If you sacrifice your child for public education, you are a bad person. | Hacker News Reader

If you sacrifice your child for public education, you are a bad person.

jdbentley.com

55 pointsjdbentley65 comments

If you look into actual research on education (it exists), private schools and charter schools are no better at educating than public schools.* It is just a matter of other pre-existing differences, like socioeconomic status (poverty), etc. As numerous people have pointed out - you want to fix education, you need to fix poverty and inequity. Sure, other things will help, too, like requiring all teachers have masters degrees and paying them like other professionals, as other countries like Finland do.

That said, the article that is the subject of the blog complaint states that it is morally wrong to send your kid to private school. I disagree with that - even people who send their kids to private schools pay taxes that go to support public schools. It is a little more of a shame when parents send their kids to (some) crappy charter schools, which DO take away money from public schools, but sometimes it is because the public school really is bad, or because the kid isn't doing well in the public school and the only other alternative is homeschooling.

* http://www.edline.com/uploads/pdf/PrivateSchoolsReport.pdf http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1670063,0... http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/are-private-sc... http://www.nea.org/home/18142.htm

well at least crappy charter schools can be identified, and closed down.

Unless they cook the books. Which happens.

which also happens in public non-charter schools.

Yes, but you claimed that it was easy to shut down crappy charter schools. My point is it's not when they lie and they will lie to make money.

you're missing the point. No system is failproof: Obviously I have no data to back this up, but I think it's probably easier to close down a charter school that screws up than a non-charter with an equivalent screwup.

Hey, Finland pays their teachers less than the U.S. does.

http://www.cato.org/blog/no-teachers-finland-are-not-paid-do...

Also, charter schools are public schools. They just have more flexible management and curriculum structures.

Your argument is borderline dishonest. Teachers in Finland don't have to worry about a lot of things U.S. teachers do because they're taken care of by the government via taxes, which results in said utilities and services being cheaper. For example: health care. I also bet that Finland teachers don't have to spend their own money on buying supplies for their students, which is sadly really common here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_in_Finland

Teachers in the US typically have full health benefits paid for by the government as well as a pension and other benefits. So using health care as an example is just inaccurate. Finland teachers also pay a higher tax rate than US teachers so their real income is even lower by comparison. The problem isn't compensation, it's that it's almost impossible to fire a bad teacher and therefore the personal incentive for individual teachers is less than it would be if teachers were paid based on outcomes rather than time in service. Teacher quality is unrelated to seniority. Yet pay scales are almost completely biased towards seniority rather than results. The rules of economics don't end at the schoolhouse door.

Are you claiming that teacher's don't have copays? Because that's patently false. How about before Obamacare when you could be kicked off your insurance roles for having a "pre-existing" condition and then you couldn't find healthcare anywhere? Do you think that didn't effect teachers? People in the U.S. pay more for healthcare than people in Finland do when you take into account the amount of taxes they pay. When the costs of programs are spread among the public, things tend to be cheaper.

Let's take a look at the Finland school system. They have strong unions that are allowed to take an active role in helping decide what's taught. They have seniority. They don't care about standardized tests, which differs dramatically from the U.S. They don't have any No Child Left Behind bullshit.

The students defer drastically, as well. All the students in Finland have healthcare. When they are sick they can go to the doctor and not have to worry about a gigantic bill. They have a poverty rate of 5.3% compared to the U.S. which has a rate of 23.1%. I'm also willing to wager that a significantly larger chunk of their population believes in evolution and global warming compared to the U.S. It's hard to learn when your hungry and sick.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-ame...

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands...

" that it's almost impossible to fire a bad teacher and therefore the personal incentive for individual teachers is less than it would be if teachers were paid based on outcomes rather than time in service"

For what it's worth, it's probably even far harder to fire a teacher hired on a permanent basis in Finland.

