The Minister of Education, Leonardo Garnier, is aiming to reverse the false stereotype that private schools are better educators over the public school system.
Garnier, who has been in the Education portfolio for two administrations, says, “there is an almost universal believe that private education is better than public. Hard to find someone who really believes in our public schools”.
The minister says that high school exam results encourages this stereotype. However, he notes a main different in the number and type of student population.
“Of the 35.000 students in the 2012 final exams, 29.000 came from public schools, representing 83% of the total and about 6.000 came from private or 17% of the total. The average score for public students was 69.2%, while the private student average score was 79.9%”, said Garnier.
But the minister says that the score results prove nothing, because private schools have a shortlist of sudents, while public schools take in all.
Garnier decided to compare the scores of the top 6.000 public school students and comparing them to the private school results.
“The average score for the top public school students was 83%”, said Garnier.
The minister pointed that his comments are not to belittle the work and quality of private schools.
So what is his point?
Public schools on CR have more off days than school days.
Private students score, on average, ten points better than public school students, but that doesn’t mean that they do better? This guy must be the product of the public school system if he thinks that this makes sense. Perhaps his implication is that the public schools have to take Nicas, or perhaps just the poor Ticos who don’t count to the elitist rich people. Actually, I suspect that the very poor don’t even send their children to school because they can’t afford to do so – I don’t know how even the average Tico family can afford to have more than one kid in school, as much as they require in fees, supplies, uniforms, etc. This denial of a problem and blaming the very significant score disparity on demographics sounds like the kind of crap one hears from the Tea Party in the US.
The public schools where my kids go do not even keep the published school schedule. They start the year late and complete it early. I have called the education ministry and have been told that they have no control over schools outside the city, that they were aware that more rural schools did not keep adhere to the requirements of minimum classroom hours (I’m not hours away from the city, but in the hills not ten miles from Heredia centro or Alejuela centro), and the teachers here cancel class altogether or teach only short days (1 1/2 or two hours) at least one day per week. There is a high failure rate for all grades. This last point alone would suggest that there is a high percentage of learning-disabled kids or a serious failure by the instructors to teach. I would like to see a comparison of failure rates of students by grade for public vs private schools, graduation rates, and of the average age at graduation (I’d guess that private school students graduate a year or two younger than their public school counterparts).
Instead of defending mediocrity or denial of what everyone in the country knows to be the truth, one would hope that a minister of education would identify problems and formulate plans to correct them. Hopefully, the next president will have an education minister who is willing to admit and address the problem.