I wonder what would happen if well-off folks worked at improving public schools rather than fleeing to private institutions.

Granted, I live in the midwest where public schools are, as a general rule, pretty good. One of the reasons we moved to the town we did though is that they have a unified school system. I heard too many of my more well-off acquaintances making offhand comments amounting to "oh, you don't want to move there. They go to the poor people school."

If you think good schools are a public good, put your family where your mouth is.

The reality as we have experienced it is that most public schools are just fine and if families simply sent their children there, the schools and community would benefit from the participation

Unfortunately there is no incentive to wait. I would expect most people would like public schools to be better but have no expectation they can influence them to be better in time for their kids to benefit so they'd separate the two issues. (1) send your kids to private school so you're not sacrificing them on principle (2) push for better public schools.

I wish I knew how to fix public schools. It certainly not with more money. IIRC the USA is in the top 10 on money spent per student. Arguably a bigger issue is all the other problems in areas with bad public schools like poverty and all the problems that come with it.

> I wish I knew how to fix public schools. It certainly not with more money.

IIRC "busing" is the most effective thing we've tried—wildly more successful than anything else—but approximately everyone (including a lot of people who weren't rich whites) hated it so we don't do it anymore.

Given that selection bias is a big part of what makes a typical "good" school good it's a hard problem to solve without some kind of social-engineering thing like that that mixes everyone up, though that comes with its own problems, especially if it's still possible to escape the system (moving even farther from the city to areas that aren't doing busing; private schools).

Very early (like... kindergarten or 1st grade) tracking or something like it would probably make mediocre schools more appealing for somewhat-well-off parents and counter the tendency of the rich-enough-to-leave but not-rich-enough-for-private-school set to flee the city when they have kids, since it'd isolate the good students from the bad to replicate some of what the suburban schools benefit from to let the "middle" and "high" cohorts do fairly well even at so-so schools, but there's pretty much zero chance the optics on that would be acceptable.

In my area (urban, educated south) we moved from a the "busing model" for integration, into a "magnet school" model. If a school is failing, reboot it as a "charter-like" school, with some attractive theme. It is still a public school, but now offers something unique the community (like robotics programs or mandarin immersion, arts programs in partners with the opera or state symphony, IB schools etc). Then it "attracts" interested parents across the district and becomes self-sustaining. The local population gets access to the improved school, and others have a lottery (or by other means with special rules for siblings and more).

It isn't perfect, but it seems like attracting interest via magnet programs works a lot better than throwing more money at failing schools or unequal access to charter schools.

You need to define what unified means, without that your comments are unclear. In many big cities there is one school district, but the school you go to is basically defined by the area you live in, you go to a school near your house. Thus you end up with segregated schools if you have segregation by race or income (ie rich people live in expensive housing that is grouped, and that school has better educated parents and they can give more support to it). You need to add integrated to that equation. I went to a school that was historically racist with clear separation in schools that reflected neighborhood separation. At some point there was court ordered integration - and that was a really good thing. Over time, after I left the area, richer and whiter people either moved out of the city to the county schools and/or sent their kids to private schools, so the old segregation was re-introduced.

> You need to define what unified means

Yea I realized after posting that the wording is probably not quite correct. What I meant is there is a single school that serves the entire district. Technically, there are several buildings, but they are broken up by grade elementary / middle / high schools.

> I wonder what would happen if well-off folks worked at improving public schools rather than fleeing to private institutions.

Where I grew up there was a gang fight at the public school where one student stabbed another.

Private schools are a bane to society. They mainly provide the well endowed separation from the less endowed, forming they're own clique which eventually creates a class system. Not to mention that they deplete the public system from talent, exasperating the class issues.

> Private schools are a bane to society.

Perhaps. In the US, there's the small matter of the 14th Amendment.

Private schooling in inherently exclusive. This is the prime motivator. It ensures their children will only have peers of a similar socioeconomic background.

I obviously can’t speak for the country as a whole, but at least in Milwaukee the schools in those areas are often fine to great, it’s the “school report cards” that are terrible.

The number one predictor of a school’s rating is the average income of its parents. Broadly speaking a rich kid at a mid-tier school will do just as well as a rich kid in a “good” school. City schools have poor kids and lower average test scores, but I don’t know anyone who chose the city schools by me and has regretted it.

> Broadly speaking a rich kid at a mid-tier school will do just as well as a rich kid in a “good” school.

This is somewhat true but it's missing a component I didn't realize was as important - you're getting relationships/networking even at these "good" schools. I know that sounds stupid but being around people of high socioeconomic status helps you learn unspoken signals and norms. On top of that - your peers will likely be going into high paying professions and will be able to help you make your way into that profession as well. Some people I know who went to these rich kid schools are happy that they did because it helped them. I rarely meet people who were like, "Yeah, going to that rich kid school was pointless. It had literally no effect on my life." I used to think I could just parent/teach my way out of any shit school and then I've watched my friends have kids. There's too much social stuff that can't be made up for by parents.

I'd be especially wary of putting a kid in a poor school. If you go to a poor school (rated or, especially, funded) then you will have to put in a lot more effort as a parent to get satisfactory results - and likely your kid will lose all childhood friendships as they age. People in poor schools frequently don't break out. If you're putting in the effort or your child is just generally exceptional then they'll break out... Which means they're leaving everyone behind and forging a path that none of their peers have done. It makes for an isolated experience and a really difficult one. If you've done it - great, you can help your kid but is that enjoyable? The programs for children who would be average or above average at a good school frequently don't exist at poor schools. Think AP courses, college credit, computer classes, advanced math and english, foreign language options, etc. I know because I had to go to a school that could only afford 4 days a week and that had to cut almost every elective. I've stayed in contact with no one from that region because... well, there's not much of a point. I haven't spoken to anyone from that school in close to 10 or so years and I'm not even 30.

That said - if you or your kid has no large ambitions or only ones that /somehow/ don't rely on any social components at all then it doesn't matter.

People find Brave New World's Betas and Gammas[1] to be evidence of dystopia, but my observation of the US school system is that by moving[2] to a specific ZIP+4, one attempts to influence one's viviparous children's lot in life by picking their friends' parents.

On the russian side, I'll make the preposterous claim that Crimea had to be "liberated", because otherwise how else were non-Moscow parents supposed to be able to send their kids to Artek[3] for the summer?

[1] undoubtedly thought of as an expansion on the 1966 system: https://twitter.com/johncleese/status/1254130854462455813

[2] what are current premiums for houses with "good schools?"

[3] https://artek.org

I have some experience with both sides of this picture. I grew up in a suburb with highly rated schools, and I'm raising my kid in a dense city with poorly rated schools. School ratings are (mostly) complete bullshit. My school left me completely unprepared for facing the real world. I literally had history teachers that taught me that the civil war wasn't about slavery. Every teacher I had taught to the test, and this was decades before NCLB.

Meanwhile, my child who is in a medium rated school in a poorly rated school district is learning critical thinking skills that I didn't even know were necessary until I started flunking out of college. As a second grader, he not only can keep up with math and science and writing standards for his age group, but he can actually apply it: I'm constantly seeing him take real world problems and figure out how to use something he learned in school to solve that problem, whether by building a mental mathematical model or designing an experiment, or using a resource like a dictionary to help him understand a word he doesn't know. My world was never like that...I thought of school as an intake of knowledge that had to be memorized, not as a way of learning.

I'm not putting these motivations into your mouth, but I get the feeling like school ratings are merely a subconscious correlation with whiteness, and as long as you aren't completely checked out from your child's life, you can ignore them completely.