Instead of paying $12,000/kid/year you could just send them to public school.

Or maybe get vouchers or tax refund for that dumpster fire.

I think that's defeats the purpose of public school. As a society, we decided we need to collectively contribute to every child's education, regardless if they are own. I have no kids, but I pay my school taxes so that other people's children can have an education.

Paying for other children's education gives you benefits like lesser crime and will keep the value of your property high.

And the continuation of modern civilisation to boot!

The parent wasn’t disagreeing with the collective payment responsibility (and I don’t know where you got that), only with the public school model that gives no choice as to which schools the money is spent at.

Suggesting a tax refund is pretty clearly proposing they should not have to fund public schools.

I fully support a public education but in the US, the school system is massively overloaded. We blame schools for everything and schools are all too eager to accept responsibility for anything and everything.

School athletics programs paying for huge multimillion dollar stadiums should not be possible. And on that topic, independent school districts should not exist. One state, one school district. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Stadium_(Allen,_Texas)

Refund or voucher to the parent suffering it. Still not seeing how you went from that to “don’t you understand that non-parents should fund public schools?” The premise is that those hurt by it, parents, recover money to otherwise educate their kids. Nowhere in that was a claim that the childless should get money back for being childless, so I don’t see how addressing that is responsive.

I think you’re saying that If your kids are not using the service, then you should not pay the tax.

This doesn’t sound any different from someone having no kids, not using the service, and expecting a refund.

No, they're hugely different. One of them accepts that the state should still be paying for education of children regardless of whether your personally have children -- just with better options than failed public schools. Which is why lectures about how "we should all be paying for kids' education" is very unresponsive. Which is why I said so. And have not yet gotten a substantive reply that addresses the criticism.

The majority of private schools are religious. We don't usually let tax money go to religions.

Like Notre Dame and Brigham Young?

I’m still not understanding your point.

I must pay for socialized education regardless if I use the service. I might choose to not use this service because I lack children or I may choose a different provider. But this doesn’t mean I don’t have to pay my taxes if I don’t want to use a gov service.

What makes adults with kids special that they don’t have to pay this tax when they don’t want to use the service?

But I don’t care if their kids use it. They are not funding their child, they are funding the system of public education.

Which vouchers are. Why is this so hard to understand?

No, they aren't. Perhaps you're having trouble telling the difference between people who don't understand your argument and people who disagree with it?

You would not pay those taxes if they were optional. Most wouldn't anyways. Most people live in a paycheck to paycheck world and would love to get a free pass on that tax bill.

"We" also have not really decided anything as a society but were born into the decisions of prior generations and it could be changed. See Roe v Wade, marijuana, etc.

The purpose of a public school is the opportunity to educate children at little to no out of pocket cost. It has nothing to do with specifics of the tax system, or whether a voucher program exists.

Also, if you are American, voluntarily donating money without oversight to a local school has as much return as breast cancer awareness.

How is a voucher not collectively contributing to every child's education?

If you give your kids a stable home they will do fine in public school

I don't get a refund for having no kids in public school. Why would anyone else?

Having been through public school in the U.S., I would not send my own child to one if I had any other choice.

Then you went to a bad public school.

The way you say this implies that there's some easy way to move your kids from a bad public school to a good public school. This is of course laughably wrong, since moving schools requires buying a home in a nicer/more expensive area.

If you’re sending 3 kids to private school for $1000/month each, you could afford instead another $400k of mortgage or so on top of what your mortgage already is with todays interest rates.

That’s almost as much as the median home in America. So assuming you already live in the median home, you could send your kids to private school, or you could buy a house that’s twice as expensive.

Where I grew up, the median home is less than the national median, and the public schools are pretty good.

No, I went to three bad public schools.

And people I know went to many bad public schools.

I on the other hand went to public school and would send my children to one. Anecdotally, some of the most successful people I know went to public school, many of which had parents that could easily afford to send them to private school.

As someone who went to public school and is doing just fine, I am wondering why that's not the solution.

Selection bias? The person who who went to public school and didn’t do fine is not so likely to be posting on HN?

Try again lol, plenty of people on here probably had varying experiences in public schools and came out just fine, and some are struggling.

Yo, don't @ me. And yes, those of us with poor public school experiences are here on HN.

Went to public until 5th then private school through HS, all were dumpster fires in their own way. Just my .02, and while this was over a decade ago, I'm inclined to believe shitty and free is better than shitty and expensive. If your kids are even remotely motivated and smart, what they do outside school is 10,000x more important so might as well put the money towards that.

Where I grew up public schools were measurably worse than alternatives. Using objective metrics like average number of gang wars in a given year.

