[copied straight from her facebook. an amazing article.]
by Lisa Suhay
THIS YEAR I learned about private education from the perspective of an unlicensed teacher in a private school that is unaccredited. While teaching turned out to be the most fulfilling experience of my life, I am giving it up because I can’t, in good conscience, be part of a system that is unregulated to the point where it can seriously damage students, families and our city.
I now know that parents who pay for a learning environment run the risk of running out of cash for tuition and then finding their child can’t return to public school at the proper grade level if the private school did not follow state curriculum standards. Some unaccredited private schools here, according to the Richmond-based Virginia Council for Private Education, are capable of graduating seniors with less than a 6th grade reading level, unable to scrape the bare minimum on SOL, PSAT, SAT or ACT tests.
“Unless they teach the violent overthrow of the government,” Council President George McVey told me, “there’s really not much they can do wrong that would get them shut down here.”
Our city and state have no control over unaccredited private schools. They are businesses, and there is no governing educational body minding these stores. It’s time for the city of Norfolk to take an interest in one of the most important factors buyers consider when looking for a new home: the quality of education. We need to set standards and time limits on how long, after opening its doors, a school is allowed to operate without accreditation.
Not everyone sending a child to private school is wealthy. Sometimes a private school is a last resort for students who fled public school violence or failed in public schools and vouchers were not provided for an alternative. Blue-collar families often have little choice but to buy the most “affordable” private education available. Let the buyer beware; get curriculum standards and accreditation status in writing.
Also, know what can happen if you run out of money. Your child pays with his/her dignity and self-esteem, used as leverage to get parents to pay their debts to the school. That happens in accredited private schools, too.
At the high school where I taught this year, administrators decided the most effective way to squeeze unpaid tuition from parents of graduating seniors was to withhold their report cards, diplomas, participation in graduation, and transcripts necessary for acceptance to college. Four boys, including two who lost their mother to breast cancer Jan. 5, sat in the back of the auditorium, names stricken from the graduation program when their parents failed to meet the payment deadline. That was the last week of May, and every day these four, their parents, grandparents, caregivers and I talk or email, trying to salvage their spirits and futures. Thanks to programs like Opportunity Inc. and Career Start, we are making progress. But it is a long distance out of the way to come back a short distance correctly.
Nobody can blame private schools for wanting payment. Making payroll isn’t easy, but making terrible errors in judgment that create long-term educational and social scars in students is a snap.
In September I was hired to teach in this private high school, never having taught before, and with no teaching degree. I was greeted by a majority of seniors who had given up on themselves and chosen to marinate in bitterness, anger and rebellion largely because of the school’s practices. Yet the students are blamed and called “unmotivated” or “losers.”
Keeping a report card from a student is a thoroughly damaging educational practice. The result is students who learn not to care about grades because caring is too painful and embarrassing. While their classmates bond over successes and failures, children of debtors shield themselves from humiliation and pain by learning not to care.
Someday, when they and their parents pay in full, each of my four students will get an envelope in the mail with a diploma. The moment that was taken will not come again. Colleges will not take them. Even the military rejected one boy for lack of a diploma in hand. Today these four, whose parents paid and paid for years, who dreamed of being a radiologist, a photographer, a businessman and a professional coach, are washing dishes, taking out trash in restaurants, or are unemployed.
While I encourage responsibility for our own financial circumstances, taking a pound of flesh from somebody’s child this way makes our city pay for years in social services, counseling, police and assistance money. Time to count the cost of unregulated private education.
Guest columnist Lisa Suhay is a children’s book author and the mother of four boys. Write to her at lsuhays2@cox.net
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