If Helen Gym Flaherty, the former Philadelphia City Councilwoman and now failed mayoral candidate reads The Philadelphia Inquirer, she must be foaming-at-the-mouth angry at a story in Monday’s newspaper. Mrs Flaherty based her campaign on her support for public schools, and had a campaign appearance in front of the Edward T Steel Elementary School, which she claimed to have saved from “going charter.”
We noted, at the time, that Steel Elementary, was ranked 1,205th out of 1,607 Pennsylvania elementary schools, 1% of students scored at or above the proficient level for math, and 8% scored at or above that level for reading. Another respondent had the charts.
The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, Mrs Flaherty, and the city’s political left are aghast that state money could be used to private schools, but there’s an obvious point to be made: if the public schools were doing a good job, there’d be no real pressure for private schools!
Why these Philly parents chose to send their kid to private school
As Pennsylvania legislators fight over a potential school voucher system, The Inquirer sat down with parents who used an existing state program to help them pay for private school.
by Gillian McGoldrick | Monday, June 17, 2024 | 5:00 AM EDT
Lawmakers in Harrisburg all seem to have an opinion about what Philadelphia parents and students want.
And the debate over education is heightened this year, as legislators again fight over a potential school voucher program to send students to private schools using taxpayer dollars and attempt to design a new school funding system.
While the fight over a new voucher system heats up, with school choice supporters, public education advocates, teachers unions, and even Jay-Z pouring money into the fight, there is already a school choice program operating in the state.
Currently, Pennsylvania parents can choose to send their children to private school through two existing programs that allow businesses or individuals to get tax credits in exchange for donating to a school or scholarship fund. Families can apply to send their child to a private school using those funds. The programs total $470 million in scholarships per year, according to the advocacy group Education Voters of Pennsylvania. These programs are different from vouchers, which would give parents state funds directly to use toward a child’s school tuition and other expenses.
It sure would have been nice to have those programs when we were using the parochial schools!
Our daughters started elementary school at the Francis Asbury Elementary School in Hampton, Virginia, and it seemed like a fairly decent public school. But when our older daughter finished the fifth grade, and was scheduled to go to public middle school, we balked. The Lois Spratley Middle School just happened to have the highest number of arrests referred to the city police, and my wife and I certainly didn’t want our kids exposed to that disaster. One guy tried to tell me that Spratley had the highest number of arrests because the principal was diligent in getting the police called when necessary, which might have been true, but it was the fact that there were a high number of arrestable offenses committed in that [insert vulgar term for feces here]hole school in the first place that was the problem.
So we bit the bullet and sent both of our daughters to St Mary Star of the Sea School in Hampton. Our girls loved it, not the least due to the fact that, when the weather was warm enough for the doors to be open, occasionally ducks would wander through; the school was right on the Cheaspeake Bay!
Moving to Delaware, our daughters were enrolled in the, sadly now closed, Corpus Christi School. In New Castle County, our younger daughter would have been bussed into the city of Wilmington combat zone schools. Nope, f(ornicate) that! The residents of New Castle County had reacted to a desegregation order by practically, if not technically, destroying the public schools, and everybody who could in any way afford it sent their kids to private school. Joe Biden did the same, sending his kids to tony Archmere Academy!
Next was Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, and the, also sadly now closed, St Joseph’s Regional Academy.
It was ‘family day,’ at the end of the school year in 2003, at which I met a woman who was a public school teacher at Pocono Mountain West high school. She sent her kids to St Joseph’s because the public school at which she taught was so bad. It wasn’t a crime ridden place, but she was required to teach ‘mainstreamed’ special education students, something which held back all of the normal kids in her classes. She spent more time simply trying to manage her classes as opposed to actually teaching.
But I digress; back to the Inquirer’s article. The story included seven photographs of students and parents using the private schools through these programs, and in all seven the students and families shown were black. Whatever this program was doing, it wasn’t funding ‘segregation academies.’
For Crystal Best, a School District of Philadelphia fourth-grade teacher, public school was something she considered for her daughter, Cydney Booker. But when the Mount Airy resident needed a pre-K program for her 3-year-old daughter, she enrolled her in the DePaul School in Germantown.
“For me, public school was an option. They had some good things to offer,” said Best, whose daughter is now 14. “However, it was an option. It wasn’t the option.”
Her daughter applied and was accepted to Springside Chestnut Hill in kindergarten, but the state’s available scholarships barely made a dent in the $30,000 tuition at the elite school.
“I wasn’t living paycheck to paycheck to say my daughter goes to Penn Charter,” Best added.
Best instead used a tax credit-funded scholarship program to keep her daughter at the DePaul School, where she graduated eighth grade last week as valedictorian. Cydney will attend Little Flower High School in Hunting Park with a full-tuition scholarship next year.
Who would know more about Philly’s public schools than a teacher there . . . and she opted to put her kids in the best private school they could manage.
We have previously noted the terrible work attitudes of some Philadelphia public school teachers. The Inquirer reported on teachers being upset that while they get ten sick days a year, the school district has a policy in place to attempt to minimize abuse of those days. The union contract recognizes that people can get sick, but isn’t there to support employees who just want to take a mental health day at the Jersey Shore.
Then there’s the issue of what’s taught in the public schools. When the schools are trying to ‘educate’ students into believing that girls can be boys and boys can be girls, rather than teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic to the point where students are proficient in them — see Edward T Steel School statistics above — perhaps there’s a reason that confidence in the public schools is low.
So, why did the parents and teachers interviewed choose private schools?
- Kamesha Callands of West Oak Lane still has vivid memories of her time as a public school student: the smell of urine, the falling ceiling tiles, how frequently she was bullied, her behind-the-crowd reading scores. She was determined to send her daughter, Sabrina Callands-Edmonds, to private school.
- Crystal Best, herself a public school teacher, knew that a private school was the better choice, with smaller class sizes and more individual attention.
- Austin and Shante Woodlin wanted to send their children to a Christian school.
The government is helping them, but it’s still a sacrifice to send your children to a private school. They all looked at the Philadelphia public schools and said no, we want better for our children. They are, of course, still being taxed to support the public schools, schools which they believe just aren’t good enough for their own kids.
The Democrats controlling Philly, and much of the state government — the state Senate still has a Republican majority — are all clamoring for more money for the public schools, as though that will solve the problems. But the public schools already spend roughly 58% more per pupil than do private schools. Yet, students from private schools consistently outperform those from the public schools:
Research has consistently shown that private school students tend to perform better on standardized tests. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is often referred to as “the nation’s report card,” assesses both public and private school students in subjects such as math, reading, science and writing. The most recent NAEP data shows what other research has found: Private school students score better in almost all subjects.
For example, eighth grade private school students averaged about 20 points higher than public school or charter students on the NAEP reading test in 2022. Fourth grade private school students had nearly the same advantage in average scores.
On college entry tests such as the SAT, NAIS found that students in private schools consistently outperformed their public school peers in all subject areas.
It isn’t the money! The public school teachers will scream for more, but the private schools are, in the aggregate, doing a better job in actually educating students, with much less money.