Education (Public & Private) in Term Paper

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There are specific daily steps that students in these working class schools must take, and in math, for example, the teacher "told them what the procedure was for each problem, rarely asking them to conceptualize or explain it themselves" (Anyon 528). And so the emphasis was on memorizing the steps, not on understanding how or why they are taken. Language arts class was much the same (copy the teacher's notes from the board). In the middle-class school, it was all about "getting the right answers." In social studies, it was the old-fashioned routine of reading the chapter and answering questions, and the same was true in language arts. "Creativity is not often requested in social studies and science projects..." Anyon writes (532).

Things were different in the affluent professional school and fathers' careers included corporate lawyer, cardiologist, engineer; difficult assignments required specific projects like film-making and script-writing; children wrote essays about the lives of people in history; in social studies the emphasis was on creative writing. The executive elite school featured a child developing his or her "analytical intellectual powers." The classes in this school emphasized literature, history, the classics, and advanced science and math. Students were "sometimes flippant, boisterous, and occasionally rude," Anyon explains on 538. That could be because children of wealthy families sometimes tend to be spoiled. In any event, what the reader gets out of reading this essay is more than just the socioeconomic differences in different parts of a city; in fact, the quality of teaching is so dramatically different, it is obvious that higher-paid teachers are to be found in wealthy communities, and that in a sense is cheating the lower-income students out of decent educations.

An article in MSNBC.com called "Public vs. Private School - which is best for my kids?" (Clayton 2005) points out that "many of us believe that private schools are better than public schools.

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" However, writer Victoria Clayton goes on, recent research by scholars from the University of Illinois-Champaign determined that (while making adjustments for a family's socioeconomic background) "...public-school kids slightly outperformed private-school kids." Clayton goes on to mention that in order to come up with that conclusion, the researchers utilized data from the 2000 National Assessment of Educational Progress - including scores from a federally designed math exam for 28,000 4th and 8th graders. That assessment lends credibility to the thought that "overall public-school education should not necessarily be seen as second-rate compared to private schools."

Overall, private school students "tend to do markedly better on standardized tests," writes Teresa Mendez in the Christian Science Monitor (Mendez 2005). But that fact may be a result of the reality of where the particular school is located in the community, Mendez continues; private schools may be drawing students from "wealthier and more educated families." Another viewpoint is offered by Joe McTighe, executive director of the Council for American Private Education (CAPE); quoted in the Mendez article, McTighe asserts that "raw scores have typically shown the country's 6 million private school students, who make up 11.5% of all U.S. schoolchildren, outperforming public school students."

Still another opinion on public vs. private schools is offered in the Mendez article by Henry Levin, economics and education instructor at Columbia University's Teachers College in New York. Levin states that based on "perhaps 15 years of research, there's nothing magic about privatization." In the bigger picture of education, Levin asserts, "...and I don't care which study you look at - the [differences in public and private school] results are tiny."

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