Well said Sundae. I am totally opposed to private education. I am appalled that for every one parent who, faced with a child's education being mishandled, is able to pay to rectify that, there are thousands of parents who have no choice but to put up with it. If there were no such thing as private sector education, the state schools would be a damn sight better and a higher proportion of our children would recieve a better education than they currently do.
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The results in Newark NJ were famous. Did you read it? Annoying. Yes - because reality is that blunt. State of NJ took control of the Newark Education system. They threw so much money into it that students in Newark had more money per student than any other state public school. And still the school system was not performing.
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All you are proving there tw, is that more money and smaller class sizes do not, alone, a solution make. That in no way proves that extra funding and smaller class sizes have no effect. I don't currently have the info to hand, but this was something tackled during my literacy support courses and there is plenty of evidence to show that better staff : pupil ratios improves overall results.
I also, like everybody I know, was educated in a state school. There were problems, the funding was inadequate (in the days of Thatcher this was), the teachers were underpaid and striking intermittently, books had to be shared and the school had just sold off its sports block for use as a privately run gym. Nevertheless, I got a decent education: I didn't get to learn Latin, but I did get to learn French, German and a little Spanish. My history teacher and my English teacher were both awesome teachers and completely lovely people (proper teachers, y'know, suede jackets with brown cord elbow pads, khaki desert boots and the unerring ability to spot a pupil-led plot before said pupils had even fully formulated it). Back then, it really was a tiny percentage of pupils that attended private schools and the individual examining authority had a lot more say on curriculum.
Nowadays, we are rushing headlong into a deeply privatised education system, with failing schools being strong armed into public-private status and specialist and grammar schools being allowed to leech the most able and leave behind a school which gradually sinks until it can be forced into Academy status. The curriculum is centrally set, and the specifics of teaching more and more heavily prescribed. Changes to the curriculum and structure of children's education are effected in knee jerk reactions to adverse results. Wholescale alterations which throw the baby out with the bathwater, or seek to reinvent the wheel.
Faith based schools proliferate, furthering the divisions in our society, and exposing our children to myth dressed as science; sometimes replacing the local secondary school and drawing its pupils from families who are dismayed but trapped into the system.
We over complicate the system. Education is not a simple thing, but nor is it rocket science. Well-trained teachers, enough to fully staff a school; funding for materials and books and, dare I say it, musical instruments and the odd museum trip; enough flexibility for teachers to do what they are trained to do and enough authority control to enforce standards and allow accountability.