> In other words, for parents of private school students, the value of in-person learning is clear, and the schools are delivering it.

There's nothing surprising about that. You have a group of parents with money and a desire to educate their children in a particular way, so they went ahead and spent the necessary money and put in the necessary time to make it happen. That doesn't help much for the parents that have to send their kids to an underfunded public school in a big city.

The thing is, these schools in some cases do not charge a lot more than the funding allocated to the local public schools.

What they do have obviously is incredibly flexibility and there really was no option in folks mind to cancel all in person learning. So they just do everything they can, small pods / cohorts, split schedules for recess, split day schedules even and all the other steps.

So I wouldn't say money, but the time and decision velocity was there. Teachers WERE going to be teaching, and the admin (with teachers and parent council) basically said, how do we make this work.

The secondary win was that this let parents work from home! So they could stay home in peace and quiet and avoid spreading stuff around.

I'm seriously curious what the larger model of learn from home was in public schools? How do these parents work and progress vis a vis their colleagues who send their kids to in-person learning?

The folks I know with kids in school actually did very well career wise, they were 100% on it for remote work, got lots done without commute or kids or if on an in-person job were 100% there (usually with an N95 mask if school demanded that).

If anything, if folks were struggling you'd think in person would be even MORE critical for both parents and kids.

Note that my local suburban public school has TONS of field space outside to set up some tents and outside classrooms.

Some links as to what this looks like sometimes:

https://www.greenschoolyards.org/covid-learn-outside

Private schools that did well with in-person learning last year could take measures public schools couldn't, and had much better compliance rates for things like masking and distancing. For instance, parents wouldn't let public schools suspend sports programs. There'd have been actual, physical violence if that'd been seriously attempted, lots of places. Private schools? Might be a thing they could do (and many did). Many public schools have to deal with kids who couldn't be trusted in outdoor classrooms, or face parent agitation when they take kids outside in anything but perfect weather (this is a weird phenomenon I've seen repeated at a couple private schools vs. public schools in the same area—the private-school goers want their kids out unless the weather's so bad they'll lose fingers to it even if they're bundled up, or there's an intense thunderstorm or something, while the public schools have been cowed into only taking kids out if the weather's quite good; I don't know what causes this).

Private schools could plan better because, despite supposedly being more beholden to their paying customers then public schools are to their constituent families, in practice they seem to have an easier time saying "nope, this is how we're doing it, deal with it", for whatever reason. They didn't have to pay any mind to morons trying to strip all protective measures every time "the numbers" started to look a little better, or lose planning time & focus to misguided planning for those sorts of things.

Private schools may already have had things like longer and more recesses than nearby public schools, so already spent a larger portion of the day outside—public schools have cut recess down to almost nothing, chasing those sweet, sweet test scores.

Private schools also may have had both the money and the leadership to get things like ventilation improvements or other expensive measures done fast. Public schools were crippled by indecision, and various factions pushing for things to go "back to normal" ASAP, fighting any spending or policies that acknowledged this would be a problem for more than a very small number of months and trying to deal with it in those terms.

We looked at a private school, but ultimately opted for virtual K. The other thing this private school had going for it was class size. Way smaller than what public schools have to put up with.

> You have a group of parents with money and a desire to educate their children in a particular way, so they went ahead and spent the necessary money and put in the necessary time to make it happen.

I don't even think it's a matter of money, but you nailed it on the head with the desire part. Some public schools actually get more funding than private ones...

Private schools get to filter out applicants. They only get applicants from families that are interested in education (and willing to spend a little bit more on it than average) and they are allowed to expel students that are not compliant.

That significantly lightens the teacher's workload and makes it easier for them to adapt.

Keep in mind in a public school classroom there will be a percentage of kids that don't want to be there and that will disrupt at much as they can no matter what. And, thanks to the Pareto rule, probably get 80% of the teacher's attention and energy. Some magnets schools manages to bypass that, but they are slowly being shamed and bullied into not doing [0].

[0] https://thelowell.org/8815/news/board-of-education-announces...

I think there have been enough studies now to show that the problem with most public schools in the U.S. have little or nothing to do with underfunding. Thomas Sowell's recent book, "Charter Schools and their enemies", shows that Charter schools with less funding can insanely outperform public schools they compete with in inner cities, even though the public schools have more funding per student.

https://www.amazon.com/Charter-Schools-Enemies-Thomas-Sowell...

