Of course I say this as I seriously consider sending my kids to a private school because of articles like this.
It worked. They have one of the best public education systems in the world.
As a counter example, the OECD PISA ranking for education puts Estonia as just barely ahead of Finland[1]. Estonia has public and private schools[2]. So, it is at least possible to have Finland quality schools while maintaining a public and private system.
Another thing to consider would be the population differences. The US has ~65 times more people than Finland. In this larger group of people there will be Finland sized subgroups that outperform and underperform Finland even though the US as a whole underperforms.
Massachusetts, for example, one of two states in the US to perform and report their own PISA numbers, is pretty comparable to Finland in 2015 (1 or 2 points above or below on scores of ~500 for science and reading and 11 points below on math)[3]. I couldn't find the official OECD results for 2018, but I believe Massachusetts is slightly ahead by then.
1 - https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/education/
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Estonia
3 - https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-2015-United-States-MA.pdf
You'll see MA scores among the top states in most forms of human development, so it shouldn't be surprising that the schools reflect that trend. The MA school system is likely not doing anything particularly unique that will be the antidote to failing systems in other states. It's likely the best way to replicate their success in other states lies in policy not directly related to school systems.
What does that actually mean? It seems like you’d have to ban homeschooling and severely curtail private tutoring too.
The idea of the state providing basic schooling so that even the poorest people start with at least some intellectual capital and can participate in society seems like and a good one.
The idea of the state limiting what education is available to everyone and making it illegal to try to organize education outside of its direct authority seems maximally dystopian.
It'd mean the same thing it already means for 90%+ people - compulsory publicly funded education from 5-17 years old.
Source: I homeschooled my sons in California for several years and participated on various homeschooling lists at the time.
I think the third was probably to go through an umbrella school, which my family did initially.
Homeschooling laws vary by state. Some are more stringent than California and others less.
No straw man involved. I don’t think you’ve thought through the implications of ‘getting rid of private school’.
The point is that to ban private schools you’d also have to ban homeschooling.
Why?
You can homeschool your children if you want.
They just have to be at state school during state school hours like anyone else. So you'll have to homeschool in your own time, like everything else you have to do in your own time.
(I'm not in favour of banning private schools, but your argument doesn't make sense regardless.)
No?
Everyone has to go to school during normal school hours. That's a simple flat rule.
What you do otherwise in your own time to teach about your own values is up to you. That seems completely reasonable, and also practicable for people with particular religious or other social requirements for education, to me.
(If you were in favour of requiring attendance at state education, which I'm not.)
I don’t quite understand how restricting a private school of several hundred students affects a parent teaching their children at home.
Clearly rules could be in place to separate those concerns apart.
Huh my understanding is the opposite!
Almost everyone in the US seems to go to public school. Nobody seems to talk about where they went to school - they just went to where was by their home. For example this list of privileged people at Beverly Hills High School is extraordinary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beverly_Hills_High_School#Nota...
The US public school system seems to be doing extraordinarily well here - in almost every other country these rich people would have been in a private school wouldn't they? The US system seems unusually egalitarian.
Most homeschooling parents do a variety of things, including teaching in groups with other homeschoolers, and hiring tutors for specialized subjects etc.
If the goal of the ban on private schools as suggested is to force the rich and powerful to send their children to public schools so that they are incentivized to make them better, then you would need to also ban homeschooling because otherwise those people could still school their children privately in cooperation with other rich and powerful parents via the homeschooling model.
If you're making a slippery slope argument - the answer is that there is a difference between a private school with administration, dedicated real estate and staff teaching 100s of kids, and people keeping their kids home to teach them themselves.
If it's a semantic argument, that homeschooling is a form of non-public and therefore private education, by private schools I specifically mean the large institutions. I doubt homeschooled people would say that they went to private school.
If it's a legal argument - a blanket ban on private schools would have impact on homeschooling in California - that's likely true, but I'm not suggesting how a law would be written, just the result of the law.
there's no effective way to ban private tutoring in the sense and effect of this thread that doesn't also involve banning homeschooling
edit: or simply send the kids abroad, the classic rich-person-in-failed-society way
The point is to move the bar for removing yourself higher - systems are complicated, there are no perfect solutions. Of course, people will always find a way - at the very least, they can move to another country. Right now though a significant number of people opt out of the public system and I think that's a huge problem.
No, the point was to make the people with the power to do something about it be forced to use public schools.
Just moving the bar a bit higher would have no such effect.
> Right now though a significant number of people opt out of the public system and I think that's a huge problem.
