I just looked at the Seattle Times School Guide, and could not find a single non-religious school that was charging anything like that little. $10,000 is a rock-bottom price in the secular school market.

I think both the discussion about unions and free market go to finance, not quality. If the problem’s really that we don’t pump enough money into education, then that’s a simple one to solve.

The discussion about parental responsibility seems irrelevant, unless we feel that Seattle is disproportionately filled with slacker parents (I’ve observed the opposite).

I completely agree about having a downtown school. Perhaps in the new Civic Square?

I’m not sure what makes a good school, but I’ve seen excellent schools right next to terrible schools. Maybe it’s money, in this case the good school is given huge amounts of donations from parents, but I’m sure there are other factors. Being a good school almost seems to be self-reinforcing – good schools draw good teachers, encourage teachers and students, and bring in more donations.

1. To state the obvious, public schools get all the kids who can’t afford private schools, and on average these kids will be harder to teach than those who can afford private schools. It’s determined by the family environment they’ve grown up in, not IQ.

2. I would assume that in many cases tuition costs at private schools are reduced by endowments and perhaps other sources of funding besides tuition. You’d need to get the private school total budget to compare to the public school expenditures.

3. The answer to your question about parochial schools is not: “because they are driven by the profit motive.” And to me, this gets at the heart of it. The free market is not a panacea for education, and is likely to do more harm than good. This is because the free market requires a product that can be quantitatively assessed, and the well-rounded education of a child is not such a product.

Parochial schools succeed because they tend to be small, tightly knit communities with strongly held common values, and their desire to educate is rooted in moral obligation, not the profit motive.

And this points to the overarching answer to all my questions in the original post: our public schools are failing because our culture is failing.

having attended public schools in belgium and germany before my parents moved back to the states, i was shocked at how dumb my american classmates were.

but i’d chalk it up to mostly negligence, teacher unions that are never held to account but keep getting more and more for less and less, and some good ol’ fashioned embezzling.

strangely, the same problems that plague SPD. who’da thunk it?!?

Unless you see something I can’t see, I don’t see where I said teachers don’t deserve good pay (in my comments above.) Let me try to explain to you what I did say: When everyone in an organization receives the same raise regardless of their performance the result is mediocrity and frustration… two epithets which seem to be applied frequently to the Seattle Public Schools.

As a parent with children in both public and private schools, I’ve seen this in action so many times it’s not remarkable enough to comment on any more.