newlamb said:
This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. Any parent who cares about the education of his child knows that there is better discipline in a religious school of just about any stripe. Better discipline results in nearly no disruptive behavior which is what the public schools are fighting now. If the teacher is the jailer, when does he/she get to teach anything.
Just from my personal experience, that is absolutely not true.
I see my cousins and friends in China who sit in classrooms with 50+ students, with underfunded facilities, who can do algebra in the sixth grade, and calculus by junior year, some surrounded by high rises, while others by farmland, as the result of top standards (Chinese gov't nationalizes their curriculum) set by society, and pressure from parents to do well. Religion has no affect on the quality of schools, money helps, but the overriding factor is motivation from students and teachers alike.
I also went to a top private college and we had about 50% go to public schools and 50% go to private schools. Few of us felt there was any difference between the two different school systems. What made the difference between a good school and a mediocre one was not how the school was funded but how selective the schools were in picking their students.
Students who went to schools that were either selective in their admissions policy whether through entrance exams (private schools) or through property taxes (public schools) tended to end up with a better education than those that went through a less discriminating school.
In the end, it's not where the money that comes from which makes a school great, it's the quality of the student body, and the willingness of the students' parents to help their children to achieve high academic success.
Schools that reside in expensive school district tend to have parents who have the abundence of resources to help their children do well, and the parents tend to be more educated themselves, making them more willing to participate in their children's educational lives, as well as give children the environment to succeed academically. Wealthy districts with good public schools tend to attract academically focused parents. Thereby, public schools are hit or miss based on the quality of the student body.
The high cost of admissions into our nation's most selective private schools (Exeter, Phillips etc), and/or rigorous entrance exams, also ensures only high achieving students with ambitious parents are able to enter their hollowed hallways. In this way, only high achieving parents, with ambitions for their little darlings are selected over Joe Sixpack who doesn't care a rat's #$! that their kid just failed math.
As I stated before, I went to a top private college, now I'm taking a few graduate classes at my local public college. Is the quality of teaching higher at my private college? You bet. But not because one is public and one is private. It's because the academic quality of students coming in is lower at the public school because of the nature of the system.
The public school has to accept everyone who has a high school diploma and lives in the state, while my private school does not. Hence, my private school attracts a high caliber of student body and can adjust their curriclum to be more rigorous to fit their high achieving students.
My public college does not have that luxury.
However, this does not say anything about the professors who teach at public schools. The quality of the curriculum is really reflection of the student body, not the teaching system in the respective institutions.
I don't think school vouchers will resolve this problem with public schools (and education in general) because it doesn't hit at the root of academic problem: indifferent students and parents. No amount of vouchers in the world will turn a child around the student and/or parent are not interested in making that change.
In this way, I don't see school vouchers as a cure for our public schools at all. It's an easy out for some people, while others happily see money flowing into (their) religious coffers. But that says nothing about the problem with low achieving kids. Kids don't aim high because they are not told to. In this way, as much as I detest Bush's policies, I think he is going the right way with improving and nationalizing academic standards. I believe that just electing to set high goals will motivate some low achieving students to do better, even if they have uncaring parents.
Most of this is just from my experience of course. But having tutored kids in inner cities, and gone to a school with kids from some of the most elite private schools in the country, and having attended several different public schools throughout my elementrary and high school years, I believe the fault of poor public school performance lies not with the teachers themselves per se, but with the unmotivated students and their nonresponsive parents that,
along with underfunded teachers, makes for a poor academic environment.
Taking money away from public schools doesn't help the problem, but I also don't think just pouring more money into the school system helps either. We need to begin by encouraging students and parents to see the
value of an education. Kids need to know it's cool to be smart, to be top of the class. At my cousins' schools in China, the coolest, most popular kids were those that did well in school, that scored tops in their entrance exams---ok, that may be too extreme, but a bit of this veneration of education could go a long way to improving our nation's schools, both public and private.
Well in the area I live anyway, I just pulled my children out of a christian school after 8 years. It was getting so small, and the ones who were there were very disruptive. 