What actual research says is that cultural factors in the home and school effectiveness factors in the school matter even more than poverty as such in constraining educational outcomes. One thoughtful article on this point is mathematician Patricia Kenschaft's article from the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, "Racial Equity Requires Teaching Elementary School Teachers More Mathematics"

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

Read the article, and see if you want any child from any neighborhood, rich or poor, to have elementary school teachers as poorly prepared to teach mathematics as the teachers Kenschaft found in New Jersey. Another interesting set of research articles are those by economist Roland Fryer, such as

"Getting Beneath the Veil of Effective Schools: Evidence from New York City"

http://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/getting-beneat...

"Achieving Escape Velocity: Neighborhood and School Interventions to Reduce Persistent Inequality"

http://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/achieving-esca...

"Teacher Incentives and Student Achievement: Evidence from New York City Public Schools"

http://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/teacher-incent...

Yet another good author on education policy is Caroline Hoxby, whose publications include

"Competition Among Public Schools: A Reply to Rothstein (2004)"

http://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/11216.html

and

"Would School Choice Change the Teaching Profession?"

http://ideas.repec.org/a/uwp/jhriss/v37y2002i4p846-891.html

Sure, other things will help, too, like requiring all teachers have masters degrees

Masters degrees in the subject taught, or masters degrees in "education"? There is no evidence in favor of the latter.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/19/us/19gates.html

"He suggests they end teacher pay increases based on seniority and on master’s degrees, which he says are unrelated to teachers’ ability to raise student achievement."

http://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/20...

You do know that article is an opinion piece that you're using to back your argument.

I reserve the right to add sources to my comment during its edit window, if I feel like that, and meanwhile I invite you to back up the statement that masters degrees add value to teachers, because there is definitely evidence to the contrary.

Charter schools are public schools... and they actually get less money per student than the other public schools in their district. (Our charter school gets roughly $1200 less per student per year than the other schools in the district). The good ones still find ways to do more with less. (Ours has kept class sizes smaller than the rest. We still have music, art, foreign languages, etc... while other schools are cutting those programs.) A lot of charter schools require (well not require but strongly encourage) some level of parent participation (volunteering in the class, fundraising, etc). Since you are not just assigned a charter school based on your location (like traditional public schools) there is a certain amount of additional effort involved. I personally think this is the first filter that keeps "parents that really don't care" from sending their kids there. So I believe this gives you a higher concentration of students that come from homes that place a higher value on education. These kids are more likely to get additional support at home... which makes them more likely to do better in school.

Funny how the author doesn't live on the streets in order to be invested in finding a solution to homelessness.

OR, she doesn't live in rural India to become invested in ending third-world malnutrition.

Seriously, how can anyone take this moron seriously. Her basic argument is that you should suffer the consequences of all world ills, so you will be motivated to solve them.

Some people take every opportunity to preach as much as possible, even though they are idiots.

Well, anecdotally, nothing like jumping off a cliff to see if you can fly right? It probably will motivate the average parent to work harder for the sake of their children and by extension others, but yes, you will end up sacrificing a child in the process...for the glorious peoples republic of america.

Maybe Doctors should also give themselves cancer so they can more motivated to cure it.

tl;dr Someone with no apparent expertise in education research/theory/policy/history debates someone else with no apparent knowledge of education research/theory/policy/history.

In a world where there are hundreds of high-quality research-based books on education, thousands of academic studies on education, dozens of books on the history of education, etc., these sorts of baseless opinion pieces get boring really quickly.

Can you recommend a good review article or similar that gives an overview of the state-of-the-art in terms of education research? I am somewhat interested.

Equality and Achievement: An Introduction to the Sociology of Education (2nd Edition) - Similar to the above, but focusing on equality-related differences (e.g. SES, class size, etc.) as mediating variables for achievement.

Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement - Research on variables effecting achievement. The only book in this list I haven't read yet, but it's slightly newer that the Riordan book above and it has good reviews so it's probably worth checking out. IIRC tokenadult recommends it also. The only caveat is I'm not sure how it deals with the research that Ravitch is critiquing, so maybe read it after that one.

Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children - Basically a book-length academic journal article on why the amount of language spoken to children is the most important variable effecting their later academic ability. A very good read.

