going to a public school, however minute they might be, "1) it's free 2) your child will be attending a local school which is part of the community 3) the teachers must be qualified and will have served a year's probation…"(Heaney 3). In a public school teachers must have a teaching certificate to teach, but in a private school a degree in the intended field of teaching is all that is required. Which high school to attend is a big decision and one that is often made by the parents, but I do not see any reason why a parent who can afford a private school would want to put their child through a public school when the private school is obviously the better choice. There are many students who have made it through college from a public school and who have made it through high school and gone on to have great jobs, but the odds are in definite favor of us. Bibliography: Works Cited Anyon, Jean. "Social Class and The Hidden Curriculum of Work." Rereading America. Ed. Gary Colombo, Robert Cullen, and Bonnie Lisle. Boston:Bedford, 2001. 162- 73. Heaney, Karen. "Which is Better? A Private or State Education." Spark Learning Institution. 2 Oct. 2001. . "Pros and Cons of Educational Options." 20 Feb. 2000. 1 Oct. 2001. . Ramirez, A.Y. "Fred". '"Parent Involvement is like Apple Pie' A look at Paternal Involvement in Two States." High School Journal 85.1 (2001): 1-9. 5 Nov. 2001 . "Report Card for all Illinois Public Schools: Bloom High School". 1 Aug. 2001 . "Report Card for all Illinois Public Schools: Lincoln-Way High School". 1 Aug. 2001 .

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