Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

you are of course right but unfortunately good teachers don't scale.

my oldest is in 2nd grade Success Academy in brooklyn, they actually do lottery ( there is even a documentary about them on Netflix called the lottery)

in my view there is only one thing that allow kids to do well in school and that is parents who care.

once my son reaches 4th or 5th we are going to send him to a private school, cause thats when it starts to matter if they want to go the educational route.

to be honest though short of getting the most fundamental skills like reading and math and music i am kind of hoping he will just educate himself with things he care about his whole life.

there is something not very futureproof of sending your kid into an educational system that teaches everyone the same while expecing them to stand out.

i managed to do quite well for myself and i am mostly autodidact, but its hard to know if i was just lucky.

bottom line is you cant make the right decisions for your kids.

Are public schools in Brooklyn that bad? I know they're very segregated[1], but the concept of a private school being of better quality than a public school is horrendous. In Seattle that isn't the case, but that is mainly due to the $10k pay gulf between private and public school teachers, nevermind the benefits differences and religious/of moral character requirements of most private schools. The major reason to go is if you want to be in the clique, outside of that its a slightly worse education for a few grand to a few tens of grand a year.

Portland meanwhile has notably worse public schools, often making it appear that you should pay for private schooling. That being said, quality is still lacking in private schools there, I saw many students left behind that would have learned how to read months earlier in Seattle.

1 - https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/07/the-gr...

As with everything in New York location matters. I live in Williamsburg on the water probably one of the richer areas of wburg. But just 10 years ago this was a dangerous area and so the public school we are zoned to isn't good. It will be in 10 years when gentrification is complete.

Other places like Tribeca public schools are great because it's completely gentrified, but for now its SA for us and then private in a couple of years.

I'm from Dallas, and we have an interesting split here.

Dallas ISD is notoriously terrible on probably every single axis; as a result, anyone who lives in Dallas ISD sends their kids to private school if they can afford it because it doesn't take much to run a school better than DISD. Seriously, every time I look at the local news, there's another DISD scandal. It's an embarrassment.

On the other hand, the suburban school districts are all excellent. Richardson ISD and Plano ISD are fantastic, as are a bunch of other school districts in the northern suburbs (I remember a friend telling me she wished she could afford to move to Prosper so she can send her kids to the excellent schools there). Not many people in the suburban school districts send their kids to private school, though it does happen occasionally (I don't know whether or not the private schools in the area are better than Plano ISD).

And here's the confusing part: school districts and cities aren't coterminal, even though the school districts are named after the cities. This is for two reasons: 1) Texas doesn't allow school districts to cross county lines (with very few exceptions), but cities cross county lines all the time (Texas counties are tiny and laid out on a grid; it doesn't make sense to limit cities to a single county), and 2) the school districts were laid out decades and decades ago based on predictions of what the cities will eventually annex, and those predictions turned out to be wrong (e.g. Dallas annexed huge swaths of territory that Richardson was expected to annex). As a result, the northern parts of the City of Dallas, which have a distinct suburban feel, are part of the suburban school districts and not Dallas ISD; most of Far North Dallas is part of Richardson ISD, and the part that's in Collin County is part of Plano ISD.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com