Life and Death of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch -- Exposing the fraudulent nature of the research behind Bill Gates' education reforms. The second half of the book is especially good, the first half is mostly about the history of failed school reforms by corporate leaders, which is interesting but kind of dry. Not only is it a must-read, but it's also very much worth going through all the footnotes and reading through the actual methodology of all the studies she's talking about. It's pretty ridiculous, and pretty much exposes Bill Gates as a complete mouth breather.

Anyway reading any of these books will be pretty much like dropping acid; you're going to come back a different person, probably for the better, but don't ask me to predict how.

Diane Ravitch is the person who thinks a high school diploma is credible even if the possessor of the diploma doesn't know beginning algebra. Her argument is that she, a professor of history, was not required to know algebra in her generation (I would hope she at least took a course in the subject as part of secondary education), so it's asking too much that young people in the United States ought to be able to pass test that includes algebra item content as part of graduating from high school. Having seen countries that do otherwise in secondary education from how the United States does things, I have to respectfully disagree with Ravitch on that point and on many other points.

Especially for tech folks, I would start with research on how people actually learn.

The electronic version of this book How People Learn can be downloaded for free: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=9853

See also "What Technologists and Entrepreneurs Should Know about Education": http://guide.hackeducation.com/techies.html

My thoughts exactly. I got to the end of this and thought, "This is a stupid response to a stupid article."

I can't fathom why something so dumb, which clearly has nothing worthwhile to say and doesn't even bring up any interesting topics, made it to the front page.

My life turned around at a private school. I have on more than one occasion thought in response to accusations that Christine Gregoire is trying to collapse the public school system that it would likely be a positive event.

Mulder, Bowles, et al. 2009 (Science) http://www.hks.harvard.edu/inequality/Seminar/Papers/Bowles1... "We explain this variation in inequality using a dynamic model in which a population’s long-run steady-state level of inequality depends on the extent to which its most important forms of wealth are transmitted within families across generations."

In some Scandinavian countries private school is against the law. They perform very well because the people who call the shots actually have a dog in the race. How many governors, senators, mayors and business owners are putting their kids in private school and then undercutting public school in some way because they are disconnected from the consequences?

This wasn't what I hoped it might be.

I could see a defense of not sacrificing the wellbeing of someone you're responsible for to appease your conscience and benefit some abstract common good. That you have a duty to your own children above and beyond what you have to other people is worth exploring, but the author focuses on whether public school, as it exists, is worthwhile, which is a boring question. The thrust of the original article was that the pressure valve of the private option meant that those most likely to actually change anything in public education are those most likely to have already abandoned the system. Of course public education is terrible - all the richest left.

I feel like the HN hivemind underestimates the value of institutions - it's the same concept as company culture. There is "a way things are done" that people buy into that isn't explicitly defined, and it s just as real as what's on paper. The rich sending their children to their own schools, and leaving the rest to fend for theirselves is very, very new (at least at the primary level) in the history of America.

As someone who got an incredibly awesome public school education - seriously, I breezed through Honors Physics exams at the University of Chicago (no slouch of a school) because I had seen exam problems as homework in my AP Physics class - I have to say, if I ever have children, they will either be co-opped or private schooled. The quality of public school education that I was afforded -will never- be available in the public sector, ever, ever again. I fear the system has become irreversibly captured by special interests which are not aligned with the children's best interest.

In America, the state has to treat everyone equally (this is not a bad thing). Yet, education is something where the ideal is not equal treatment. To launch a student's future, that student's teacher has to provide opportunities, identify the student's strengths, and play to them. This individualized attention can never be equal. And the problem is, no matter what 'system' is used, the outcomes will be different. As different outcomes get observed, a special interest group (not just the poor, who will generally fare the worst in attempts to capture special interest; but think of rich parents arranging for their kids to be diagnosed as ADHD or dyslexic and getting special test dispensation) will swoop in and demand changes to address their interest. Repeat, until the effectiveness of education gets whittled down to a minimum.

