Hacker News Reader

Comment by justaman | Hacker News Reader

>Imagine if we lived in a society where public school didn't exist.

This assumes the market wouldn't self correct and private schools became the norm.

Public schools did not drop out of the sky by surprise. We, as a society, intentionally created them because private schools (which predate public schools by hundreds of years) were not meeting society’s needs.

I think the scale of public schooling is not widely understood. A bit over 56 million kids attended school in the U.S. in fall 2020. Of those, almost 51 million attended public schools—-almost 90%. Private schools cannot take up that volume; they never could. Again, that’s why we created public schools in the first place.

It’s not so different from why we created public roads, even though private versions already existed.

Indeed, and the rise of charter schools shows that it is very doable to run a private school on less than the amount of tax money allocated per-child.

The elite charter schools in my state just game the system. They enroll a large number of students at an early age, and weed the low performing students out through attrition. Then, they don’t replace those students. Each grade gets smaller and smaller, and more elite. By 12th grade, their graduates are equivalent to the top 10% of a normal high school, with similar test scores. It looks like these charter schools (which don’t restrict who can attend) are producing Ivy League capable graduates, while public schools are producing ditch diggers. In addition, parents are expected to “tip” the teachers each semester, resulting in significantly higher income for the teachers. The profit goes to the for-profit school administrators. Then, the “smaller government” state Governor/legislature will highlight these charter schools as an example of why there should be more charter schools and defund public education.

Any of the other charter schools in the state, not employing these tactics, produce gains on par with public schools.

Although it’s great for the students who graduate from the elite charters, it’s unscalable.

do you have some articles or books that I could read to better understand this phenomenon of charter schools behaving this way. Of the few charter schools locally that I have experience with, none of them work this way.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/03/...

That's because charter schools intentionally decline expensive students- students who need occupational therapists, school psychologists, social workers, special education programs, remedial schooling, etc.

When you look into what it means to have a public school system it really means that the system is expected to support everyone, including the neediest and most expensive students. So of course by declining these students charter schools can boast being much cheaper.

That's an interesting proposal, could you link something that breaks down the numbers? Special needs schools are separate from normal schools, so I can see how such a calculation might be possible.

Normal schools educate a lot of special needs students. The standard for going to a special needs school is higher.

I listed a lot more than just special needs. I'm talking about students that need remedial lessons, more support for problems at home, too. These are all things that will be more expensive and charter schools can decline for.

What about poor people? I think there are 60 million of those in the US.

>>>> Imagine if we lived in a society where public school didn't exist.

>>> This assumes the market wouldn't self correct and private schools became the norm.

> What about poor people? I think there are 60 million of those in the US.

The invisible hand would decide, in its infinite and sublime wisdom, that society is better off if they get no education....which is as clear an illustration as any of what market failure is.

Public schools not existing does not imply that poor people would have to pay tuition or remain uneducated. State governments could easily provide tuition assistance, likely means-tested, to alleviate this issue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com