Reddit reviews The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools

>> Have a source for how they 'perform worse'? By what metric are you measuring performance? The guy you were replying to wasn't saying that the education an average child receives was the best, but that the best education in the world that money can buy is in the US.

And that's absurd. You can't have an education system that only serves the privileged few, education is a god damn human right and does nothing but improve this country.


>> Citation needed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/15/education/15report.html

Private schools don't even outperform public schools in America when you account for factors.

https://www.amazon.com/Public-School-Advantage-Schools-Outperform/dp/022608891X

This is one of several attacks on the finding that public schools outperform private schools when student SES is accounted for, that was documented in the book The Public School Advantage. These attacks do nothing to dis-prove the findings of this book. One of the authors of the book provides a thorough rebuttal to the attacks here. So, no private schools don't beat public schools.

My public school was awesome. Great physics, science, math, computers, language, technology, and history educations. (graduated mid 00's) Ended up in a top university.

Know why? I lived in middle class neighborhood in a rich area of town. Schools are funded largely by local property taxes. Poor places tend to have worse schools. A great example of this is 2 elementary schools in the city of Atlanta: Morningside Elementary School, one of the best schools in the entire state, and Thomasville Park Elementary school, one of the worst in the entire state. They are both part of the Atlanta Public Schools district. One resides in the dilapidated old industrial south part of town. The other resides in the northern, office-based, commercial, and residential part of town. I'm sure I don't need to tell you which is which.

This pattern is repeated across the nation. Poor places have bad schools, well off places have great schools. Given this, do you really think that poor places are going to just grassroots fund their way into great private schools if public schools are taken away?

>You need not ask if your policy feels good, but does it do good. In other words, does it work? Social education doesn't work for the same reason no other bureaucratically managed industries work - they lack proper incentives and controls to innovate and self-manage efficiency.

This just doesn't seem to be true. In the past decade, a bevy of new research has shown that private schools do not actually produce better outcomes. This book is a deep examination of data that shows this. You can find gobs more information out there, including the foot notes and references in that book.

I guess I still don't think the ideas you're proposing are going to educate everyone, though I certainly think we could agree upon the fact that they ARE over-regulated with the endless testing and metricization and focus on memorization rather than teacher certification/trust, reasonable pay, and training students to think and learn problem solving skills.

>Are there asshole parents out there that are going to buy a new car instead of send their kids to school? Sure. But you can't get hung up on this as a reason to make ineffective decisions based on appeals to emotion.

Isn't that what you're doing when you say government schools are producing uneducated people who are destroying the west? "Oh my god, destroying the west? We have to get rid of public schools now!"

> No government welfare program can even hold a candle to the Red Cross

The US Military seems to do a pretty kickass job of being there for disasters that happen across the world.

>The absolute most effective mechanisms for social welfare are private institutions - hands down.

After Reagan gutted the public mental healthcare system (an admittedly primitive system, but one that at least attempted to help the most likely to recover to do so) the only private system to spring up has been those based on exorbitant profit which the majority of Americans cannot afford.

>Why is it you put so much trust in a group of people that has little accountability and no incentives? The market has these - put your trust there.

This seems farcical. Some serious mistakes were made at the founding of the country (and many on the way to now) that prevent us from truly holding our elected officials accountable, including but not limited to: non-enforcement of increased representative count with larger populations, FPTP elections (for some positions), allowance for arbitrary and politically motivated district allocation, and others. In the early 1920's onward, after a pushback against the guilded age corruption from the 1880s to the 1920s, the increased involvement of money in politics, allowed by the justice system, and codified by the judicial branch, has led to our officials becoming beholden to moneyed interests, instead of the people.

I think we could if we make a few changes so that the system is a bit more accountable to us, rather than those with gobs of money - which leads me to...

As for the market - we've seen what happens when the market allows companies to act uninhibited - they attempt to maximize profit at the expense of anything that gets in their way: they permanently contaminate large swathes of land ( here), they pollute water supplies indiscriminately ( [here] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes#Pollution) and (here), they kill people via food for profit (here and here), they kill those that get in their way (here), they poison vast swathes of the world (here). I could go on. So I ask you: what makes you place your trust in opaque capital market entities that pursue profit at all costs rather than the one entity in society that isn't driven entirely by never-ending increase in profit regardless of the consequences?

>Ask yourself honestly, which are you?

Definitely a 1, I'm just trying to get by while leeches like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamara_Ecclestone and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump inherit billions of dollars and don't have to do an honest day's work in their lives to live in the lap of luxury.

Given a more equitable society I would love to do hands on work with children, but it's just not possible if one wants to escape the trap of labor exploitation and one day be able to pursue such works.