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Comment by nmrm | Hacker News Reader

> Just abolish public schools

This suggestion is highly inconsistent with the data from the article.

Every nation out-performing the United States has a strong and well-funded public school system. Although some have a hybrid model, the hybrid models favor public schools over private schools. And hybrid models hardly constitute "abolishing".

There is also a strong correlation between states (in the US) with high per-pupil spending and states which out-perform the US average [1].

> but every segment of the population will be catered to by price, taste and other preferences.

"Same quality, lower price"? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

[1] I am comparing Fig. 1 of the article with the table titled "Current Spending per Pupil" on this page: http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-educa...

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Can we define strong? What does well funded mean? How do achievements of students in public schools vs private schools in all the out performing nations compare? How do they compare between nations? And to the US? Were the students normalized before we compare per capita spending vs achievement by state? How? What factors were not considered? Without answering these and many other questions, most of this data is useless and pretty much exemplifies the pitfalls of aggregate statistics.

We absolutely do /not/ need to answer all those questions before we can conclude that countries out-performing the United States have significant public school systems.

The other correlation I pointed out does deserve scrutiny, but data-driven decision making is not impossible and this data isn't nearly as bad as you claim. The correlation between high per pupil spending and educational outcomes is not a ground truth and does not hold universally. However, it does hold with surprising consistency throughout time and space).

As an aside: you initially claimed that abolishing public schools will solve our performance problems. You provided zero empirical evidence. It's not even possible to compare the evidence for and against your claim, because you literally provided no evidence.

You're holding other people's opinions to a ridiculously high standard of rigor while selling your own as self-evident.

If the state of affairs is really this bad, if it is impossible to obtain good data and make reasonable predictions based on that data, then your initial post could be nothing except blind faith.

As far as I know, the hate towards public education in US is unique to western countries.

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