I think it's unfair to say that wealthy parents send their kids to private schools as a way to actively defund public education. Parents are making this choice to give their kids a better education, and anyone with the same opportunity would do it too.

Wealthy people don't like to pay taxes which funds the public education

According to the 2020 IRS tax report, the top 1% of American earners pay 42% of all income taxes, the top 10% of earners pay 74%.

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p1304.pdf

Because the middle class is shrinking. The wealthy also use their money to lobby against new taxes that would fund public education.

Hey look, numbers that don't mean what the person said.

What percentage of their wealth do they pay? What are their effective tax rates compared to the working class? Why are capital gains taxes so much less than most income taxes? Why does our "progressive" tax rate stop growing in the 150k range or so? Which one of those groups can afford lawyers to structure their incomes to pay even less?

The rich are not paying their fair share and generally have been paying less and taking more for decades, I don't know what you are on about.

> Why does our "progressive" tax rate stop growing in the 150k range or so

I believe it actually stops at around 700k for married couples and 575k for singles.

You're right, I mixed up when I moved to Cali my tax rate increased, but I wasn't making near there hah!

For a different view under the line, check this calculator to see how much less the wealthy are taxed nowadays compared to pretty much any time last century except the wild 30s. All that money is not going into education, roads, healthcare, you name it anymore, an entire system of public funding collapses.

https://qz.com/74271/income-tax-rates-since-1913

Not exactly a choice.

Then why do wealthy people congregate in specific suburbs that have highly rated public schools?

> The wealthy parents sent their kids to private schools and try to defund public education

They didn't say sending kids to private school was a way to actively defund public education just that wealthy parents do both which is true. What's your motivation to vote and support politicians that advocate for better funded public schools when it doesn't effect your kids but raises your taxes?

Maybe you'd like to see the public school system improve so your grandchildren can attend it? Maybe you just want assurance that the serfs flipping your burgers can accurately read the sanitization instructions on their equipment?

People are all different and their motivations are complex. Not everyone is angling for ultimate personal advantage and maximum externalization of downside, even amongst the wealthy.

Sure, hypothetically. It's just not what I'm seeing the wealthy parents in the town I grew up in doing. Most of them are fighting for school vouchers so they can divert money from public schools into their private schools.

Continuing to poor money into a system that isn't working isn't a solution to the problem.

School vouchers offer the potential to poor that money into a system that is working instead. Maybe that richer parent is trying to help not hinder other parents. Public schools appear to be fundamentally broken in many communities. More money won't fix that brokenness. Firing a bunch of teachers and administrators might work but good luck getting that to happen with the current state of education unions. Enabling parents to put their money into systems that aren't broken is a reasonable alternative to that.

I say this every time that education unions are blamed, but there are many states which do not allow teachers to collectively bargain in any way, thereby completely defanging the "unions" which exist in those states, and yet students in those states have lower test scores and educational outcomes on average.

There is already a live experiment where education unions are totally neutered, and it didn't fix anything. Private schools "work" because they get to expel anyone who doesn't pay enough money to outbalance any problems they cause. Public schools obviously cannot do this.

I did not only blame the unions for the current state of things. I merely stated that they stand in the way of one of the potential solutions to the current problem. I don't find the debate of whether there is a hypothetical world where giving them more power would help the state of our schools particularly interesting or compelling.

    Private schools "work" because they get to expel anyone who doesn't pay enough money to outbalance any problems they cause. Public schools obviously cannot do this.

This is an interesting statement that tries to attribute a private schools success to a single cause. I find this unlikely in an area where there number of confounding variables is so high. I also don't see why I should take the cause as true. But let's put all of that aside for a moment and ask the entirely reasonable question: "Why exactly can't the public school expel problem students?" If as you say it's the secret to a private schools success maybe public schools should think about copying it.

> "Why exactly can't the public school expel problem students?" If as you say it's the secret to a private schools success maybe public schools should think about copying it.

Because the main purpose of the public school system isn't to provide the best education for the most capable, it's to provide an acceptable education for the average student to eventually work a basic labor job, to provide daycare for working class parents, and to keep teenagers mostly busy so that they commit less crimes.

