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.