Comment by IggleSniggle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IggleSniggle | Hacker News Reader

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I really take issue with the position that parents have zero influence. Our children attend a "mediocre" public school in our US city. We simply talk to the teachers and administrators, and you would not believe the results. I always go into it thinking that we are whiny parents talking to an overworked staff, and the results are incredible.

For anyone who is considering homeschooling but isn't sure, there is a real middle ground: actually engage with your huge staff at the public school who are hungry for parent involvement because it seems like the parents don't care and the kids are just there for the babysitting.

Public schools work great, but you do have to remain engaged and be ready to problem solve. It's like homeschooling but you get a whole publicly funded (somewhat overworked but enthusiastic) support staff to accomplish educational goals for your child.

Yes of course schools vary but if approach ANYONE with a combative attitude they are likely to fight back, even if you're on the same side. Approach with sympathy, open communication, and the occasional set of hands in the classroom, and you can get the best for your child.

I can attest to this exact same scenario with my children and their schools. I observed both types: the parents who immediately entered the school combative towards administration (not looking to collaborate on a solution, just shouting loudly to "fix it"), and parents who spent time engaging with administration towards a description of the problem and ideas for resolving them.

That being said, there are and were definitely limits to what public schools can do. They are resource strapped, procedurally constrained, often fighting their own political bureaucratic battles within the school districts, and even within the academic departments.

We ended up leaving the public school for those reasons, and could not be happier.

My observation was: public schools have become much like enterprises, and private schools tend to be more like startups. The public school has so much inertia and tends to have "guardrails" and policies to keep even bad administrations functioning, but at the cost of exceptionalism and performance. Private schools have less of this, and more direct accountability.

You absolutely can have a private school that doesn't educate better than a public school, but I'd argue at least one of two things happen: 1) the school fails to attract student, and closes.. or 2) the school focus shifts away from education to other priorities (e.g., social status, culture, or sports), relegating academics to a secondary role.

I taught at a private school for several years, and what I saw there convinced me that they are up against many of the same things that public schools are except they need a marketing budget and all the parents have financial resources (although few had the resource of time).

I guess I think it's hard to make real generalities about public v private schools, and good data is hard to come by since stats can be juiced in various ways for various reasons.

>We simply talk to the teachers and administrators, and you would not believe the results.

It would depend on what you're asking for. It depends on the school district/state, but anything that gets close to the curriculum isn't easy or simple to change.

For example, one of my kids who went to public school had to use this program (I forget the name) for algebra that the school paid for. You used a weird toolbar to input your equations that appeared to be some monstrous Javascript nightmare. It more or less worked, but it wasn't great. To my mind it would have been simpler to teach them LaTeX or something, but whatever.

As a parent, you can't go in and say "why don't you just let them write the answers on paper like everybody else did until 9 minutes ago?" The teachers loved this program, because it did all the teacher work for them. The school administration already paid for it, plus paying for the computers for the kids to use, plus the IT overhead to keep the computers running.

That's a fundamental structural problem that no parent can surmount. "What do you mean use a screwdriver? We paid for all these hammers!"

The incentives that drive public education are often orthogonal to actually teaching the public. It's not a mystery, any trough where money collects will get snouts rooting for some of it. The parents don't have much say in how all this money must be spent because they don't have any say about the money at all, other than moving to a different district or writing off what they pay in property taxes and paying again to do something else.

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