Thanks PCL. I guess the Whiz might take offense to that article but it is a fact!! Can't argue with facts!!
I’m staying out of this argument, but I just want to show off one of the things I learned with my public school education. Understanding the source and metrics of studies you cite is important. That study and grade you link doesn’t mean what you think it means. It’s not meant to show the performance of Pennsylvania public schools, but how much states value public education. The metrics cited in that report card have nothing to do with the performance of schools. It’s giving grades in the following categories: (1) no high stakes testing; (2) professionalism of teaching; (3) resistance to privatization; (4) school finance; (5) spending taxpayer resources wisely; and (6) chance for success.
No high stakes testing means that states aren’t using big standardized tests for graduation requirements, teacher evaluation and student promotion. Professionalism of teaching is factoring in teacher salary, retention, tenure, and the rejection of merit pay. Resistance to privatization is the rejection of using public dollars to fund private schools and the limitation of the charter movement. School finance is the adequacy of state funding formulas, adjusting per pupil expenditures for poverty and district size. And spending taxpayer resources wisely is the prioritization of spending to reduce class size, limiting variation of class size by school type, and spending on pre-K education. And chance for success is measuring how pervasive factors that impact student success such as socioeconomic and racial integration in schools.
So Pennsylvania scores poorly (Pennsylvania gets a D, but looking at a map, the highest grade in the country is a C), but not on how well the students are learning and achieving, but the state’s efforts to support public education in the ways I explained above. The study does raise what I’d consider to be significant problems with public education in our state (I find most state funding formulas disgraceful, for instance), but none of them are the problems we’re talking about here. And if your conclusion from this report card is "private schools are better" it just means you didn’t actually read it.