Expelling every problem student would totally fail at these goals, and would create an underclass of problem teenagers who have mostly nothing to do but commit crimes and get eachother pregnant. This would be a massive failure and much more expensive than public school. It would worsen the lives of the millions who would have otherwise grown out of these negative tendencies.

Further, it's not the only secret to private schools success, only one reason. Other reasons are costing money and therefore disqualifying poor people, parents who pay money for their children's school are more likely to be invested and involved in their child's education, and private school teachers are paid much more money than public school teachers. All of these factors contribute. I just listed a one, since the only reason you listed was unions.

A more interesting comparison is between public schools and charter schools which are not allowed to use selective admissions (must admit by lottery etc.), which is much closer to the public school system. My understanding is that they do a little bit better on average at the cost of more outliers. And even they avoid the most checked-out parents who couldn't be bothered or are actively hostile to filling a free application for a school.

Oh - and you said you didn't only blame unions, but the only other targets in your post are teachers and administrators, which private schools also have. Can you expand on this?

Everyone wants well-funded public schools because they produce safer and better communities. Can you think of many safe and affluent cities in the US that have poorly funded public school programs?

People supporting voucher programs don't want well funded public schools.

Do you participate in society? Do you interact with other people? Better schools could help make that a more pleasant experience.

    Parents are making this choice to give their kids a better education, and anyone with the same opportunity would do it too.

I very much disagree with the assumption that "anyone with the same opportunity would do it too". This is the kind of logic people use when trying to justify something to themselves they know might not be the moral choice, but they want to choose it anyways.

Diverting resources, whether those resources are students, tax dollars, or parental volunteer time, away from public education harms the students who attend public education and harms our society.

Rather than put the time and energy into building a proper community, those with means instead prefer to wall themselves off from the rest of society, which harms everyone.

So we need to consider students as resources? That might be a difficult outlook to market to parents.

Except that if they put the same money into their public school that they do into the private schools, they'd get even more superior outcomes than they do from funding private schools.

I'm a comparatively wealthy parent, I've bothered to look at the data, and I'm sending my kids to public schools.

I really don't believe it's about giving their kids a better education, because the studies pretty consistently show that public schools have superior outcomes when you adjust for socioeconomic status of individual students and special needs. The private schools of course don't accept these students. It's about exclusivity.

If we do dollar for dollar, spending more money on schools isn't going to help the outcomes either. The money would be better spent on the home life since that is what determines kids outcome the most.

> Except that if they put the same money into their public school that they do into the private schools, they'd get even more superior outcomes than they do from funding private schools.

No, they wouldn’t. Schools have extremely small effects on student learning, if that[1]. Private schools buy a safer, more class homogeneous environment which is worth a lot but you can get the same effect by living in the right suburbs.

[1] Education and Intelligence: Pity the Poor Teacher because Student Characteristics are more Significant than Teachers or Schools

Education has not changed from the beginning of recorded history. The problem is that focus has been on schools and teachers and not students. Here is a simple thought experiment with two conditions: 1) 50 teachers are assigned by their teaching quality to randomly composed classes of 20 students, 2) 50 classes of 20 each are composed by selecting the most able students to fill each class in order and teachers are assigned randomly to classes. In condition 1, teaching ability of each teacher and in condition 2, mean ability level of students in each class is correlated with average gain over the course of instruction. Educational gain will be best predicted by student abilities (up to r = 0.95) and much less by teachers’ skill (up to r = 0.32). I argue that seemingly immutable education will not change until we fully understand students and particularly human intelligence. Over the last 50 years in developed countries, evidence has accumulated that only about 10% of school achievement can be attributed to schools and teachers while the remaining 90% is due to characteristics associated with students. Teachers account for from 1% to 7% of total variance at every level of education. For students, intelligence accounts for much of the 90% of variance associated with learning gains. This evidence is reviewed.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/spanish-journal-of-p...

A great deal of the positive effect of a public school is that you end up with a less homogeneous group of peers, imho.

