Why? switching to private school is expensive. Switching from is not. In the public system, schools change every 3-5 years anyway.
" and it strikes me that private schools may be less likely to change drastically over the course of 8-12 years than a public school."
Why? public schools change slow and ploddingly, after long tedious debates.
Well, _paying_ for it is expensive in terms of money, it's not the switching that costs money generally.
The switching costs I'm referring to are "social" ones. I don't want to shop my kids around schools if I can avoid it, because each time they'll have to make new friends and be "the new kid" for 1-2 years.
In the public system, you change schools twice, elementary -> middle and middle -> high school (or just once, k-8 "middle school" -> high school), and each time you generally know lots of other kids because schools are arranged as "feeders", and a given high school class is made up of cohorts from each of the feeders.
> public schools change slow and ploddingly, after long tedious debates.
Public schools are beholden to state budgets, and I don't like they choices that were made a couple decades ago when _I_ was in public schools (no music or "arts" education at all in my k-6 school), so I shudder to think of what's going to happen nowadays. State budgets fluctuate along with the political climate.
That's my thinking, anyway.