Also in the "School News" publication, I noticed that some school districts, the superintendents crowed that they provided their student with a public education at a private school price.
Why do public school administrators go out of their way to compare their schools and services with private firms?
The efficacy of private schools is past question. These institutions must respond the needs and interests of the parents and the students. If they fail to provide a safe and fruitful learning environment, then the consumers can pull out their kids and go elsewhere.
Unfortunately, in more impoverished neighborhoods, public schools, with the help of compulsory attendance laws, stifle inner city families' quest for prosperity and social mobility. Students have to go the local school just because it's close, and the districts do not go out of their way to inform parents that there are oblique, arcane options for them to enroll elsewhere.
My father had to drive to Downtown Los Angeles to file paperwork so that I did not have to go to the local Los Angeles Unified high school, one where riots took place on an all too frequent basis. My father told me that he would move heaven and earth to attend the high school in a smaller local district, or enroll me in a private school.
Yet how parents have the time, the means, or the tenacity to jump through so many bureaucratic hurdles? How parents know that they have an option? Most public schools will do all that they can to prevent prospective enrollees from fleeing to another school district.
Because of these outrageous zipcode laws, more prosperous and prominent school districts will require new students to prove residence. As an aid in my high school counseling office, how many times did I hear the secretary demand from prospective parents to provide two proofs of residence:
"Trash, electric, water, but no phone bills" -- apparently, phone bills were easy to manipulate, easy to forge false addresses with. I do not understand why parents should be punished because they want their kids to go to a good school? I do not care how many new buildings our local school districts set up, they need to build up quality programs and effective teachers in the classrooms. All the top-down reforms are not working. Oversight has led to more unsightly oversight, or rather "Over-Look".
Competition is the engine that will prime the pump of innovation, not more rules and regulations which teachers can ignore and administrators can neglect to enforce. Private schools change and improve because they have to, or the competition will eat them up. To this day, public schools do not have to compete, and therefore they do not compare to the quality education which students can receive in private schools.
This trend is made manifold and manifest in "School News", where the higher-performing public schools advertize a "private education">
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