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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacques Chitte who wrote (41383)	6/21/1999 6:56:00 PM
From: The Philosopher	Respond to of 108807

But I am entertaining that the cost differential of taking kids private is more than balanced by the threat of alternative education. This would serve to weed the complacency out of our public eduacation administrators. This is happening in spades on the next island over from ours. Islands without bridges are in a sense ideal social laboratories for some things, since leaving them takes significant intentionality and effort (in my case, a 1-1/2 hour ferry ride each way PLUS, since there are no reservations on the ferries, either getting in line between one and five hours ahead of time, depending on the time of day and year, or risking missing a ferry and waiting at least 3 and up to 8 hours for the next one.) Back to the point: on the next island over there is serious parent unrest with the elementary school program. So not long ago a small alternative school opened up. As that didn't seem to solve the problems, this fall two other schools will be opening. Since schools in Washington are funded on a per-student enrolled basis, each student siphoned off to private schools pulls several thousand dollars out of the system with no reduction in building or administrative overhead, and minimal if any reduction in teachers (when you only have two first grade classes, if you only take out 10 first grade students you can't drop to one class. But the benefit is that the remaining students get the benefit of smaller classes, which may mean better teaching, which may bring students back.) Like all de facto social experiments, this is uncontrolled, hard to interpret, and nobody knows or is even trying to predict what is going to happen. But it will be fun to watch!