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Comment by bigbacaloa | Hacker News Reader

Private schools are mostly quite bad and worse than typical public schools. A few outliers distort the general picture.

Anecdotally, but the private schools in my large city are miles ahead of the public schools. The difference is so dramatic. I graduated from the same public school system. The children that went to private schools ended up in a far better place.

Do you have any evidence private schooling is bad? This is the first time I've heard it's worse than public school.

> The children that went to private schools ended up in a far better place.

Is this a result of the private schooling or does the socioeconomic status of their parents play a significant role?

I attended both and the people that were rich enough to attend private school but were sent to public school anyway still did very well for themselves, not obviously different from those that attended private school.

Could be parenting too, yeah. I don't think it can be discounted the level of violence in public school. Even when I was in school it was closer to a prison than a learning environment. Both in culture, and in construction. I'm sure this had an effect on kids.

The public schools in my city weren't even accredited when I graduated, as the students were not able to achieve the graduation rates and test scores required. This was despite the influx of billions of dollars to modernize the facilities, equipment, and lesson plans. Beyond that they were dangerous from middle school through the end of high school. Private school was really the only option for anybody who had the funds to escape the public school system.

Multiple decades of studies produced by the NAEP directly refute your argument.

I would reference the confirming NAIS studies as well but they've got some self-interest in those results.

I was curious and only found: https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/studies/2006461.a...

the data is very very old (20 years), but they did not find significant differences after adjusting for the schools / students characteristics. Unadjusted scores however do look better for private schools.

They release this very easy to find data every year (although items in the chart may be ~10 years old).

https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/dashboards/schools_dashboa...

Private schools outperform in nearly all subjects.

thanks, but I think that comparison is not fair, if you're throwing all demographics in one bucket. E.g. I'd bet income explains most of those differences. I'm on the fence about public schools in the US as I'm originally from a different country where private schools are a rarity, but I've learned how bad schools can be here. Anecdotally here in NC public schools have a much better reputation than private.

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