[headsplice]

As a person who went to private school, I'm always interested in why people think privatizing schools would work. There are several reasons why they do:

They have a MUCH lower teacher to student ratio. there were never more than 15 kids to a teacher, and that was a LARGE class.

The parents and school 'community' are MUCH more involved. There are families that are literally on their fourth generation of students. Old students come back and teach, even if only for a couple of years. Kids go to football games and pep rallies.

The school has the option of making the child leave if they don't perform. Most of the kids that I went to school with were there because they wanted to be there. Yeah they bitched about it, but we all took entrance exams and all made the choice to continue going there because we liked going to school there.

So what we have is a multple-fold problem: underpaid, overworked teachers that can only care for so long until they are literally drowned by the horrible conditions created by socio-economics; kids that don't want to be in school because they can't see any reason that it is going to help them out; parents who don't have time to worry about what their kids are doing (or not doing) at school because they have to work three jobs to keep a roof over them and food on the table.
To fix the schools, you have to fix all of these problems and more. If we look back at the fifties (The Wonder Years, if you will), a huge percentage of the population was actively involved in making sure their kids had a better life than they did and had the resources (money AND time) to do it.
/rant