Why? What’s wrong with thinking the public school system is bad (which it obviously is) and doing something better for you child?
for some reason, the US never mastered publicly run institutions and they seem to attract the kind of people who run them into the ground
I do agree that the fact that lobbyists and major donors being able to remove themselves from the social consequences of the policies they help implement is a major problem in the American political system; cronyism is out of control and the political funding system is a scandal
This is by design, sadly, because the "wrong people" might benefit from them. But hey we have MLK Day and Juneteenth now so we fixed racism :)))))
I'm not trying to pressure you or anybody else to agree with me, but personally it was really shocking for me when I realized how segregated the Bay Area actually is: http://radicalcartography.net/index.html?bayarea
There's no way I can look at a divide like the one at the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge and not think that ease of access to irl mobility is an issue. Once Upon A Time it was imagined that Phase 2 of BART would run alongside that bridge. There is a bus, but it's not of much use for anybody who needs to work later than 9PM, like many service jobs: https://www.goldengate.org/bus/route-schedule/del-norte-bart...
150 years ago...
I don't see what the rest of your comment has anything to do with the discussion at hand. DMVs are terrible everywhere. The DMV in a rich zipcode suffers from the same issues as a DMV in a poor zipcode. Both rich and poor have to use the DMV.
The problem is not that racist white people are trying to run the DMV into the ground to keep black people poor. The problem is that many of our government institutions are run like shit. In many cases, fixing these institutions would benefit the wealthy more than the poor. Yet it doesn't happen. Why? Well, like with any other question regarding complex systems, there are different reasons depending on the case. Trying to distill it down to "racism" does not get as any closer to identifying the cause, nor fixing it.
But is it, though? I get the impression these complaints run mostly on inertia. In the last 5 years I've been to DMVs in Missouri, New York, and Rhode Island and I've never waited long (they take appointments now at many branches), the people were friendly, their websites explained exactly what I needed to bring, and so on.
The experience was fine.
And yet I keep hearing about how awful the DMV is. I get it; nobody really wants to be at the DMV, but I didn't walk away from those experiences aghast at the dysfunction.
In France folks send their kids to public school mostly. The best high school in the country are public. And usually it’s a sign of something weird if you do your high school in the private.
All that being said. Money always find a way. Some optional curriculum become the key to get assign to the « right » high school.
like learning Latin, Greek. Or picking less common language, outside of the Spanish/English classics. like Italian or German.
I really hope we move back home before my kids are old enough to go to school.
So you've got "good" ones and "bad" ones depending on the neighborhood. So, yes, the best high schools are public, in areas with high rents and property prices.
Additionally, the best high schools select their students on academics, proof of residence, cover letter, letters from former teachers, etc. [1]
But for instance growing up, the big stink was that those poor projects kids we’re in the same middle school that middle class folks. The trick was to pick German to avoid that and be affected to another school.
I don't think voting homeowner retirees sitting on fat Prop 13 tax cuts are going to change their tune because their grandkids can't go to private school.
From a systems point of view though - why would businesses move to SF if it meant bad schools? The answer right now is because the leadership can opt out and go into the private system, but if that wasn't the case, I think there would be a lot of incentive on the city to fix these problems.
There’s no budget shortage. There’s a mis use of funds. If you throw more money into the system we’ll just see even crazier pension packages and administration staff overheads.
The main advantage private schools have is they an expel problem students and let the public schools try to handle them.
It ends up selecting for people who are more transient and have less experience, who haven't gotten the better Public school job yet.
> The main advantage private schools have is they an expel problem students and let the public schools try to handle them.
They theoretically have more control over expulsions, but whether or not they use it really depends on the school.
Then we would have a direct way for parents to improve the schools their kids attend.
Things are usually not solved by making things worse for everyone.
Instead, the solution, to most problems, is to try to help more people, instead of trying to stop others from being too good at educating their children.
If you ban private schools, people will “group homeschool”. If you ban homeschooling, parents can pack cigarettes in their kid’s lunch sack until they are sent to continuation school where attendance isn’t required. Then the child is free to attend a “group tutoring academy”.
The solution is to make public education easier to reform by the members of the community.
There are still huge discrepancies across public schools.
But let’s me add some counter example for the sake of it.
here is public high school, with « famous »teacher and kids clearly coming from the wealthy élites.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyc%C3%A9e_Henri-IV
The trick is that the selection process is so stringent that you basically have to be :
- a genious in getting excellent grade according to the French system or … - have parents that coach you to get in there.
Here is another similar public high school.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyc%C3%A9e_Louis-le-Grand
Again, I mostly agree with you point. But dépending of the country, a private education can be seen of « bad taste »