This is required by law, because the state is required to treat everyone equally, and the chosen metric is outcomes (this is maybe not a good measure for equal treatment in any case). The asymptotic result is zero.

Bottom line, if you really are interested in seeing education equality as an outcome, you should take the time to personally do research into where our society has failed its citizens, and pay out of your own pocket to provide for the education of people there. I've done it, I've made a marginal difference in the education of people who have less access to it. It feels great. You should do it, too.

There are other issues with public education as well, such as capture by other groups that seek entitlements that are not necessarily in line with the student's interests, conflation with municipal loans, which are backed (+interest!) by the forcibly appropriated income of the very people it's supposed to help, the questionable wisdom of letting municipal (or state or federal) elected and unelected officials be at the helm, but I won't get too deeply into those.

>As far as I can tell, based on what I experienced, public schools aren't teaching anything worthwhile.

OK, the writer holds idiotic ideas, and/or dellusions of what's worthwhile. Case closed.

Some are, no doubt, you haven't experienced a truly terrible idiotic public school... like soul crushing bad...

You should check out the private schools in the middle Georgia area. A couple good ones, and the rest teach that man and dinosaurs walked the earth together. Soul-saving bad.

Well, I had my share of bad public school teachers. That said, tons of bad private school teachers too.

And I've heard stories of horrible homeschooling that would give one the chills (not to mentioning crushing any social skills the child could gain).

Thank you. I posted the original article earlier today hoping it would get the treatment it deserved.

I've read the article quite a few times today and just can't fathom that there are still people who believe that we should stomach 7.9% success rates [1] for even another 5 years, much less multiple generations. I had the same visceral reaction to this article that I had to the head of the Chicago Teachers Union's celebratory declaration at the conclusion of their strike that, "Cities everywhere have been forced to accept performance pay. Not here in Chicago!"

People like Allison Benedikt are dangerous. The kind of intellectual laziness that spawns an article like the one to which OP responded is hard to read, but it's a nice reminder of why I'm working in EdTech and in all likelihood will make education my life's work.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732465940457850...

Is this some weird kind of alternate reality? I've never even heard of people claiming teachers and parents telling someone high school is the best time of their life before this article. It's always the reverse: students think high school is the end all be all, while adults let you know it's nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Adults who had their peak experiences in high school say that. If I can be judgemental for a moment, these people are usually very shallow, and were very attractive and or popular. Think Al Bundy. Their features that were everything in high school don't get them far in the real world, and their attractiveness declines rapidly post high school.

There ARE people who send their kids to private school because that's the best option for their individual kids - especially if their public schools suck - but still do all they can to improve the public schools, whether through money, time, political advocacy, etc.

If I could, I would homeschool my kids, with liberal use of supplemental outside resources.

I'm on the school board of a small private school and I can (anecdotally) tell you the factors that determine a child's success there are the same as they'd be at the public school - engaged parent(s).

I can also tell you that the social environment at our school is dramatically different from that of public schools.

Great premise, if it weren't for open enrollment. Now whatever barriers a child has to get a good education are all but gone.

Can read about each state's open enrollment rules here:

http://mb2.ecs.org/reports/Report.aspx?id=268

Oh sure, the parent has to sacrifice a little by maybe driving little johnny across town to a better school, but if you value an education, these are the sacrifices parents make.

Although like the author points out, no reason to have your well educated kids going to a shitty school, just so they can help out a few kids who may or may not want help. Maybe little johhny wants to deal drugs and carry a gun instead of getting a high school diploma. No amount of smart suburban kids is going to change that.

Yes, until interdistrict fighting occurs and one district decides to end the brain drain by refusing any further transfers, forcing families to move districts so they can go into better ones.

So, open enrollment: great in theory. Not as real in practice.

The district 3 miles from my house in Texas believes in open enrollment, at $10,000 per child. Ha.

Look, it's all fine to buy into marketing materials and campaign promises but at a certain point in your life you need to recognize those for what they are...

