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To your first point: There are certainly rare exceptions. But the broader effect of public schools is to remove competition and choice, so the natural tendency

To your first point: There are certainly rare exceptions. But the broader effect of public schools is to remove competition and choice, so the natural tendency of humans to compare various options and make a choice (as a projection of individual identity) is suppressed. People value things because they chose them and because they realized that "wait a second, I have to pick which one I want, so which one is better?" (I experienced this phenomenon first hand when asked about my preferences on china patterns, and it's visible even in poor communities with things like mobile phones and athletic shoes). To your second point: In a rich community (Greenwich CT, the Chicago suburbs, etc.) the public schools are exceptionally well funded and well supported. I know people who attended public schools where most of the faculty had masters degrees and some had doctorates. This does not represent the success of public provisioning, on the contrary, it represents the ability of a community with enough sufficiently powerful and motivated people to shape a public school into what they want (with the aid of lots of tax dollars). I think it's fairly obvious that communities like this would find a way to provide excellent education for their children even if classes had to be held in an old barn. Of course, public school apologists are quick to take credit for any excellence they can find. Meanwhile, the inner city poor beg for voucher systems and are denied by powerful teachers unions, etc. The poor simply lack the political power and resources to overcome the state sanctioned education monopoly. Notably, one reason why your statistic of private schools being worse is true is because some of the largest serve vast numbers of the urban poor for pennies on the dollar (compared with public schools). Much of this (due to the shortage of funds created by the public monopoly) is via Catholic charities, but it's still a remarkable accomplishment. Even so, those schools reach a limit and have to turn people away... Meanwhile funding gets pumped into failed public schools (many of which can't even offer a safe environment free of violence) and parents who weren't lucky enough to get a spot in an affordable private school must send their kids into these awful prisons every day.

btilly 17y ago
On my first point, in international comparisons the USA tends to score very poorly. Therefore evidence suggests that the USA is exceptionally bad, and better systems are average. On the second point, your arguments strike me as very confused. For instance you think that private schools are worse because there are large Catholic private schools that serve poor communities. But the relative quality difference exists even after you control for parents socio-economic status, which puts those Catholic schools on an apples to apples comparison with public schools in similar neighbourhoods. (In fact controlling for socio-economic status is important, because there are strong correlations between socio-economic status and educational performance, and private schools tend to have richer parents.) Similarly while I agree that advantaged schools have extremely good funding, exemplary public schools compare very well with private schools with similar levels of funding. The funding difference between schools helps explain how parents socio-economic status leads to different educational outcomes. But again it doesn't explain the discrepancy between public and private schools. It seems to me that you've correctly laid your finger on some of the blatantly obvious problems in how education is delivered in the USA. But your observations are not as general as you claim, nor have you made a convincing case that public provisioning is necessarily broken.
- grandalf 17y ago
  There are a lot of differences between the US and other countries, I suspect the difference is either cultural or a function of the incentives given to teachers. I don't think much more can be read into it... In the US many private schools are religiously affiliated. In the example I cited above, parents send their kids to a religious school in spite of its religious affiliation because they perceive the quality to be higher. However, there are surely many cases in which parents take a youngster out of an adequate public school and send him/her to a religious school because of their religious beliefs, which in this case take precedence over their value of educational opportunity afforded by the public school. Suppose this phenomenon is responsible for the discrepancy you mention. Currently public schools get a huge taxpayer funded subsidy, whereas the school that the religious parents send their kid to does not. Maybe with an additional $8K per year per student, the religious school could afford better teachers, computers, curriculum, etc. Since so many more students attend public school (due to the economic subsidies), private schools do not obtain the same economies of scale or have remotely the same budgets. Many urban Catholic schools outperform the nearby public schools on less than half the money per pupil. Also, note that I'm not arguing that public provisioning is inherently worse than private provisioning, just that the way public education is provisioned today has a lot of problems that stem from the monopoly given to it and the lack of choice and competition -- for reference, suppose that there were two DMV offices next door to one another and employees at the one with lower wait times were paid a 30% salary bonus... how long do you think the line would be? My own preference would be for government provisioned schools to compete with privately provisioned schools so that parents and students could have more options. Right now, private schools are at a major disadvantage... so one would expect even worse relative performance. The main problem with government provisioning thusfar has been that the monopoly granted to public schools has been a target for greedy adults who want to capitalize on the government resources allocated to education. This is why we have seniority based pay, no competition, and why a teacher practically has to assault or molest a child in order to lose his/her job. With private provisioning on at least equal footing (and the explicit prevention of monopolies rather than the granting of one), it is a lot harder for interest groups to hijack the public funding the way teachers unions have. Incidentally, I think it should be illegal for any public official to send his/her child to private school or to receive care in a private hospital.

btilly 17y ago

On my first point, in international comparisons the USA tends to score very poorly. Therefore evidence suggests that the USA is exceptionally bad, and better systems are average. On the second point, your arguments strike me as very confused. For instance you think that private schools are worse because there are large Catholic private schools that serve poor communities. But the relative quality difference exists even after you control for parents socio-economic status, which puts those Catholic schools on an apples to apples comparison with public schools in similar neighbourhoods. (In fact controlling for socio-economic status is important, because there are strong correlations between socio-economic status and educational performance, and private schools tend to have richer parents.) Similarly while I agree that advantaged schools have extremely good funding, exemplary public schools compare very well with private schools with similar levels of funding. The funding difference between schools helps explain how parents socio-economic status leads to different educational outcomes. But again it doesn't explain the discrepancy between public and private schools. It seems to me that you've correctly laid your finger on some of the blatantly obvious problems in how education is delivered in the USA. But your observations are not as general as you claim, nor have you made a convincing case that public provisioning is necessarily broken.

grandalf 17y ago
There are a lot of differences between the US and other countries, I suspect the difference is either cultural or a function of the incentives given to teachers. I don't think much more can be read into it... In the US many private schools are religiously affiliated. In the example I cited above, parents send their kids to a religious school in spite of its religious affiliation because they perceive the quality to be higher. However, there are surely many cases in which parents take a youngster out of an adequate public school and send him/her to a religious school because of their religious beliefs, which in this case take precedence over their value of educational opportunity afforded by the public school. Suppose this phenomenon is responsible for the discrepancy you mention. Currently public schools get a huge taxpayer funded subsidy, whereas the school that the religious parents send their kid to does not. Maybe with an additional $8K per year per student, the religious school could afford better teachers, computers, curriculum, etc. Since so many more students attend public school (due to the economic subsidies), private schools do not obtain the same economies of scale or have remotely the same budgets. Many urban Catholic schools outperform the nearby public schools on less than half the money per pupil. Also, note that I'm not arguing that public provisioning is inherently worse than private provisioning, just that the way public education is provisioned today has a lot of problems that stem from the monopoly given to it and the lack of choice and competition -- for reference, suppose that there were two DMV offices next door to one another and employees at the one with lower wait times were paid a 30% salary bonus... how long do you think the line would be? My own preference would be for government provisioned schools to compete with privately provisioned schools so that parents and students could have more options. Right now, private schools are at a major disadvantage... so one would expect even worse relative performance. The main problem with government provisioning thusfar has been that the monopoly granted to public schools has been a target for greedy adults who want to capitalize on the government resources allocated to education. This is why we have seniority based pay, no competition, and why a teacher practically has to assault or molest a child in order to lose his/her job. With private provisioning on at least equal footing (and the explicit prevention of monopolies rather than the granting of one), it is a lot harder for interest groups to hijack the public funding the way teachers unions have. Incidentally, I think it should be illegal for any public official to send his/her child to private school or to receive care in a private hospital.