There is some nuance missing in your claims too. Those productive world-competitive people more than likely did not go through the public school system in the US. They tend to have had a great deal of socio-economic advantage. The US is the richest global power, so it makes perfect sense that there are a lot of people who have such advantages in the US.

> Those productive world-competitive people more than likely did not go through the public school system in the US.

That is highly unlikely. Even at elite Ivy universities, a majority of students attended public high schools.

Public education is a lot better than people give it credit for. There's wide variation in quality but there are certainly plenty of excellent public schools available.

Public education is good in the areas where the upper middle class live.

Old Greenwich, Cos Cob, and Riverside have great public schools because that's where all the IT professionals, quants, and middle managers move to raise their families. Those districts have access to many adults with an interest and ability to participate in the school community, and so the district ends up with a lot of extra resources.

But the hedge fund upper management send their kids to Brunswick School, Sacred Heart, and the like, and the district on the super rich and the poorer, primarily-Hispanic sides of town, has a poorer reputation.

That correlation seems to exist, but that doesn't mean public education can't be good in economically challenged regions. I went to public school from grade 4–12 in West Virginia (ranked 49th out of 50 states by GDP/capita), and most of our graduating classes of ~250 had 10–20 students get into Ivy league or top 20 universities.

Based on my experience in high school, the opportunities for a good education were there, but not every student took advantage of them (or was able to take advantage of them). While the public school system has its flaws, the problems with education in the US are multi-factorial. We could do better by having more teachers and funding for schools and modifying our system for educating kids, but we'll hit a ceiling unless we also improve the quality of family life for students at home as well as the US' cultural attitudes towards education.

The correlation is there, but I'm not convinced about causality. I know people pay good money to buy properties near a good public school... so, I suspect it's not that "public schools are great where upper middle class live", but that upper middle class moved where great public schools are.

I think it's a feedback loop.

It's a loop. In many areas, schools are funded by property taxes, so higher property value leads to more funding for the school, which leads to perception of better school, which drives more people to want to live there, which produces higher property values, which...

That doesn't fully explain it though. Many of the worst schools also have some of the most funding per student.

Possibly, but in any case the problem isn't that public schools are flawed as a concept, but rather that some of USA public schools are bad. If many of these schools run on the same set of general principles and processes (although often with more funding) but work, the problem is not with the concept or goal but rather with the particular (some) implementations, some of the managers, or (mis)allocation of resources.

And they moved to where there are many other upper middle class families who are very involved in their children's education. As a result, you see schools with good metrics on standardized tests and the like even though the per pupil spend is not uncommonly less than that in urban schools with poorer metrics.

Public school funding in the US is probably the most inequitable in the developed world. Not only does each state decide its funding and taxes, but smaller local areas do too. High home values => high property taxes => more school funding.

Districts like that don't get "extra resources" or any material benefit to kids' education from parental participation. The kids are spending all day sitting in classrooms with public school teachers just like any other district.

"Public" education in upper-class, predominantly white/Asian neighborhoods, with property taxes funnelling in significant money are hardly "public" in the grand scheme of things.

For example: Stuyvesant is a public high school. But is it actually? There's a 3 hour test you take in order to be admitted. 900 or so kids are admitted. How is this "public?"

> There's a 3 hour test you take in order to be admitted. 900 or so kids are admitted.

There is nothing wrong in segregating kids based on their ability. Public universities use tests to take the best kids and this should happen at all levels. A black kid who is smart should not be held back just because he lives in bad neighborhood. He should get into a better school if he can score more.

The black kid who lived in the bad neighbourhood can't make it into Stuy because they already fell behind by going to their local elementary school. So now what, you want to test 4 year olds to see what school they deserve to be in?

> you want to test 4 year olds to see what school they deserve to be in?

Yes. That is how it happens in urban India. Even for nursery admissions schools interview both the kid and parents to see if they have potential.

> A black kid who is smart should not be held back just because he lives in bad neighborhood. He should get into a better school if he can score more.

You are right, he should. But he is statistically very much likely not to based on his upbringing and systemic discrimination.

Okay then he should do something else.

In what way does having an entrance exam make a school non-public? Are state universities not actually public because they have admissions standards?

Yeah, and very few brown children end up being in that 900, wonder how that is?

There also are plenty of good public schools and plenty of successful people who went to public schools.

Schools are not all the same, you know? The only thing you can say without diving into the statistics is that it depends on when and where you went.

First, plenty of people succeed despite public school, not because of it.

Second, how do you define success? If you define success in terms of money, education and intelligence play a very, very small role. The correlation of financial success to who you know and who you are related to is orders of magnitude higher than how smart you are or how much knowledge you have. The vast majority of PHDs are much more intelligent and educated that the vast majority of millionaires.

You could mathematically prove that the return from providing free education in terms of the incoming taxes from an extremely educated and capable working population will outweigh any benefits from effectively strapping people down into indentured servitude. How many jobs are being lost because would be job creators are locked into something less than their full potential to service these kind of exploitation loans? How many more businesses and jobs would be developed if we didn't have Sallie Mae vampiring a huge chunk of productive potential?

Alternatively, education level is just used as a proxy for other forms of discrimination. If X is free they will just require X + 1, so free public education will simply reduce the number of productive years as people spend ever more time being educated.

That's really only true if the multiplier is less than 1/30 per year of school, eg 3.3%. I have no data on this but I'm betting a year of college is higher.

In some cases that is already not true. For example Medicine and law.

Your academic training ends late in life. And therefore you have to charge higher and higher to make up for your investments. And of course, for the student loans too.

So law degree nor medical degree is not a 20x multiplier on productivity of a highschool graduate?

A high school graduate capable of getting a medical degree != a normal high school graduate. Further, doctors are an artificially constrained supply which vastly increases pay vs. other progressions. In many counties they make comparable salaries to US programmers which don't need collage degrees.

A Law degree from a 3rd rate school on the other hand is not so constrained and outside of 'top' schools which again are a limited supply tend to have minimal benefit.

How much lower would the premium for an educated worker be if college became the new high school?

I’d also support free college, but I’d expect all wages to fall accordingly. Or for the loan situation to repeat itself, this time to pay the income taxes on tuition waivers for grad school, as a masters or PhD becomes necessary to set yourself apart in the labor market.

You might find this article interesting [1]. Although free tuition caused enrollment to rise 22%, still German "university graduates earn 40% more than those with a vocational education." And "making tuition free hasn’t led to any noticeable change in the demographics of who goes to college," partly because living expenses aren't free.

[1] Jon Marcus, "Germany proves tuition-free college is not a silver bullet for America’s education woes" https://qz.com/812200/is-free-college-possible-germany-shows...

Are those minds the products of public schools, especially in the era where increased standardized testing has worked to hold back the best teachers from doing their jobs as well as many here will probably remember their favorite instructors doing?

Or are they a product of culture, from their parents and society at large, pushing them to accel independently of public education?

Education has always been mostly about culture and family (and individual interest/motivation) as opposed to any specific role of public education if all of those things are lacking.

IMO, the standardized testing bugbear is at least partly a red herring. An excessive focus on teaching to the test is bad; I'm sure we can all agree. But it's worth remembering that the increased focus on standardized testing grew out of a system where accountability and metrics of any sort were pretty much a four-letter word.