This is where the parents have to figure out how valuable a good education is. Some will make the sacrifices for their kids and some won't.

My parents weren't rich, but when we moved into a different school district in high school, they paid tuition to the school district we lived in so I could remain with my friends and finish at the same school I started. They drove me to and from school everyday so that I could attend the same school before we moved. They made sacrifices so I could still get a good education.

Thank you.

I read Benedikt‘s article earlier this evening, and it infuriated me on a very primal level. Not because I‘m a parent yet, but because I had my run ins with public education.

Especially him saying that ‚gifted‘ children will be just fine. Let me tell you a personal story.

I was diagnosed as gifted in second grade by a local school psychologists. My teachers recommendation was to send me to a school expressively tailored to gifted children, which my parents at that point could not do, which is why I stayed in the public school system. As I went through the rest of primary school, I started to mark myself out as a troublemaker, and I was bullied, both things my school didn‘t have sufficient resources to care for. By the time I hit middle school, I was thoroughly disillusioned towards the prospect of school, and my meager grades went from acceptable (B+ level) to hopeless (D level). By 8th grade, going from one debacle to another, I fell into serious depression. Since my future seemed so bleak, I was considering suicide or getting back at everyone with a school shooting. To my defense, I was 13, isolated and depressive, not just crazy.

Since then, I‘ve recovered. After grade 8th, I was offered by my family to leave for a private international school out of the country, and offer which I gladly took. Since I suddenly had a new slate to work from, things didn‘t seem quite as bleak, and I‘ve become more resilient due to the stark contrast between these two poles.

But when I read an article like Benedikt‘s, it brings me back to sitting in my room with the blinds partially down, dreading going back to school the next morning, contemplating whether I should fill my bag with fertilizer instead of schoolbooks. And that article tells me „you should have stayed, for the good of many“, should have perished for people that give half a damn about you if you don‘t blow up, and if you do, they blame it on the games you play, or on the specific school you went to, or on you being psychologically broken, or any number of factors.

It‘s never on the system, it‘s the people who are broken.

I went to both private and public schools growing up, and I realized that they have different goals. One taught me new and challenging subjects, taught me to ask questions and think for myself. The other taught me how to deal with bureaucracy, how to be in the right part of the building at the right time and how to discern new information from reams of repetition. Public schools won't get better, but they will go away. The internet has created a place where you can go to learn whatever you want. Eventually the high cost of homes and the subsequent high taxes will cause schools to be closed to reduce the tax burden when all of the unnecessary programs have already been cut. We'll all be homeschooling then. We'll have no choice.

A child who is homeschooled compared to attending a school meet so much fewer people in their lives - all else kept equal; This means they're more likely to be socially awkward when they grow up. How to compensate for that?

Not to mention that, because of they types of people that choose homeschooling for their children, the child is more likely to be indoctrinated to all kinds of BS shit.

With all the failings of the school system, home-schooling still remains a fuck-you to the humankind -- like some BS bubble created by the kid's parents is inherently better.

That doesn't have to be the case. You might find Leo Babauta's blog http://zenhabits.net/unschoolery/ interesting reading. It's encouraging to see the discussion. Hopefully its the kind of debate that challenges and redefines what "school" in the 21st century should be about.

I would argue the opposite. A child who is homeschooled (typically homeschools operate like co-ops, these days) interacts with a few individuals across a broad spectrum of ages. This is a better model of adult social interaction than schools where you are jammed in with a firehose of your near-exact-age-peers.

I'm always amazed at how artificial the school environment is. In the real world, I interact with a diverse group of people of many different ages. I have a lot of control over who I deal with, such that I can usually avoid dickheads. If I can't avoid them and one of them causes trouble to the extent of physical threats or attacks, I can get them hauled off by the police.

In school, everyone around you is the same age, you can't avoid the dickheads no matter how much you might want to, and they can harass you with near impunity.

I realize that some allowances must be made for children (can't give a 10-year-old total control over their lives the way an adult has it, after all), but the massive differences in something that's supposed to be preparing them for adulthood are a bit crazy.

