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Comment by someguydave | Hacker News Reader

>I'm a layperson on these issues, but how would privatizing k-12 specifically solve the NIMBY issue?

If schools were voluntary and private then it wouldn't matter which school district your house is in. The quality of local government schools (and therefore the good school's district) often is a large factor in house prices.

>Also how do you align the long term goals of educating those kids with often short term profit motivated KPIs.

I'm not sure that the government management of schools aligns the school's interests with long term goals.

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> The quality of local government schools (and therefore the good school's district) often is a large factor in house prices.

anecdotally i went through almost all of my k-12 in public school and it seems like the opposite: that areas with more expensive houses pay more in local taxes which fund nicer schools and governments. meaning the "quality" of the local government is a function of the wealth held by its residents. this is all to say that be it the local government or a privatized system, the education system seems very much beholden to their patrons, the rich families. i don't see why privatization would be a better alternative.

> I'm not sure that the government management of schools aligns the school's interests with long term goals.

saying that the current system isn't good enough doesn't automatically mean that some other system is better. the question remains.

You must be a rich family to afford a home in a good school district. As your children perform well in school, the school rankings get better and the housing gets more valuable. These self-reinforcing pockets of wealth are great for those on the inside of the virtuous cycle, but further segregate them from those on the outside.

Decoupling property values from school quality has a lot of liberal appeal. SFUSD does it. Unfortunately, SFUSD's experiment has largely failed because parents who draw bad schools in the lottery system opt out and move to the East Bay, where they can reliably buy their way into good school districts.

(If they stayed, their children would likely turn those bad schools into good schools, or at least okay schools).

Privatizing education wouldn't remove school quality as a function of wealth, but it would let you pay directly for school quality, and disentangle it from the real estate market.

>this is all to say that be it the local government or a privatized system, the education system seems very much beholden to their patrons, the rich families.

I think you are arguing that school quality is a function of the kinds of students that attend the school, rather than the value the school itself adds. In that case I agree with you.

>saying that the current system isn't good enough doesn't automatically mean that some other system is better. the question remains.

My hypothesis is that schools could be run much more cheaply and be as effective as they are today. Therefore the money not spent on public schools (or on expensive homes in good school districts) could be gainfully invested elsewhere in the economy which would make everyone more wealthy.

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