I've seen the results, my husband went to private schools his entire life, I went to public schools. You want to know the difference in adult achievements between his friends and mine, nil. In fact, if I listed resumes, my public school pals would look better on paper as they actually had to go get careers because there is no family business for them to fall into or trust funds to rely on. No one went Ivy Leauge, almost all went to State colleges or Universities. What I can see from the sample set of his friends and mine is that paying a lot of money for school does not give your child brains, it does not give your child the drive to take the hardest courses or attend the most admired and respected schools. It does not make them curious, well rounded or intelligent. What matters most is the parents, how hard they push you, how hard they make you work, how involved with the school they are. I don't see a difference between my friends and his when we are all out together, not everyone is well read or cares about politics or even cares to research the environment or other causes. It really depends more on the person than their alumni status.

This is what has convinced me that as long as you aren't worried about your child getting stabbed or shot at school, public school is just fine for getting your child what they need, college entry and a decent job. If anything, if I have the money to send them to private school, I'm putting it in a house or college fund so they can either have no college debt or be able to buy a home in our city after they graduate instead.

I just think it keeps the classes seperate if you live in a major city like LA, SF, NY or others. The really rich keep their kids together at the most expensive private schools, the upper middle class keep their kids together in private and parochial schools and the lower middle and poor all mingle in public school if they can't get their kid into a magnet or charter school.

that was a really cool assignment! I love it.

Equal Funding, Qualified Teachers & Neighborhood Schools is now and always has been the way you get quality education. Schools in wealthier districts should not be funded differently than those in the poorest districts. We have sufficient quantifiable evidence to know children do best when they are in neighborhood schools.

The teachers union was supposed to professionalize teaching. Instead they fight to keep qualifications excessively low and teachers employed who are not only not qualified, but in too many cases, functionally illiterate. About 70% of public school teachers cannot pass the minimum skills test given by the schools in which they teach.

Our communities used to take great pride in our public schools. Now we treat them as leper colonies. The rising cost of private education and private health care are forcing even upper middle class families rethink the"let them eat cake" mantra. We - all of us - suffer when our children suffer. Our children suffer when we neglect our social fabrics underpinning, such as health care and public education. This culture of neglect is returning some costly problems, not the least of which is a society that is growing dumber and dumber.

At least we have some fancy bombs we can show our descendants when they ask why the wealthiest country to ever exist on the planet squandered their resources and let their children grow up with inadequate schools and go without basic health care. I'm sure they will understand after someone from India, Cuba or China explains it to them.

I spent nine or ten years (repeating temp job) scoring standardized tests for kids in many states, grades 4 through 12. The idea of "teaching for the test" is not so bad.

Many 21st-century kids actually know how to write because their teachers teach to the test. I myself never got any actual writing instruction in school. Now these kids get it, because of "the test." And the good fourth grade writers will make you feel humble.

Since the USA is rated at 27th down the list of Western industrial nations for quality public education, I'd think maybe we should be looking at why we do so poorly. Why do private schools do markedly better? I'd say discipline and better teachers. Discipline is easy. Your kid is out of tune with the program they ask you to leave. At that point, or before, parents effect discipline.

Public schools have discipline problems and that ends education. If a teacher is really motivated and well educated he or she can make more money in the private school; or even if it is par with public schools, he or she doesn't have to be a disciplinarian. They can use the time to teach a willing audience.

Integration made the public schools ineffectual, or at the least the methods that were used. We can start with the huge racial divide of the '50s, and the attempts of the government to use the schools as the prime instrument of integration. I honestly don't know what else might have been done, but there was a slavish adherence to the philosophy of John Dewey, to progressivism, and the blind assertion that putting kids of all races and religions together would be the "fix" of all that separated people from one another. As if religion, and race, and social classes were mere constructs that could be ignored rather than central to the identity of each of the children who went to school. Somehow the schools were to take a black, Baptist, poor child and by using the schools turn him into.......what? If one looks honestly at what the progressive schoolers were trying to do, they were trying to turn them into replicas of themselves, mentally, socially and in virtually every other way. It was the same goal that their abolitionist minded Great-grandparents had for

the German . Irish immigrants and well as the black Americans; what Their parents wanted for the Jews and Italians, and of course, the poor whites who came into the cities. The shock of the Civil Rights movment but more importantly, the failure of politically imposed school intergration, led them to abandon any real effort to save the schools. Oh, they were all for giving their tax dollars. But they gave lip service, and withdrew before a reality that could not be easily changed. More or less like rich families in Latin America, or for that matter in most times and places, they put up walls to keep out the less fortunate, the people not like themselves. So politicians of all stripes, liberal and conservative, avoid the DC public schools like the plague. Jimmy Carter symbolically put his daughter in a public school, but she existed in a bubble, un contaminated by a culture that both wanted and rejected the culture she represented. Bussing was a crime, because it accept ed the fictions of "Brown" that blacks needed to be around whites to prosper, and it sacrificed the well-being of white children to political expediency, and forced black children to associate with children with whom they shared little in common. Like many another politcal dogmas, integration, at least as propmoted by progressives, does not stand the test of truth, the empirical evidence thatholds it falsehood up under their noses. It is easy to put a nosegay to one's moth and turn away, but corruption has a way of posining the very atmosphere of our common society. Human corruption is always founded on falsehood.