2 ms·

A great deal of the positive effect of a public school is that you end up with a less homogeneous group of peers, imho. At any rate, I've seen that data and th

A great deal of the positive effect of a public school is that you end up with a less homogeneous group of peers, imho. At any rate, I've seen that data and think it's perfectly applicable to what I was saying. My argument wasn't really about the spend on "the school" per se, but more that the resources could be better spent on the behalf of students if it wasn't directed to a private school, whether that's spend on the community environment or specifically on the students themselves (like with tutoring, or sponsoring a club). Directing money towards a private school is counterproductive to both the individual and the wellbeing of your own community. This does assume day-schools. Boarding schools are an entirely separate beast, and I don't have a strong sense of why parents choose them, despite having taught at one for a few years. Mastery learning can be applied in any setting. The thing that remains is, do you teach your student how the world is, or how act in order to be enculturated into an elite "in" group? I would argue that the former can confer the benefits of the later, but that the reverse is much harder.

mhuffman 3y ago
While your thought experiment is noble, many parents are worried about violence, their children actually learning usable skills and not just social/political ideologies (not taking a side, but that is a thing now), and being prepared to take care of themselves and family and contribute to their community as an adult. In my experience, many public school systems pay lip service to those things but practically are uninterested in that treating the system as just a jobs program (especially for large school systems) or as a political tool a lot of which comes from the Federal government and changes every few years. It is a sad state but true and you can't reasonably blame parents for wanting something different for their children when all attempts and working through the public school system come to nothing. You also mention community over and over as if every community in the US is similar in demographics or culture which is also not the case. All Muslim people I know, for example, send their children to private school, some driving nearly 50 miles both ways twice a day (200 miles!) just to do it after getting a taste of what the local public school system had to offer! My own children all went to public school and if I had a chance to do it over again I would have put them in private school.

mhuffman 3y ago

While your thought experiment is noble, many parents are worried about violence, their children actually learning usable skills and not just social/political ideologies (not taking a side, but that is a thing now), and being prepared to take care of themselves and family and contribute to their community as an adult. In my experience, many public school systems pay lip service to those things but practically are uninterested in that treating the system as just a jobs program (especially for large school systems) or as a political tool a lot of which comes from the Federal government and changes every few years. It is a sad state but true and you can't reasonably blame parents for wanting something different for their children when all attempts and working through the public school system come to nothing. You also mention community over and over as if every community in the US is similar in demographics or culture which is also not the case. All Muslim people I know, for example, send their children to private school, some driving nearly 50 miles both ways twice a day (200 miles!) just to do it after getting a taste of what the local public school system had to offer! My own children all went to public school and if I had a chance to do it over again I would have put them in private school.