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Comment by jshen | Hacker News Reader

Hm, interesting question. I was thinking specifically of primary education, most people never go to a private college and it's a very different situation.

For example, my wife is a teacher, and one of her biggest challenges is dealing with kids with severe behavior problems. They disrupt the entire class, but these kids still need an education. If you remove those kids from the class the rest of the kids benefit, but our goal as a nation isn't to only educate good kids.

This seems to create a perverse incentive in a private system. Private schools will do everything they can to be selective about there students, because their ultimate goal isn't to educate the nation as a whole, and that seems like the wrong goal to me.

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Why does there have to be an ultimate goal that is shared by every single education institution? Top-tier children deserve a top-tier education every bit as much as misbehaving children deserve the best education they can manage. Instead of having a single educational goal, why not start with the following three goals, and move from there?

1. Maximize the maximum outcome. In other words, allow gifted students to move as fast as they want.

2. Improve the mean outcome. If the mean education level of the nation rises, one can expect the mean productivity level to rise as well.

3. Minimize the negative cases. Provide intensive remedial (in the strictest sense of the root word "remedy") solutions to raise the worst case students to the highest possible level.

Actually, I suppose these three goals could be summarized into a single goal:

1. Maximize the individual outcome of each individual student. This would be like the reverse of the "rising tide floats all boats" metaphor. If every student reaches his or her maximum potential, then the nation as a whole reaches its maximum potential.

That should be the singular focus of any education system. Any other metric will fail to optimize certain students' outcomes, which by definition fails to optimize the mean outcome. I would be very happy if nobody ever had to be told to slow down to keep with the class again, as I was multiple times in my public school education.

Nobody is arguing that there shouldn't still be public funding of education. If I had a kid in special ed I'd want to send him/her to the best school possible for his/her unique challenges Right now the only option is public school unless you can afford massive private school tuition.

With more private schools, smaller, more specialized schools would develop. Someone passionate about teaching special ed would have the chance to make such a profound difference in this setting compared to the public school status quo.

nope, parents would mostly fall for marketing and branding.

If a private school can provide a superior education to non-disruptive children, and public schools continue to provide the same education to disruptive children, isn't that a good thing?

If I could make a better product than apple wouldn't that be a good thing? Too bad I can't.

Are you trying to claim that it is impossible to do a better job than public schools? If not, I simply don't understand your comment.

It's not a question of whether it's possible, it's a question of whether it's probable.

Here's my theory. We should privatize prisons. The competition between companies to build and manage prisons will lead to innovations in rehabilitation techniques, and innovations in efficiency of inmate management. We'll get a system that releases prisoners who don't end up back in prison and it will be cheaper than our current system all because of the magic of competition and the profit motive.

Except we've tried this experiment, and the results are clear. The profit motive has lead to the prison industry lobbying government to get laws that send more people to prison, and to private prisons giving kickbacks to judges to send kinds to prison for first time minor offenses.

The incentive created by privatization is to create more profit, not to create a better school or prison.

We don't need to theorize. We already have a privatized education system in the US - college. Could you explain why it would be a bad thing to make primary education more like college?

Also, if you feel the US college system is so bad, should we try to make our college system more like our primary education system? If not, why not?

Your comparison to prisons is silly since a) non-privatized prisons have similar incentives and similarly lobby for more prisoners (google CA prison guard unions), b) prisoners don't get to choose their prison (unlike schools), and c) private prisons are not rewarded based on rehabilitation.

"Could you explain why it would be a bad thing to make primary education more like college?"

They don't have the same goals. Primary education has to educate everyone. Private colleges can be selective about students, kick out students, etc, etc. You can't compare a system that has to educate everyone with one that can be highly selective. It's apple to oranges. But, private colleges as a whole are questionable. Look at all the diploma mills, aggressive recruitment to private "colleges" with substandard education, no real campus, whose goal is only to make a profit. I can't find it now, but I read a story recently about a scam private college that bought another school that was accredited so that they would get the accreditation which wouldn't be rechecked for years!

So in short, I think some private schools do a great job for some students, but I'm highly doubtful that it will work well for primary education that has to educate everyone.

I think US colleges are great, but it's not the same goal as primary school. I don't think the two are comparable.

The private prison example isn't exactly the same, but it has similarities that you guys are ignoring. The main one is that the incentive is to maximize profit, not to make a better prison or school.

The main difference is that with prisons, the "customer" is the government. Inmates do not have a voice in society, and they are routinely raped and tortured (and often murdered) in both private and public prisons.

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