Is there a demonstrated correlation between the number of people you meet in your childhood and social awkwardness in adulthood?

Is that a hypothesis or based on scientific research? Homeschool kids have plenty of outside activities and extracurriculars. One could argue that spending time on prison introduces you to a lot of people as well, but that doesn't mean it's socially beneficial. Besides, social awkwardness happens with all kinds of people, regardless of academic background and circumstances.

One of the common mechanisms that homeschooling parents use is a co-op mechanism. A group of homeschooling families in an area decide to school their children together, with varying degrees of cohesion. This, especially coupled with extracurricular activities, can easily address any concerns about socialization. The adults I know who were homeschooled and seem to have socialization issues by and large were homeschooled in a bubble and not encouraged or given opportunities to socialize. Another benefit of these co-ops is that they can allow for shared resources and expertise that replicates some of the other benefits of a more traditional school environment.

An easy example of this might be to take advantage of guided tours of theatres or museums. It's not often easy to get a guide for one parent and one child, but organizations will accommodate a group of 30 more frequently. Another example of this collaboration is electives. Even the best-intentioned homeschooling parent might not know some skill their children have taken an interest in (e.g. cartooning), but if another homeschooling parent knows that skill (e.g. a professional cartoonist), it's common for such parents to make arrangements for lessons in the interest of the group. A parent with an interesting hobby (e.g. model rocketry or electronics) could very easily expose other children to that hobby in an educational way. A group of willing parents can go a long way towards replicating the breadth of educational experience that a traditional school and its resources can provide, without any of the drawbacks.

This is an incredibly ignorant opinion. You make it sound like home schooled kids are raised on Mars.

It wasn't that long ago that people grew up, went to school and worked in the same neighborhood always dealing with the same people. They rarely traveled and moving was unheard of. Did these people grow up socially awkward? No.

Home schoolers are in little league, pee wee football and quite often a very large religious community.

Being home schooled doesn't cut you off from the world.

But putting them in a room with 30 strangers that might dislike them is somehow going to fix it? Most high school cliques rarely get larger than 5-6 people, so simply giving your kid opportunities to meet other children (it could be some sports club, or the boy scouts, or a science club, really anything) will allow them to get a small but tight social circle, which is more than some kids have.

Hear. Hear. I saw the original article to which the author of the article submitted here responds,

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/08/priva...

and I thought, "What a shallow analysis." I'm glad that there has already been a reply article, and I'm especially glad that it is gaining lots of karma here on Hacker News.

Readers who like deeper analysis of these issues may be interested in reading some of the books found in the online bibliography "Books on School and State,"

http://learninfreedom.org/school_state.html

part of my personal website. For a long time, I have been studying education policy, and indeed it was reading Paul Graham's essays

http://paulgraham.com/articles.html

on education policy that drew me to participating here on Hacker News. We can all come up with lots of ways to incrementally improve schools, and we can best do that by exposing any one kind of school to competition from competing providers.

I have seen some examples of helpful reforms where I live. Minnesota, where I now live and where I grew up, has had largely equal per-capita funding for public school pupils statewide since the 1970s. The state law change that made most school funding come from general state appropriations rather than from local property taxes was called the "Minnesota miracle."

http://www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/18public.htm...

Today most funding for schools is distributed by the state government on a per-pupil enrollment basis.

http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf

http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/SchSup/SchFin/index.html

The funding reform in the 1970s was followed up by two further reforms in the 1980s. First, the former compulsory instruction statute in Minnesota was ruled unconstitutional in a court case involving a homeschooling family, and a new compulsory instruction statute explicitly allows more nonpublic school alternatives for families who seek those. Second, the Legislature, pushed by the then Governor, set up statewide open enrollment

http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.h...

and the opportunity for advanced learners to attend up to two years of college while still high school students on the state's dime.

http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/CollReadi/PSEO/index...

And Minnesota also has the oldest charter school statute in the United States.

http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Chance-Passage-Pioneering-Charter...

