Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindvirus | Hacker News Reader

I feel like if we want to start addressing inequality in education, we have to start with private grade schools. In particular, I think that private high schools and grade schools should be stopped, and everyone should be forced to use the public system.

Private schools let the wealthiest, most influential people take their children out of the system, and so have no motivation to fix the system. Meanwhile the people who are least able to fix the system are left stuck with it. Take NYC as a great example of this - extremely high incomes, $45k/year private schools, and some of the worst public schools in America.

It's not that people are bad for using private schools - it's hard to take a moral stance when your children are the cost (I will certainly send my future kids to private school). But by having an easy out, it lets people avoid fixing the system.

View on HN

New York actually has some of the best public schools of a major U.S. city.

Also, your proposal would cause a collapse of U.S. cities, as all the middle class and wealthy families moved out. Schools are a key battleground for race and class warfare in the U.S. Even in wealthy Manhattan, 70% of students in public school are on free or reduced price lunch. Wealthy and middle class families would simply leave cities rather than send their kids to schools with students who skew poor and skew minority.[1] Even liberal San Francisco had to give up on its progressive policy of randomizing public school assignments (to prevent wealthy people taking advantage of neighborhood-based assignment to create enclaves within the public system).

[1] Peruse the school profiles in Chicago: http://schoolinfo.cps.edu/schoolprofile/SchoolDetails.aspx?S.... Note how prominently racial and economic demographics are featured. D.C. school profiles even have a handy pie chart for racial demographics: http://profiles.dcps.dc.gov/Anacostia+High+School. This information isn't prominently displayed because parents don't care about it...

The idea that we should create a ban on private primary and secondary-ed institutions to fix the public system is incomprehensible to me. Should we force people with enough time and effort to devote to quit homeschooling, too? How about those who can afford private tutors? How far do you plan to take this to eliminate any economic advantage? Inciting conflict and anti-governmental feelings is a great way to inspire creative workarounds by the upper class, not creative solutions to a broken shitpile of an educational system. Ask yourself: would you really be inclined to fix something that someone else broke because you were forced to by the government?

The solution to fixing a broken system isn't to prohibit an alternative and force everyone to use it; those with resources will find a way to circumvent any specific ban, as that's significantly easier than solving a systemic failure. Also, why is it their problem? I'm by no means a libertarian, or particularly anti-government at all, but why should individuals with higher socioeconomic status be burdened with repairing a malfunctioning piece of government above and beyond voting and paying taxes?

What the US public educational system needs is to incentivize the most qualified individuals—potentially those who graduated from private secondary schools, even—to join and help fix the system as it currently stands. The vast majority of teachers in US public schools aren't there because the pay and benefits are any good, and I've known several former educators who've since moved on to other careers due to the need for a living wage. If we want to restore the system correctly, it needs to be done by providing impetus for its repair, at which point perhaps those individuals will actually admire it enough to send their own future children there.

The real issue isn't private schools, the wage gap, or any of that, it's the dismal lack of motivation for anyone capable of overhauling the system to do so.

You are making a reductio ad absurdum.

I'm not proposing that private schools all close their doors tomorrow - of course there would be chaos - but that in long term planning of the education system, we should consider that that privatization of education perhaps leads to a greater socioeconomic gap.

Likewise, I'm not saying that the problem magically fixes itself. It's a long, hard road to undo all of the damage. But if the most influential people aren't on board, it becomes significantly harder. I don't think there's any hard and fast reason that we can't have a public education system that serves the needs of everyone.

As a means of affecting change, I think it's important that the wealthiest, most influential people are involved. Consider - I think it's not a stretch to say that a congressman with no kids in the public system would be more willing to vote to cut funding or vote for a counterproductive measure. And we do rely on the wealthy more to contribute to society. Someone making $500k/year is required to contribute at least $200k of that labor to the government - while someone making $30k might be barely required to contribute anything. And so one might say that it's not without precedent.

If you take away school choice through private schools, then wealthy people will exercise residential school choice. That is, if you have the $45K for a private school, but suddenly they become unavailable in NYC; those same people have the means to move outside of NYC. Once they do that, they no longer have to pay income or other NYC taxes, and will simply select an excellent school district in the suburbs, move there, and have their children receive a quality public education. They'll pay for it with high property taxes in that new district, and they will no longer significantly contribute to the NYC tax base, putting NYC public schools at a greater disadvantage than if they had to compete with the private schools.

Thank you, Harrison Bergeron.

Will you also ban those families from reading to their toddlers, teaching their kids music, helping their kids doi homework, and having rich friends?

I'd prefer to tax those folks and invest the funds in improving public schools.

No, I don't think any of those things, but you're the second person to get that out of my post, so I apologize for being unclear. First, see my reply to winterswift above (below?).

I think that by having a two tier system, you end up promoting inequality. Consider American healthcare - from my perspective, it's fantastic, with world class doctors, no wait times and modern machines. Certainly better than my experience in Canada! However, this is a system that serves 20% of the population very very well, at the expense of the rest. I just happen to be in that 20%. And because it works well for that group of people - which includes congressmen, senators, celebrities and chief executives - there's not a huge push to fix it.

The same goes for education. I can more than afford to send my kids to private schools, and honestly, probably will. Small classrooms, modern materials, great teachers. It's a system that I'll be very well served by. Yet the American public education system is largely failing, but this failure does not affect the most powerful people, there's not a huge push to fix it either. Indeed, they benefit from it - their children have a competitive advantage by having fewer people well educated (although I don't claim there's a conspiracy here, just that the value of good education is so much more).

