Moses is right, the difference is parenting. Parents who spend huge piles O'money to send their kids to private school usually don't ignore their kid's education. They get involved. They are typically higher up the mental and evolutionary food chain, and read to their kids and help them with their homework instead of getting drunk in the alley with their friends.
Another huge difference, at least at the schools where my kids go:
The schools are very selective. They don't let in trouble-makers or kids who can't keep up. If a student acts up and gets disruptive, he gets booted.
He is not allowed to drag the other students down. That way all students work and learn at an accelerated pace.
At Orange Lutheran high school, over 90% of all graduating students go on to college. That is an impressive number. And almost every single student graduates high school. Having a kid drop out from OLU is a very rare occurrence. As opposed to the 31% drop-out rate at Los Angeles Unified school district.
Here's another interesting tid-bit from their website:
Quote:
Academics
Orange Lutheran's Class of 2008 was honored with a four-year total of approximately $4.75 million in scholarships for the schools they chose to attend. The total amount of scholarship offers received by the Class of 2008 was an astonishing $10.1 million for four years. Moreover, 33% of our four-year college bound students are attending schools from Princeton Review's 2008 edition of The Best 366 Colleges.
|
Those are not a bunch of low income scholarships, they are not primarily minority assistance scholarships, they are not reverse-discrimination government hand-outs. They are scholarships for excellent scholastic and athletic achievements. Rewards for years of hard work and dedication. BTW it's also a small school, about 1150 students total so that $4.5 million in scholarships was spread out over less than 300 students. One of them is now the starting quarterback at USC.
The teachers at out local Lutheran schools are not rejects, they are hand-picked cream of the crop. The best of the best.
In public schools they dummy-down the curriculum to the lowest common denominator.
in fact the public schools around here decided that they would teach everything in English and Spanish. The teachers all had to be bilingual and repeat everything twice. That's when it became obvious that my kids were going to private school.
Later the public schools finally realized how stupid they were with the "teach everything twice only teaches half as much" plan.