I have not read Sowell's book. Do you know how he addresses the issue of self-selection? For example, with cost: Some kinds of students require orders of magnitude more resources than others due to health/behavioral/developmental/poverty-related issues. A school that is able to attract specific families or expel specific students should logically attempt to minimize the number of these kinds of students and therefore we would expect them to have significantly lower "per pupil" costs than average. Comparing such a school to one that must accept all students is an apples-to-oranges comparison.

As a personal anecdote I used to manage an academic department that was highly ranked. I'm proud of the faculty and curriculum but to be perfectly frank the biggest factor in our success was that our ranking attracted top-tier applicants. At the level we were at, the differences between us and similar institutions mostly boiled down to that initial self-selection.

He addresses all of self-selection, demographics, and discipline directly in the book, if I remember accurately.

First, to address self-selection as a primary cause, Sowell specifically compares the outcomes of students who won the charter school lottery versus those who didn't, and shows the performance gap between public and charter schools remains even when only considering students who entered the lottery.

Second, Sowell purposely compares schools that have as similar demographics as possible, including racial makeup and economic status. He also attempts to control for location differences by comparing schools that are co-located in the same building or are located within a small distance of each other.

Finally, he specifically calls out charter schools' ability to enforce stronger discipline and even expel students as a distinct competitive advantage, one that the teachers unions recognize and are trying to undermine. He also believes that relaxing discipline in the name of reducing disparate outcome among identity groups has a direct causal effect on worsened education in public schools.

To me, with regards to discipline, the lesson to be learned is that public schools need to be empowered to enforce stricter discipline as well. There is no justice or fairness in allowing a small minority to disrupt the education of a willing majority. A few of the discipline-related anecdotes Sowell shares in his book are heart-wrenching, including one story of a student punching a pregnant teacher in the stomach, telling her he was going to punch the baby right out of her, and finally returning to school the next day with no imposed consequences for his violent behavior. I don't know how any student could learn in an environment like that.

With respect to cost, I'm not sure any of these points refute the hypothesis that charters cost less per pupil primarily because they are able to offload the most expensive students. And if that is true then increasing the number of charter schools will simply increase the concentration of the most expensive students into fewer schools that have less funding to deal with them. At that point we can either acknowledge that expensive students require an order of magnitude more money or we let them pass through to the welfare and justice systems. In either case it doesn't seem like we're saving society money by switching to charters, we're just shifting it to other parts of the budget.

With respect to educational opportunities that seems more compelling. But as Sowell alludes, I suspect you could get a similar effect by allowing public schools to enforce stronger discipline and make it easier to suspend or expel difficult students. On that note I'm surprised to hear that teachers unions are opposed to that now. I've certainly heard that unions are an obstacle to getting rid of poor-performing teachers, but I rarely hear of them being an obstacle to dealing with difficult students. At least a couple decades ago the AFT was actively pushing to make it easier to expel students for things like drugs or weapons in school.

So I think an underlying assumption you have that I want to scrutinize is that misbehaving students are costlier from a monetary perspective, or that they require more money spent to handle them, or that spending more money will result in better outcomes for these students. This assumption may or may not be true, but I think it is valuable to question it and expect some evidence to support it. For instance, it is quite possible that stricter and more rigorous discipline in schools could benefit misbehaving students far more than any spending increase in the school system. Likewise, there may be certain cultural norms or expectations in charter schools that have far more impact on misbehaving students than spending increases.

I think the far more important point, however is that some charter schools are working phenomenally well for the underprivileged and doing so with less funding, and that there are valuable lessons to be learned from that fact, which lessons are at risk of being ignored or lost. However, instead of either trying to learn from these charter schools or allow more of them to be created, teacher's unions and the government officials they support via campaign funds are openly hostile to them, as the book details. These adults are clearly acting in their best interests, not in the interests of the children they are claiming to serve.

With regard to government policy in general, there seems to be a complete disincentive to analyze policy in retrospect honestly, determine successes and failures, and learn from the past in order to influence future decisions. With government policy, intent often matters more than results, as intent earns votes. This can easily lead to perverse incentives.