Since there's something like 100k public schools in the US, with very different performance and governments in charge, I don't think people here are really in a position to judge someone's parenting choices over the internets.

Also by the way, public universities run about 12k/year, so they may well have their children in public school.

Yeah you raise a good point, I was in a city with generally serviceable schools. Really, I just tend to get frustrated at the belief system that all public schools are awful and any good parent should send their kids to private school. Even when the public option is ok we can't have our kids hanging out with the prole kids.

Even when they hand with the proles, they get their real education at afterschool private programs.

This is still just one data point. Can you compare your public HS experience to your private HS experience? Can you compare public school A to public school B? Private A to private B?

A school being private doesn't magically make it great. It has to still work hard for that. A public school being good requires hard work too. But let's be honest, usually it boils down to parent involvement which is usually fueled by economic status. Rich(er) people have time and/or resources to actually be involved in their kids lives. They also tend to have fewer kids so more time/resources per kid. The initial thing a private school does these days is pool the rich(er) cohort of kids together.

I live in a part of my city known as the 'private school corridor' because there are so many. And, the public schools are notoriously horrible in the city's ISD. So, it's pretty much required if you have the means. The other alternative is to move to a suburb (different ISD), but even those are pretty easily seen as correlating good school districts with high home prices. Yet, I've seen studies in my area that say if everyone sent their private schooled kids to the public schools they would average out and be pretty well rated. But it's a first mover disadvantage to do so, so nobody does.

I also live in the south and this whole private school thing really started during integration, so there's that whole issue to contend with too. The impacts of red lining and white flight are pretty stark here. I don't think it's the motivating factor for most people any more, but inertia.

This is why our public schools have stats like "5% white" and "86% low income" on Great Schools. 5% white seems really low, the city is ~56% based on another google search.

> Rich(er) people have time and/or resources to actually be involved in their kids lives.

More commonly, to pay other people to be involved.

I'm sure the vast majority on HN went to public school. In my country only the absolute elite such as monarchs go to private school.

The majority of HN was schooled in USA.

My kids school called us in for a meeting. My son froze up on tests. They had a standardized test coming up, and they wanted to label my son as illiterate so that he could have someone with him while he took the test, they thought that would help him do better. To be clear my son could read just fine and he just froze up on tests. Both of my children were placed in private school that week. The sad thing is we were the super involved parents, donated a ton of time and supplies, coats/gloves/hats to the coat drives to make sure the kids didn't go without, etc. But I'll be damned if you are going to label and stigmatize my child because standardized test scores are your true priority.

The private school never had a test?

The private schools priority was education. They had the normal tests on the subject matter taught, and may have been required to do the federal government standardized tests used to judge schools, but they did not focus on those tests results. They focused on education, not federal/state government standardized tests.

test taking is a skill you should be working with him on.

Does he have some sort of generalized anxiety? Like it or not, an inability to take tests is going to negatively affect his life.

My impression (from across the pond) is that the quality of public schools can vary quite a bit, because they're funded by local property taxes, which means schools in rich neighbourhoods have better funding than those in poor neighbourhoods.

And I have no idea how much freedom Americans have to choose which public school to send their kids to.

By comparison, all Dutch schools receive the same funding, whether public or private, have roughly the same quality and are subject to the same standards, and people are mostly free to choose which school to send their kids to. (I think in Amsterdam, some primary schools have a certain postal code area from which they accept students, and for secondary schools there's a massive ranked lottery system where a small percentage of kids do not end up in one of their top-3 preferred schools.)

> My impression (from across the pond) is that the quality of public schools can vary quite a bit, because they're funded by local property taxes

Sort of.

Per Wikipedia:

The largest source of funding for elementary and secondary education comes from state government aid, followed by local contributions (primarily property taxes)

As a side note, my city passed a $70 million dollar bond to build a new elementary and middle school. The school is currently ranked in the bottom 5% in the state.

Also:

Schools in the United States spend an average of $16,993 per pupil, which is the 7th-highest amount per pupil (after adjusting to local currency values) among the 37 other developed nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)

$3,000 seems like a bargain by comparison.

> That’s a second mortgage.

Sounds like student loans.

@anonreeeeplor spend less on candles

Do you have a spouse? You might be worried about public school quality, but at some point it would be cheaper to just have the spouse stay at home and home school.

Not to forget that OP could do the home schooling and the spouse keeps working.

Homeschooling is like a second job, though. One where you can't bullshit and lie your way through it.

and where you don't get paid and which doesn't give you any credit on your CV when you go to look for your next job and where you don't get any social security benefits.

I don't think the OE crowd is loading up their CVs with these concurrent jobs. And kids are the original social security.

