Quality education for every student would be held by many as a human right, hence countries like Finland where all schools are required to charge no fee, and the public education system is superb.
In other words, it would seem that one wouldn't start a backyard school unless they thought their children would be better off than in public schools. The outrage here seems to be that the public agrees with that assessment: students who have access to this backyard school would have an advantage over students going through public school programs during the pandemic.
From both sides, it seems that the ball is in the public schools' court. For the investor, there wouldn't be a need to start a backyard school if he felt that the public schools were offering a reasonable alternative. For the public school parents, there wouldn't be as much outrage if they thought the public schools were offering the same quality of education as this backyard school.
Definitely agree that quality education for all is the desired outcome here, but given that it's not in place yet, starting a school to give your own kids every advantage makes sense, as does pushing representatives to fix and fund public schools more fully.
There are two arguments that have been brought up.
1. This sort of disjointed system is not desirable as it propagates inequality in opportunity. This should be fairly obvious and not contentious.
2. Private schools and these pods, as their extreme form, face a similar issue as insurance markets if there is capture in governance (which seems to be the case in the US). On the one hand, wealthy people have an incentive to bundle their funding in private schools, which will lead to higher average contributions. They also have an incentive to petition government not to use their other tax contributions for public school, as they do not profit from it. Even more, their kids profit from this distance. Given that wealthy people are powerful in the US, this seems to be a more likely reason why public schools are not well funded.
So economically speaking, private schools on a large scale could be damaging to the quality of general education, much like a fragmented insurance market may eventually split into high and low classes.
Countries like Finland have public education on-par with the best private schools elsewhere. One component may be funding for education generally. But it will probably also be true that there is more funding towards public schools in relative terms, since powerful actors (in any sense) have an incentive to make schools for their children decent. In the US, wealthy people in general have zero direct incentive to fund public education.
Therefore, it seems to me that the solution is not to introduce competition. Speaking with US teachers and administrators, it doesn't seem that they could provide better education if incentivized by better private schools. What I hear instead is that public education is simply underfunded in the US. That would speak for the argument above.
Even the richest person on Earth can't fix the public schools with their whole fortune, not even a group of the top 10 could - they wouldn't be able to provide funds for more than a year. And private education is definitely not reserved to the rich, I don't think the majority of parents that send their kids to private schools have more than average income.
Be it true or false, this is the axiom on which the whole debate is based. If it were not true, I think there's no economic or incentive issue with either form, and there should also be no ex-ante reason to prefer private over public schooling except for idiosyncratic preferences about the approach, given that both forms should receive equal funding.
And indeed, I think there are countries where precisely that is true. These are the ones where the public school system is considered good, and where private schools typically place emphasis on a different manner of education.
However, for the US, I think most people would disagree with you. Funding for private schools is incredibly high and driven by above average contributions of wealthy parents, whereas funding of the public school system is allegedly more than poor.
Child actors have had private teachers and have decades. Private schools have existed for centuries. Homeschooling is an excepted right.
Why should the rich not be allowed to home school using private staff or demonized for wanting to do so? Does anyone begrudge Mark Zuckerberg for hiring private security to help protect his family?
The purpose of government-run schools is not to ensure that each child gets an education. The purpose is to make sure the government gets to decide what constitutes an education.
This has been looked at extensively. At the most basic level it boils down to the structure of government/politics, culture and unions.
Taken in reverse order, unions in the US had plenty of justification to exist decades ago. From my perspective, except of for a limited set of domains, they have been doing more harm than good for a very long time. Education is one such domain. If one were to dig down through problem areas in the US educational system one would find the dirty, ugly, stinky intersection of teacher unions and politics.
Culture is another factor. The US is very different culturally from lots of countries. I mean, not to go too far, look at the ridiculous rejection of masks in the middle of a pandemic. Anyone who doesn't understand just how different the US is from a place like Finland need not go much farther than the cultural differences as they apply to this pandemic.
Finally, government. Unlike Finland (and lots of other countries) there is no unified US-wide educational system. The federal government does not run the show. What we have is fifty mini countries, each with their own idea of reality. Even worse, we have thousands of teacher unions, each, in turn, with their own ideas of reality. This all leads to a f-ing mess where some schools want to teach such nonsense as intelligent design while others focus on science.
No, we can't compare the US to Finland (or anyone else) other than to say that we definitely need to sort this out. How? Isn't that the question.