At any rate, I've seen that data and think it's perfectly applicable to what I was saying. My argument wasn't really about the spend on "the school" per se, but more that the resources could be better spent on the behalf of students if it wasn't directed to a private school, whether that's spend on the community environment or specifically on the students themselves (like with tutoring, or sponsoring a club). Directing money towards a private school is counterproductive to both the individual and the wellbeing of your own community. This does assume day-schools. Boarding schools are an entirely separate beast, and I don't have a strong sense of why parents choose them, despite having taught at one for a few years. Mastery learning can be applied in any setting. The thing that remains is, do you teach your student how the world is, or how act in order to be enculturated into an elite "in" group? I would argue that the former can confer the benefits of the later, but that the reverse is much harder.

While your thought experiment is noble, many parents are worried about violence, their children actually learning usable skills and not just social/political ideologies (not taking a side, but that is a thing now), and being prepared to take care of themselves and family and contribute to their community as an adult. In my experience, many public school systems pay lip service to those things but practically are uninterested in that treating the system as just a jobs program (especially for large school systems) or as a political tool a lot of which comes from the Federal government and changes every few years. It is a sad state but true and you can't reasonably blame parents for wanting something different for their children when all attempts and working through the public school system come to nothing.

You also mention community over and over as if every community in the US is similar in demographics or culture which is also not the case. All Muslim people I know, for example, send their children to private school, some driving nearly 50 miles both ways twice a day (200 miles!) just to do it after getting a taste of what the local public school system had to offer!

My own children all went to public school and if I had a chance to do it over again I would have put them in private school.

That's why we need school choice, give the working poor the same opportunity to abandon the public schools like the wealthy have.

False. Taking tax dollar funding away from public schools only exacerbates the issue. School choice is a scam to fund private Christian schools to brainwash the youth and maintain a conservative voter base

The cost per student in the US is higher than every country in the world (save Luxemburg if I recall correctly). The problem isn't a lack of money, the problem is the money is misused. Private schools are just better stewards of the students dollars.

I mean the teacher's unions have been screaming about smaller class sizes for decades, let's give it to them.

The cost-per-student of private vs public education is not an apples-to-apples comparison because the public school system is also obligated to provide transportation and special needs education, both of which are very expensive and neither of which are in scope for most private schools.

The EU and Canada have those costs too... and are still spending way less per student than the US.

Indeed, and it'd be worthwhile doing a comparison. My only point is that you have to make sure comparisons are accurate with respect to scope of services.

Private schools in the US look artificially good in terms of both finances and performance because they end up selecting the more privileged students to start with.

Why do you assume the money would be taken away from the public schools? Is it because they suck? If so, you're right and it should be taken away from them.

You don't improve if you aren't answering to anyone. If they're threatened with money loss you better believe they're going to start doing something to make their school more attractive and that's how it should be. Right now they can be absolutely abysmal at educating anyone and still receive tax dollars.

It's like some choice who brainwashes my kids. Are they going to learn about men being pregnant and go to a drag show or that god created earth 5 thousand years ago.

Maybe i could even alternate every year so they are "well rounded".

Did homeschooling just fall off the face of the planet? Stop sending your kids to these kinds of schools. Take the initiative to be learned enough to teach your kids at least the fundamentals, and then instill in them the drive to want to learn more. It's made much easier with the advent of the internet.

And someone's probably going to respond "but muh socialization!" In what other real-life scenario are you going to end up with a bunch of people who are almost identical in age, with little to no responsibilities, regurgitating shit with no incentive other than that you have to be there, or else? You don't. After that, it's off to either real school (university) where people are all at various stages of their education throughout their life, chasing education in fields that actually benefit them and the rest of society; or they work a job where there's even more diversity and generally less interaction with people.

Lower school is an alien place to be, and always has been.

But muh full time job and two-income economy..

I didn't say it would be easy.

Having choices is bad. Today I learned.

Did you miss the /s tag here?

In other words, replace it with nothing. That doesn't help the working poor. If you mean another private option, they aren't going to shell out for a "discount" school over public schools, and nothing prevents them from trying.

The problem with "vote with your dollars" is that the more dollars you have, the more votes you end up with. The wealthy can already do this anyway: having those resources means you can live wherever you want, and thanks to the fact that school funding is primarily done via property taxes, the wealthy can move where they like to a school of their choice that will then benefit from that funding.

