If funding plays a roll then public schools fail by a large margin as they constantly request funding increases yet fail to actually do anything more with it.
Yes, this is often true.
Wait, is this a Canadian publicly funded Catholic school? It is hard to keep track. Your location says Fargo (which I am assuming is ND), but you talk like you live in Canada.
Yes, it is—mostly publicly funded. And yes, I do live in Canada. My location is a satirical reference to something else I posted in the Funny Pictures Thread. (And a reference to the film.)
If it is a private school then any issues there are the fault of parents for keeping their kids in that school. If it is a public school then the issue is not related to Catholicism at all, as you pointed out that none of the teachers are Catholic.
It's not so much that it's
either public or Catholic—as the two are as distinct from each other as they are from a Private school—but rather immediate locales. A school is only as good as its' faculty, and when there's a revolving door policy with only common-standards screening, then the quality of education suffers. It's my view that the entire thing could be improved by overhauling the programme within which our potential educators are enrolling.
Do not think I am arguing in favor of any kind of parochial school being better because it is parochial. No, I only see them being better options because they are private.
And in the most frequent circumstances, that
is the case. Here—Ontario—is a little different, but there are Catholic schools independent of the Catholic School Board, established as an alternative for parents seeking a "proper" Catholic school. These are most commonly K-8 levels, though.
For me it is a private issue, not a religious one. I will always have a preference for private schools for one simple reason: If they do not meet my standards that I set for my daughter I can choose to change schools.
Most of my current friends were of this ilk—while certainly literate, they have turned out a little...different.
As long as I rely on public schools I have to use the one they tell me and the only incentive they have to do better is to not hear me yelling at them during PTA meetings.
I hear that.
And it's a legitimate concern, but those territorial boundaries are there for a reason. Private schools, likewise, have to maintain an acceptable student:teacher ratio, lest they dilute the teachers' attentions; they, too, have to turn down students quite often.
Continuing this off-topic diversion: Canada actually has another "parallel" public school system: French Immersion, initiated in an attempt to bring together the "Two Solitudes" of Canadian society - French & Anglo.
Some have criticized French immersion programs for having become a way for higher socioeconomic groups to obtain a publicly-funded elite track education. Since lower socioeconomic groups and children with learning and behavioral problems have lower rates of participation in French immersion, a situation has developed in which ambitious families prefer French immersion possibly more for its effective streaming than for the bilingual skills it gives to students.
My children have attended French Immersion school since Grade One.
I think one of the reasons Separate (Catholic) schools generally have a better reputation in Canada, is that they are better able to refuse or kick out students with "behavioural problems" than the regular public schools. They therefore tend to create a more disciplined environment for learning.
My rather small, downtown, upper-middle class street which I grew up on was home to many different parental approaches to education. Within 15 houses were families with kids going to:
-Public schools
-Catholic Schools
-French Immersion
-Montessori
-Waldorf
and
homeschools;
Being a very tight-knit community, the differences between us were well-understood by all—and not always for the better. So on that note, there's something very important to understand—these schools all socialise students vastly different from each other. While "education", whatever we can call that now, does have a distinct relation to success, the second immediate factor behind that is a person's social skills. No matter which school you attend, poor social skills won't achieve anything. (In my experience, the Waldorf and Montessori schools have produced some incredibly, er,
strange people.)
Anyway, that's enough subjective, anecdotal, off-the-cuff testimony from me for one night.
