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Comment by FireBeyond | Hacker News Reader

> Charter schools have been the best bang for the buck.

That is a lot easier when you can require a transcript from the prospective student, review it, and say, "Uh, no thank you".

There's a private technical college near here that offers EMT and paramedic training. They "guarantee" "100% success in certification and registration" for their students.

How do they get there? They boot students out after they fail (<80%) their second test in the class.

I'm not necessarily opposed to such a policy. It is, however, intellectually dishonest of them to try to tout it as a better school for that reason. Charter schools are free to reject students who will bring their grade averages down.

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Yeah, that's very selective. Catholic schools on the other hand just require you to be Catholic and be somewhat involved in the Parish and score much higher.

I believe this is not only restricted to Catholic schools though they are the most common. Most religious schools have higher scoring students.

If nothing else, parental involvement correlates with higher test scores and being enrolled in a non-default school correlates with parent involvement. So it's no surprise that being enrolled in a non-default school correlates with higher test scores.

IMHO, we always hear about such and such school (system) has X% kids proficient with $Y/year per pupil. But what I would really want to know about a school is how does a year change at the school change the proficiency of the class. If the class of 3rd graders starts the year at 20% proficient at 2nd grade level, and ends at 22% proficient at 3rd grade level, that might be a good school, even though a single point in time check says 22% proficient. But the numbers we get aren't really useful for that; a cohort analysis would be better; there's real privacy implications, but that doesn't make the numbers we get useful. :P

Catholic schools in Australia don't required you to be Catholic. Although, I'm sure most kids are. And enrolling there will expose you to Catholic teaching.

I wonder if USA schools are similar. It's next to impossible to require belief.

The vast majority to all Catholic schools in the US have no requirement of you being Catholic.

Correct. Your chances of getting in are just much better if you are, then even better if you're in the Parish.

At least around me, it's pretty easy to get into one due to enrollment not being very full in most if not all. They will of course give automatic enrollment for anyone in the parish, but I can't really argue with that since these schools are usually subsidized by the parish and local dioces.

You need to test to an academic standard of course, as they definitely want to keep the bar rather high. So they won't take all comers. But if you are either just starting out or come with an academic track record/high percentile test scores you shouldn't have much of a problem at all. When I went even 30 years ago there were plenty of low income kids who were not academic superstars. The only real metric that was universal across the board was the requirement for involved parents.

I'm sure other areas are different, but Catholic schools in my region have really suffered in recent years with a lot of them closing down.

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