Parents in Minnesota now have more power to shop than parents in most states. That gets closer to the ideal of detecting the optimum education environment for each student (by parents observing what works for each of their differing children) and giving it to them by open-enrolling in another school district (my school district has inbound open-enrollment students from forty-one other school districts of residence) or by homeschooling, or by postsecondary study at high school age, or by exercising other choices.

The educational results of Minnesota schools are well above the meager results of most United States schools, and almost competitive (but not fully competitive) with the better schools in the newly industrialized countries of east Asia and southeast Asia. It's a start. More choices would be even better.

Not really a shallow analysis, but they don't make their point particularly well. I think bringing in "sacrificing your kids to make a point" is unnecessary linkbait.

The basic issue for me is that western democracies and the US are founded on principles of equality (qv. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_men_are_created_equal).

If public education is left to rot (as well as transport and healthcare and everything else), but the rich are allowed to buy their way out, surely this is a subversion of the principles that your country is founded on?

Edit: wow, you've added a hundred links since I replied. Perhaps you could condense your point down into a couple of paragraphs?

The problem with public education is that it isn't typically shaped by free market principals and there's little effective competition. Competition drives innovation. Parents are generally the best arbiters of success because they care about their kids more than anyone else. Adam Smith, when applied to education can have dramatic results, yet public schools are typically about as efficient as a Pentagon procurement office.

principles, not principals.

Which, thinking about it, is an even more condensed version of my argument above.

Competition is all very well, but if you're talking about the education of a country, you can't very well just chuck out half the students and/or schools because they failed the competition, particularly when the competition is "rigged" from the start:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/...

Finland has the best school system in the world and they aren't driven by the free market.

The Soviet Union was based on equality too. The problem is that some bureaucracies produce an equally shitty product for everyone.

There's no inherent conflict between rich people having better stuff and equal rights. For better or for worse, the American belief on this subject is that opportunity to better one's economic situation should be equal, but that it's fair for quality of life to be dependent on some amount of success in taking these opportunities.

That aside, though, I think the point is that any reasonable person with kids will do whatever they can to bring them up in the best way possible, with whatever resources they have. Maybe the US public school system is poorly executed but well-intentioned; maybe it is not even that. It doesn't matter; it is what it is. There's no shame in not participating in it if you have a choice (participation is not what it's short on!). Maybe we will have amazing education for every US child one day, but who knows when or what form that will take, or what will drive it. Private school may be a luxury, but you don't have to be rich to home-school, it's a valid and attractive option for many parents in areas that are cheap to live in but have terrible schools.

I disagree with that pretty strongly - if you have time, go and read the NYTimes link that I posted below.

Their point is that many children don't have that opportunity, since they're already well behind by the time that they start school. And a large part of the difference in school performance can be explained by differences in the students economic background and family life.

This doesn't square with the equal opportunity / everyone's equal that the US seems to be so fond of.

I agree that "equal opportunities" is a myth. People grow up with vast differences in the advantages they've been given.

However, deserving equal things doesn't mean you get equal things. See the fact that people have different amounts of money from each other, and have for thousands of years. We celebrate the ability of individuals to better their life situation as much as possible, and we don't shame rich people for spending money to give their kids a better education than the government can provide.

The US public school system is simply an attempt to give all children in the entire country access to some education. It would be great if it was a gleaming example of delivering quality on a large scale, up to the standard of, say, McDonald's, but alas it is not.

Quora answerers did a better job than me making the point about raising your kids: http://www.quora.com/Education/If-you-send-your-kid-to-priva...

Another response, this one from Ken White at Popehat:

http://www.popehat.com/2013/08/29/this-is-no-surprise-to-you...

If the good people who read the above article follow Allison Benedikt's prescription then we will end up with a society in which their children are poorly schooled in the name of egalitarianism, and only the children of bad people receive the quality education and critical thinking skills that the author so obviously lacks, thereby making society even less fair than it already is. Talk about evil genius. Was it Lex Luthor who put her up to writing this, or was it Senator Palpatine?

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