If you can snag a WFH job, you can homeschool after grade 5 pretty easily. School is half daycare and a lot of students doing work, and half foller topics you don't need to study.

This is the way to do it IMO. I've worked with people with kids and OE people. The people with kids aren't double-dipping dragasses.

Except the stay at home spouse doesn't get any pension/social security benefits from this, plus it tanks their career with massive impact on future earnings.

SS is split with a partner.

That makes the spouse financially dependent on the partner for life, which can be a bad situation.

Nope. You get the same social security benefits (50% of what the earning spouse would get at your age) after divorce if you were married for at least 10 years.

They get 50% of their spouse's benefits at that age.

As long as they were married for at least 10 years.

Huh? Why would the spouse do it instead of OP?

And why do you think having a full-time tutor is cheaper than group care at a school?

Potentially OP could do it. But from the wording of the comment, it sounds like OP is the main earner in the household, so if they have a spouse then the net income opportunity cost from not working would be lower for the spouse.

As to why it's cheaper, that's a calculation they have to make. If the spouse's net income (looking at marginal tax rates) is greater than 3k a month, then it's not cheaper.

Not to pick on you but that attitude infuriates me and belittles teachers.

You seem to imply that “anyone” can be an effective teacher. That’s simply not true. Plus many children react much better to people outside the house. I was definitely that way. And my wife has many amazing qualities but she would make a horrendous teacher.

I mean, the teacher quality varies a lot, and the average teacher is unlikely to be smart enough to teach the child of a HN commenter optimally, so it's not hard to match their effectiveness.

> School must get paid for.

You pay for it with your taxes. It's a lifestyle choice if you want to send your kids to a private institution when public school is already covered.

I hope that doesn't come across as rude, because that's not my intention. But private school is not some necessity of life that you're forced to pay for -- definitely not "literally impossible" to survive without.

Technically yes, but depending on your location your public school system may be chronically under-funded, to the point where sending your kid to a public school would put them at a big disadvantage in high school or college (and so then for the rest of their life).

Yes, you could move, but as it turns out properties are more expensive in good school districts.

I'm a product of one of the shittiest public schools in my state. While I attended, they were forced by the state to convert to an "international baccalaureate" school because the alternative was closing.

I say that because yet, among my peers from that school, I count engineers, astrophysicists, doctors, IT workers, psychologists, pilots, and more.

So I would vigorously argue against the idea that students who attend underfunded public schools are at a disadvantage for life.

The biggest impact I noticed is home life and the involvement of parents. If you are a parent who cares and pushes your child, that is worth way more than the quality of the school as assigned by some ranking system.

Additionally, my exposure to a rough-and-tumble school with people of varying backgrounds (i.e., not a single socioeconomic stratum) gave me empathy and social skills that are extremely useful in everyday life.

I'm not saying your choices are wrong, but I strongly disagree with the premise that a less-than-ideal public school leads to lifelong negative consequences.

> The biggest impact I noticed is home life and the involvement of parents. If you are a parent who cares and pushes your child, that is worth way more than the quality of the school as assigned by some ranking system.

Agreed.

My comment is from experience as well though. A lot of my classes in HS had to be slowed down to the slowest student (no child left behind I guess), but the better students were frequently bored. I'm glad I was lucky enough to be able to take advanced classes, but I still think one's school has an impact. Exposure to certain topics or classes can certainly impact a student's life (in my opinion). For instance, high schools with a compsci class, I'm sure will have more students becoming SWEs than high schools without.

If school funding has no advantage on life performance then we need to drastically cut all funding and just save the money.

That seems so unlikely to be true I can't be bothered reading the rest of your comment.

A single example of a school spending program that has positive results would collapse your argument.

Providing an example would surely help your case. US schools are currently removing gifted education (which costs nothing extra, just has higher standards) or because they found that spending more on non-gifted students didn't close the achievement gap.

You’re setting up a false dichotomy. There’s no one input that’s responsible for 80% of a successful education.

School funding is obviously dominantly important up to a point (they need books, rooms, teachers, etc.).

Past that point, marginally more engaged and educated parents are worth much more than a marginal $X of funding per student per year.

I went through a public school with a tri-modal distribution (that almost perfectly mirrored our county’s tri-modal income distribution). A handful of people dropped out functionally illiterate, most people came out “just fine” and went to a local community college or state school, and a handful of people went to top tier universities paid for by pell grants, scholarships and PLUS loans.

The main variable correlated to which modality you fell into was a combination of the socioeconomic status of your parents, and how engaged they were in your education (i.e. not going through a divorce, not rich but working 100 hours per week, etc.).