As an example, it's easy to claim good intent when proposing to spend more money on schools. But, if we want to actually help children out, results matter more than intent, and it seems very clear that, past a certain point, pouring more money into the public school system has little to no impact on educational outcomes. Instead, we should both be looking at other factors, and we should be allowing for more competition so that we can iterate on more ideas more rapidly. The relative monoculture of the public school system, combined with perverse incentives among both the government and teacher's unions, seem unhealthy for society and for our children.

To be clear, I am not arguing in favor of teachers unions or short-sighted politicians. I am not arguing that our education dollars are being well-spent since it is clear that we are spending more to get worse results. I am not arguing that increased funding has a bigger impact than improving discipline.

But it does seem logical to me that given a set of students, some of them will end up costing more than others. To give a trivial example, a student who repeats a grade costs more to educate than a student who skips a grade, just by virtue of spending an extra two years in the system. Similarly, it seems logical to me that students who can't afford lunch, need additional ESL or special-needs teachers, are physically handicapped, are violent, etc will cost more than the average student. (And sure, kicking that violent kid out lowers your costs, but it simply shifts that cost to the juvenile detention system.) Assuming the above is true, any school that is able to attract slightly more low-cost students or discourage slightly more high-cost students (however they are able to do so) should enjoy substantial cost savings.

> some charter schools are working phenomenally well for the underprivileged and doing so with less funding

I do not dispute that there are positive examples. From the statistical analysis I can find the overall effects seem mixed: in some states charter-school students do better (on average) than public school students, in some states worse, and in some states like Ohio there's simply more variance between charter school students. And since I do not know is what this effect is due to I'm not sure to what degree this approach scales. For example, do charter schools work equally well in a region where there are no more public schools left for them to dump difficult students onto?

One way to test this would be to randomly assign a population of students into a public school system and a charter school system, give them the same funding, and require that each system accommodate even the most difficult students who have special needs or disciplinary issues. (Not necessarily in the same classes, just that they are responsible for their education.) If charter schools have better educational outcomes in such an experiment then I would find that truly compelling.

I think it's absolutely useful that states are taking such different approaches to charter schools though, and I think eventually that will give us the data we're looking for.

Public charter schools can't pick and choose their students the way private schools do. They have to take students with special needs, discipline problems, etc. Expulsions can only be done in extreme circumstances.

The real advantage of charter schools is parent engagement. Parents usually have to specifically ask for their children to be placed into charter schools. That's a signal that the parents take education seriously and will impose some discipline on the children.

The US spending is on a per student basis is on par with other OECD nations[0], it is incumbent upon the teachers unions and department of education to explain why they can not achieve what the rest of the world has with the same funds, not the taxpayer to throw more money onto the bonfire.

[0]https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd

US schools serve as a de-facto provider of social services. Think free lunches and breakfast, school nurses, screening for disease/disabilities, sports and multitudes of after school activities to keep kids occupies until parents return, transportation to/from school, etc. Those services are a separate line-item i (I imagine) every other country.

A better and more instructive comparison would be money spent only on instruction, adjusted for PPP and maybe student poverty.

I can't find that data, but I doubt that a couple of minimum wage lunch ladies and a school nurse are why our schools have to cost twice as much as everywhere else. Other nations provide transportation as well, all of Europe doesn't live in areas with public transit, despite that perception.

As for sports, if sports aren't moving the needle academically then we shouldn't be funding them. If other nations priotized education over sport, and got better results we should learn from them.

Just throwing more money at probably won't do anything, what is likely is that they will double down on the strategies that aren't working.

My point is that its not as simple as concluding the US wastes money and is ineffective at teaching. The schools in the US do a lot more than instruction, and work with a different set of students.

We certainly could learn from what works around the world, but comparing raw numbers is simply not helpful.

We can also learn from what works in different states. For instance, Massachusetts, as a state, has PISA scores that are on par with the best in the world.

I just don't see a basis for calling them categorically underfunded.

For example, New York State has the highest spending per student $24,040 and is ranked 14th in this survey[0] while Virginia is ranked fourth and only spends $12,216. Massachusetts spends $17,058 and tops the list.

A honest look at the school system may reveal that some parts of it are underfunded, but it will likely also reveal parts that are overfunded. I suspect a lot of progress can be made by being better stewards of the money they currently have, and therefore suggest starting there. Ultimately any taxes come from the wallets of families supporting the children we are trying to help here, making them poorer needs to show benefit to be justified.

[0]https://wallethub.com/edu/e/states-with-the-best-schools/533...