Part of it is that I don't think that money is the main issue - there's a ton of money in the education system, it just goes to the wrong people. And if someone is required to pay money into a system that doesn't affect them, why do they care what the results are and how well the money is spent?

So my only claim is that we should consider that for major public services (health, education, safety), that allowing two tiers can cause major divergences that cause long term negative consequences, and that we should seriously think about this.

Perhaps you don't realize this, but many parents choose not to use the public school system for religious reasons. Are you willing to trample all over their religious liberty and lock them up in pursuit of your utopia?

You probably just didn't think about them. So thank you for posting this, as it demonstrates a growing problem in America: ignorance of religion. I don't care if you're religious or not, this is a country with a lot of people who are.

People these days love words like "tolerance" and "diversity" but then they suggest the most intolerant policies you can imagine.

>> but many parents choose not to use the public school system for religious reasons.

at the risk of sounding naive how does attending a public school limit one's ability to practice religion?

i am particularly confused because all of the private schools where i grew up were Catholic, which i assumed were even less religiously tolerant.

Deciding how to educate their children is part of their religion. If you tell them "you must send your children to a public school" you are limiting their ability to practice their religion.

And this isn't just an ad-hoc excuse... this has been true for a long time. For example the puritans in this country highly valued public education. They thought all children should know how to read so that they could read and understand the Bible (a direct consequence of their sola scriptura reformation roots).

So suppose you come from that background (like many Reformed and Evangelical Christians today), and the top priority in the education of your children is that they know the Bible: "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom" and all that.

Well children won't be getting that in a public school in America. And more than that the social institutions in this country (at all levels) are dead-set opposed to those kinds of traditional religious doctrines. (parents might point to things like evolution, sexual education, etc..)

Now I understand that from a secular perspective this looks ridiculous. That line of reasoning isn't even something I would necessarily agree with. All I'm advocating here is a bit of tolerance as well as a little bit of knowledge about your fellow citizens. The very type of people who are predisposed to bypass the public school system for religious reasons, are also the type of people who won't bow to government pressure. You'll have to lock them up and take their children away from them before they'll stop. (There is abundant historical precedent for this)

As to your point about Catholic schools... do you think that a Catholic school ought to be a place where other religious teaching is tolerated? Do you think such a school ought to be required to teach Islam or Protestantism for example? Or, to take a popular topic at the moment, should a church be required to perform same-sex marriages?

That seems like a very strange definition of tolerance to me... Catholic schools ought to teach Catholicism, and because the government doesn't require you to send your children to that school you have the freedom to educate your children how you see fit.

Yes that means parents will sometimes choose badly and children will suffer because of it. But that's the price we pay for living in a free society.

>> Deciding how to educate their children is part of their religion.

herein lies my naivety i suppose. :)

>> As to your point about Catholic schools... do you think that a Catholic school ought to be a place where other religious teaching is tolerated? Do you think such a school ought to be required to teach Islam or Protestantism for example? Or, to take a popular topic at the moment, should a church be required to perform same-sex marriages?

no, my point was simply that public and Catholic schools were my only options. and fortunately one of them was suitable for my beliefs (whatever they may have been).

i didn't intend to suggest that forcing public schooling was the best, or even a good solution. but i'm wondering how we extract the logic from that argument without alienating anyone.

> Perhaps you don't realize this, but many parents choose not to use the public school system for religious reasons.

Tough. Between the fact that data shows that the religious schools produce sub-par academically trained students as well as promulgate a set of bigoted, intolerant social mores, yeah, I'm kind of against the idea of opting out for religious reasons.

Let's see how tolerant these "religious reasons" objectors are when the school has "Scientology" or "Madrassa" in its name.

"I feel like if we want to start addressing inequality in education, we have to start with private grade schools. In particular, I think that private high schools and grade schools should be stopped, and everyone should be forced to use the public system."

My three children are in public schools, although they all did KG and preschool in private schools. Since the government does not own our children, I don't think it has the right to compel our children to attend a certain school. Are you going to ban homeschooling too?

I went to public and private schools in NYC.

There's absolutely two tiers of private schools and the secular and protestant schools are on one (top) tier and the catholic ones are on another.

Many parents end up sending their children through catholic school because they would otherwise be (or have been) removed from public school for behavior or are not performing at their grade level. Many of my classmates' parents donated their childrens' way through school. I met a lot of kids who couldn't hack it but their parents exploited every trick to get their kid passed through unimpeded. After I finished things in the diocese got even worse.

Neither my public or private school experiences were very good. In fact, now that my former public school principal is now the NYDoE Chancellor of Schools I have no hope or positive feelings for the education of anyone in NY... ...unless you can test into the super-exclusive private & public schools.

NYC also has some of the best public schools in America, or anywhere. There is some saying to the effect that if the Bronx High School of Science were a country, it would rank very high on the list of countries for the science Nobels.

In general, I wonder how strong the correlation is between availability of private schools and disfunction in the public schools: low, I suspect. The Washington, DC, area has three very strong school districts: Montgomery and Howard Counties in Maryland, Fairfax County in Virginia. And there are four pretty fair public magnet high schools in Washington, DC. Yet side by side with excellent public schools there are private schools. And though I don't know this, I suspect that in places where the public schools are uniformly bad (not this neighborhood or that, but whole counties), the private schools aren't much better.

How exactly are parents going to "fix" bad public schools? That's like saying countries shouldn't accept refugees or grant political asylum so that those people could go back and "fix" the failed state they're trying to escape.

Well, shouldn't they?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com