A passionate teacher or extracurricular sponsor (drama teacher, athletics coach) might have temporarily filled-in for or amplified this normally parental role for a year or two with a similar effect, but only for a couple students at a time. They would usually target their efforts on kids on the cusp of a modality (failing but with a lot of potential shown elsewhere, or very smart but from a troubled home).

There’s a study on kids that just barely missed the cutoff to get into the #1 public school in NYC. Their post-HS outcomes were indistinguishable from those on the symmetrical other side of the divide. On either side of the divide, you had parents encouraging and pushing their kids just as hard. Interpret from that what you will.

Basically, the world isn’t black and white. It’s damned complicated. Public school is complicated. Anybody who claims a simple solution, especially tied to funding or teachers, deserves suspicion IMO.

> I'm a product of one of the shittiest public schools in my state. ... yet, among my peers from that school, I count engineers, astrophysicists, doctors, IT workers, psychologists, pilots, and more.

Are you serious? How did they manage to apply for and pay for the education needed to score those jobs?

A friend of mine was also a product of one of the shittiest public schools in her state, and she was apparently the only person in her grade to continue on to university.

US has public universities and college scholarships. And, you know, students don't pay for college out of their own income from high paying jobs they got based on high school education.

One simple (and perhaps actionable) way to express this idea.

Say you're two parents who are very conscientious about wanting your child to have "good outcomes" in life (i.e. have a good schooling experience, go to a good college, have a good job).

It is better, for your kids, for the family to live in an environment in which you (the parents!) are living comfortably and with minimal stress, than it is to attend a top 50 high school, (assuming that means trading off against comfort & stress).

By comfort/stress, I mean to say: money isn't a weekly, monthly, or even quarterly issue, jobs are low-stress, and you have a lot of spare energy/time to invest in your kids after school, on the weekends, and in the summer/holidays.

There are plenty of schools in the top 500 or top 1000 in the US that are in geographies check these box for you, your spouse, and your family, that don't cost $1000/month/child.

You might not be min-maxing your retirement accounts by taking jobs that allow you to work in-person/remotely there, but the compounding dividends paid by investing in your family and community carries much more value.

I think there are "shitty" schools, and then there are _shitty_ schools.

A "shitty" public school is probably generally underfunded, but at least has the decent-enough quality of teachers/parents to lead the motivated kids to the right information. That way those kids can go on in their own time and study enough to make it to professional jobs in the real world, although most of these kids will never make it to top-tier colleges due to optics of their schools.

A _shitty_ public school lacks even generally-caring teachers, and often suffers net-negative because of the parents. Kids in these schools grow up ignorant of what to learn, much less how to learn it.

public schooling and low-tier education were undoubtably the worst experiences of my life. the criminal behavior (hard drugs, regular violence) and resentment of the teachers are the closest thing to hell I have experienced. you got out lucky.

The poster you're responding to is the poster child for the helicopter parent that plans their child's life and then bribes school officials to get them into an ivy league school.

Little Johnny is better than the plebs around them who attend the public school in their district.

The funny part is that school teaches you to do things "by the book" and that, itself, has its own downsides.

You could live in a shitty apartment in a good school district, if you are really determined to sacrifice and give a good education to your kids.

100% of the immigrants do that

And raise traumatized children like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32946010.

That person would be traumatized at private school too.

You're getting a lot of heat for investing in your children. This makes me sad, though I suspect the people are good intentioned, trying to help you "solve" your problem.

I can think of many scenarios where 1K/month/child is the best option. I don't know the quality of schools available in your area, but I do know it can vary wildly, and good school can make a huge difference.

And you have my deep respect for the sacrifice you are making for your children. We need more people like you.

Eh, the planet is overpopulated. We don’t need people to have large families anymore. This person is not doing a public service, they just wanted a large family. And they got what they wanted so they have to pay to support their choice. Which is fine, but I don’t feel a ton of sympathy.

I’m reminded of a Bill Burr joke (paraphrasing): They say it costs like $300k to raise a kid from birth to 18. Yet, people with no money keep having kids. It’d be like if I came to you complaining about my money woes and then said, ‘but anyway, the wife and I are buying another Ferrari…’

In particular, how many of the "public school is good enough" folks are paying four figures extra on their mortgage payment to be in an area where that's true.

In any major metro, an extra 2-3 bedrooms in a district with great schools is way more expensive than living in a place with the worst schools and paying tuition.

I think the reason for the heat is framing it as "it's impossible to survive".

Sorry to hear, that sounds like a real struggle. Serious question: have you considered giving up one of those jobs and home-schooling your kids with the time gained? There were quite a few articles about how unreasonably effective real tutoring (as opposed to exam tutoring) is, it's made me wonder how practical it is for people who aren't independently wealthy.