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Comment by willcipriano | Hacker News Reader

That's why we need school choice, give the working poor the same opportunity to abandon the public schools like the wealthy have.

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False. Taking tax dollar funding away from public schools only exacerbates the issue. School choice is a scam to fund private Christian schools to brainwash the youth and maintain a conservative voter base

The cost per student in the US is higher than every country in the world (save Luxemburg if I recall correctly). The problem isn't a lack of money, the problem is the money is misused. Private schools are just better stewards of the students dollars.

I mean the teacher's unions have been screaming about smaller class sizes for decades, let's give it to them.

The cost-per-student of private vs public education is not an apples-to-apples comparison because the public school system is also obligated to provide transportation and special needs education, both of which are very expensive and neither of which are in scope for most private schools.

The EU and Canada have those costs too... and are still spending way less per student than the US.

Indeed, and it'd be worthwhile doing a comparison. My only point is that you have to make sure comparisons are accurate with respect to scope of services.

Private schools in the US look artificially good in terms of both finances and performance because they end up selecting the more privileged students to start with.

Why do you assume the money would be taken away from the public schools? Is it because they suck? If so, you're right and it should be taken away from them.

You don't improve if you aren't answering to anyone. If they're threatened with money loss you better believe they're going to start doing something to make their school more attractive and that's how it should be. Right now they can be absolutely abysmal at educating anyone and still receive tax dollars.

It's like some choice who brainwashes my kids. Are they going to learn about men being pregnant and go to a drag show or that god created earth 5 thousand years ago.

Maybe i could even alternate every year so they are "well rounded".

Did homeschooling just fall off the face of the planet? Stop sending your kids to these kinds of schools. Take the initiative to be learned enough to teach your kids at least the fundamentals, and then instill in them the drive to want to learn more. It's made much easier with the advent of the internet.

And someone's probably going to respond "but muh socialization!" In what other real-life scenario are you going to end up with a bunch of people who are almost identical in age, with little to no responsibilities, regurgitating shit with no incentive other than that you have to be there, or else? You don't. After that, it's off to either real school (university) where people are all at various stages of their education throughout their life, chasing education in fields that actually benefit them and the rest of society; or they work a job where there's even more diversity and generally less interaction with people.

Lower school is an alien place to be, and always has been.

But muh full time job and two-income economy..

I didn't say it would be easy.

Having choices is bad. Today I learned.

The problem with "vote with your dollars" is that the more dollars you have, the more votes you end up with. The wealthy can already do this anyway: having those resources means you can live wherever you want, and thanks to the fact that school funding is primarily done via property taxes, the wealthy can move where they like to a school of their choice that will then benefit from that funding.

Unsurprisingly this means schools with a lot of wealthy students already attract other wealthy students due to their successes largely brought about by funding, and poorer schools get even poorer as the few remaining people try their best to leave, because the school sucks.

As I've gotten older I've become incredibly skeptical at the almost knee-jerk reaction to "give people choice and let them self select." What if the choice is difficult? What if it requires knowledge most people don't have? What if people don't need to live with the consequences of the choice? What if the choice affects not only them, but others who have no choice?

How many strong WFH advocates are anti school-from-home? The anti-SFH sentiment seems to come from antagonism to which groups have been the first to adopt it, but I'm sure my bias affects my interpretation.

In other words, replace it with nothing. That doesn't help the working poor. If you mean another private option, they aren't going to shell out for a "discount" school over public schools, and nothing prevents them from trying.

Did you miss the /s tag here?

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