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Comment by b59831 | Hacker News Reader

And the kids who's families can't afford to move/go to private school pay for the rich family's idealism.

The rich families are not the problem here. The public schools with the tyranny of low expectations are the issue.

I will have to disagree with both you and GP to a certain degree.

A developed country is not where even the poor have cars, it's where even the rich use public transport - a quote attributed to many including LKY.

Extrapolating this to the current argument (disclaimer: not read the article), if the same system is thrust onto the rich and poor alike, it should get better over a period of time, no?

This is a complicated question, thoughts welcome.

My child attends a small, arguably underfunded, rural public school. It does not have enough faculty to teach Chemistry or Physics every year. Spanish is the only foreign language taught.

The student body generally excels. A graduating class of 120 students might have a dozen who score 30+ on the ACT. And, of course, there is perhaps an equal number who fail to graduate.

They all go to the same school, but I wouldn't say "the same system is thrust onto the rich and poor alike." The most important system in the education of a child is not within the walls of a school. It is within the walls of their home.

It is simply true that a certain level of affluence is necessary to provide a stable learning environment * in the home *. Affluence does not guarantee that stability, but it increases the odds so dramatically that its affect should not be ignored.

That’s a very specific view of a mostly urban environment. Forcing an encumbered, Orwellian institution on a populace against their will does not seem very developed.

(I say that as a husband to a public school teacher, son of a public school teacher, and father of children attending public school.)

No, it’s the school board of San Francisco who is making the poor kids pay. They can’t afford to get private schooling, and their school is actively preventing them from succeeding.

i'm curious in what sense you mean that they "pay"... public schools could easily just offer these classes, ex idealism, but they choose not to in the name of Equity. and it's not because the rich kids go and attend private school instead-- their rich parents still pay property taxes like everyone else, so i don't really know how that flight would shift an extra burden on to the kids that don't move schools. i guess school funding is tied in some formulaic sense to the number of kids that attend that specific school? but even that roundabout justification has the causality backward: the un-offering of the course is what leads to the rich kid flight in the first place-- seems to me that the only "idealism" that is being "paid" for here is that which is being promulgated by the Church of "Equity". but it is true that the non-rich kids are the ones stuck paying for it. (but where do the kids of these high priests of Equity go to school? i have a hunch...)

and beyond that, isn't the whole point of GP's comment that the idealistic rich people are trying to / would like to leave their children in public schools? what's idealistic about sending your kids to private school instead? seems like the exact opposite to me.

so other than "pay" not making any sense, "idealism" not making sense, and randomly swapping whose (not "who's") idealism is being paid for, your reply makes perfect sense.

like, when people make comments like this, do they think that they are saying anything in particular, or is it just about the words sounding good in a certain order, like music lyrics? it's like some sort of pathos DDoS. but, hey: at least "your heart's in the right place", right?

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