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Comment by yellow_postit | Hacker News Reader

To mitigate part of the "salt lake" issue you raise I wonder if a penalty tax on families sent to private schools could help. The public schools lose more than just a diverse student body when kids are sent to private schools, they also may lose out on engaged parents who are effective advocates for improvement. A penalty fee could help alleviate that as well as increasing the incentives for parents with the means to fight for improved public education standards/instructors/resources to obviate their desire to send kids elsewhere.

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Your "penalty tax" is called "property tax" in most localities in the US.

I pay around 7% of my upper-middle-class income each year in property tax. The vast majority of that money goes to my local public school district. 3 of my 5 children are home schooled. In effect, I pay both for the private education of my own children as well as the public education of others. Sure feels like a penalty to me.

This is what makes the GP comment so off-base. There's no "salt lake" effect from a funding perspective. This is the whole point of the recent political rumblings to institute voucher systems that let parents take their tax dollars and spend them on alternative schooling options.

There is however a huge effect from the perspective of who is effective at making changes in school system happen.

It's entirely possible to pay your property tax (and thus fund public schooling), home-school your children, and be elected to your school board or be otherwise involved in your local education system.

None of those are mutually exclusive activities.

I took the salt lake effect to mean that the students left in the public school no longer have a potentially intelligent (emotionally and/or socially) peer with which to interact. As has been stated ad nauseam, kids learn a ton from their peers, especially the ones they view as strong/confident/talented.

When "smart" parents remove their kids from the public school, the public school is worse off from having lost the student and parent would could have helped provide a better environment.

That is a good deal of my point.

Along with the children left behind no longer getting to interact with adults who are in the more successful category, losing an entire set of role models to aspire to. How many children have benefited from their friends' parents providing excellent role models and life advice? Allowing the privileged to separate themselves into private gardens removes part of the ladder to pull yourself up by. And, along with that, it limits the mixing of the SES/racial categories, which further inhibits compassion, as you won't have grown up next to them.

A key example of the effect this category of isolation leads to is Romney's remark in 2012[1]: "... middle income is $200,000 to $250,000 and less...". Had Romney more experience (or even familiar with the vital statistics), he would never had said such an profoundly ignorant remark.

[1]https://www.yahoo.com/news/romney-middle-income-200k-250k-15...

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