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Comment by Hermitian909 | Hacker News Reader

> If you're spending more money for worse results, we SHOULD divert funding to better-performing alternatives.

The data doesn't really say this. Two things to know about education:

- A large percentage of school outcomes are dictated by home life. Interviewing parents or just picking from the population of people who can afford $20k a year allows you to pick from a higher achieving cohort.

- Private schools don't have to provide the same level of services to children who require additional care. This is a significant cost saving. Most schools I've worked at had multiple staff dedicated to the care of just a handful of children.

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My kids go to a charter school. Wife works there. They have a number of people with severe disabilities. A few require multiple staff members per kid. It’s a huge burden as they don’t get nearly as much money as regular school. they only get state money, not local county money.

This is a language immersion school. Kids with IQ of 50 and lower are getting no benefit.

But siblings go there to so the parent doesn’t wanna make two stops.

My wife’s class was mostly shutdown for 6 months because she got six special needs kids and her kindergarten class at the beginning of the year. A mix of non verbal, Violent and or extreme low IQ.

It took that long to go through all the legal processes to get them moved to the proper rooms. She had quite a few injuries from it all. Lot of parents were unwilling to admit that kids had any issues.

Plus a lot of these issues were not caught in preschool since the pandemic had those shut down.

Exactly, public schools pay about 3x cost ($30k/yr vs $10k) price for each of the (learning and other) disabled kids which private schools and charters completely avoid. It's just cost shifting and the only solution would be to share costs, which (like insurance) reduces profits so they'll fight tooth&nail.

>> multiple staff dedicated to the care of just a handful of children.

It gets worse. I've seen multiple staff dedicated to a single child, and not the sort of child you would think needs that much. It is mostly behavioral issues that result in some kids needs near-constant dedicated staff.

Every private school I ever went happily took and cared for disabled children. My impression was that they had a pretty great experience compared to my years in public school, where all disabled children were in the same classroom regardless of grade and basically were babysat and not educated all day.

And we had plenty of braindead but normal kids too. Their parents paid out large donations to get their useless children passed through school and at least an attempt to educate them.

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