Private School vs. Public Schools

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Art

English

Dr. Weiss

In english class we have been working on a project about bay area issues. Part of the project included writting an editorial about our topic.

Public High Schools VS. Private High School

In The San Francisco Due to the smaller ratio of students to qualified teachers and the individual attention each student receives, Private High Schools are more effective than Public High Schools in preparing a student for college and life. Private High Schools have a much smaller enrolment than Public High Schools so they are able to offer more individual attention that Public High Schools can. Because not everyone has that chance to attend a Private High School, Public High Schools in San Francisco must be improved. Due largely to the smaller campuses of Private High Schools, they are not able to enroll more than four hundred students for all four grades. This creates an environment that has often less than ninety students per grade. With so few students in the grade, the class size comes out to usually be less than twenty kids in each class, compared to the some thirty plus kids in Public High Schools classes. Because the majority of students attend Public High Schools, the enrollment is around two thousand students, if not more, therefore the class sizes are much larger, so each student gets less individual attention from the teacher. Due to the smaller community of Private High Schools, students can be placed in class with other students to maximize their potential. To develop the education a student receives in Public High Schools, several plans can be put into action. Several plans could potentially improve the Public High School system. One plan could be to take into consideration each student and place them into the classes which the will develop in. Putting a student who has a mediocre knowledge of History with a group of students who have done extensive research in the subject would not be beneficial to the student nor the group. Students should be placed with other students of the same approximate knowledge and learning speed so maximize their potential. Changing the Public High School system as a whole also has a possibility of enhance the education of students. Instead of students attending the High School closest to their house or a magnet school such as Lowell if the have the opportunity to do so, students would take a series of tests, which along with their grades, would determine which school the go to. The students, who did very well on the test, would be placed in the same school, and arranged in class according to their strengths and weaknesses. A student who went through middle school with straight AÕs and scored a perfect score on the tests would attend the same school as other such students. Students with poor grades and poor test scores would be placed into schools with similar students. This creates a situation where students who are able to learn quickly to learn as much as possible, and students who cannot learn quickly, to learn everything they need for college well. Although there are not any two students who learn at exactly the same speed, this will cut down on the probability of one student slowing down the whole class or one student making the class go to quickly. If one issue could be pointed out that contributes the most to poor Public High Schools, it would be the poor large number of unqualified teachers. This would be a hard problem to solve due to the small number of good teachers and the large number of teachers needed. Because teaching isnÕt the most popular job or the best paying one, qualified teachers are hard to find. This forces Public High Schools to hire teachers who are unqualified to teach students. An increase of funding could greatly benefit Public High Schools. This would potential enable the schools to hire better teachers, buy better resources for the students, upgrade facilities, or anything else they can do to improve the schools. Private High Schools benefit greatly from the tuition students pay and from donations they receive from various people such as relatives of students and alumni. This enables Private High Schools it invest more money per child into the school and what is necessary to improve it. Public High Schools donÕt have the benefit of such money, so they are forced to work with the budget they have from the government. If more time, and more importantly, more money are put into Public High Schools, and Public Schools in general, they will greatly improve. This can happen of the government takes a big step, one that propels education into the most important issue in America. If America takes this step and puts more work into building a better education system, Public schools will be greatly improved, letting students who canÕt attend Private Schools experience the same quality of education as those who can attend Private Schools.