Unsurprisingly this means schools with a lot of wealthy students already attract other wealthy students due to their successes largely brought about by funding, and poorer schools get even poorer as the few remaining people try their best to leave, because the school sucks.

As I've gotten older I've become incredibly skeptical at the almost knee-jerk reaction to "give people choice and let them self select." What if the choice is difficult? What if it requires knowledge most people don't have? What if people don't need to live with the consequences of the choice? What if the choice affects not only them, but others who have no choice?

How many strong WFH advocates are anti school-from-home? The anti-SFH sentiment seems to come from antagonism to which groups have been the first to adopt it, but I'm sure my bias affects my interpretation.

So the solution is…not go to school, missing out on by far, the most important resource to defend yourself from oppression (education)?

A primary source of oppression in some nations is the education system. To think that it's impossible to be wielded against us in kind, at some point in the future, is naive. You might think conservatives are stupid for homeschooling, but it's only a matter of time before the things being pushed in public school are things you morally/ethically oppose as well.

Be the one to break the cycle. Be educated, educate your children to the best of your ability with the fundamentals, and show them how to want to learn more. That's how to set your kid up for success.

> continuously draining education in order to have lower property taxes

This is so provably false that I'm amazed anyone could have this opinion. The US spends huge amounts on education. More than almost any country. Neither education spending nor property taxes have declined.

Government current expenditures: Education

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/G160291A027NBEA

Personal Current Tax Receipts: State and Local Government: Property Taxes

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/S210400

US education spending is one of the highest in the world, and is also increasing 2010-2019 faster than almost any country:

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...

I can find plenty of sources pointing to net education spend decline relative to inflation/gdp: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/educ... https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/a-punishi... https://edlawcenter.org/research/$600-billion-lost.html

https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/most-stat... The question is not really is it increasing — but how much it has increased and whether that actually affords a quality education. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/07/us-education...

(Hint: it probably has to do with the fact teaching makes very little $ in most places and is not treated as a good career in the states)

Spending on the education apparatus is not spending on the education of the child. Local teacher salaries are the same here as they've been for the past 10+ years, while the school's budget has gone up millions. Administration and overhead is a self-perpetuating growth industry. Also renovating buildings, changing standards for buses and playgrounds and such - tons of cash around educating the kids, but still, the teachers and books and such are the last to get anything.

All of that could be true yet "continuously draining education in order to have lower property taxes" is nonetheless completely false. If what you say is true then we should demand that schools use their money better, not that we give them more money that they can sock into their as you call it "self-perpetuating growth industry".

Agreed on all points. I just wanted to point out that 'spending on education' in a macro sense has no actual impact on 'spending on education' from an educational impact on students and teachers sense.

>The US spends huge amounts on education... for rich people

FTFY

https://nces.ed.gov/pubs/web/97916.asp

That's from 1996 and definitely not true today. The $$ numbers there are also hilariously low now. Compare them to:

https://www.aaastateofplay.com/school-districts-ranked-by-th...

Especially in inner cities, many of the better performing school districts spend far less than the places serving poor communities. Camden NJ is one of the highest spenders, so are a lot of city schools in Illinois. Famously "good" schools, like Stuyvesant which spends about $17,000 per student, don't even make the list. It's far below the average for NY!

A more recent report echoing similar findings: http://hechingerreport.org/a-decade-of-research-on-the-rich-...

https://hechingerreport.org/new-data-even-within-the-same-di...

https://www.epi.org/publication/public-education-funding-in-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/09/upshot/biden-school-fundi...

That is from 1996. Not sure that is why all of the sudden kids aren't attending school.

In fact by the metric of "per student spending" the US is #2 in the world.

America does have big problems with public education, but funding is not it. Even grossly underperforming schools are often funded at per-student rates well above the OECD average and even the US average.

It's a frequent talking point in the US that underperforming schools are simply underfunded because they're in poor areas and thus don't get enough property taxes, but that's not what the data actually shows. For example, you may have heard of the mass-failure of Baltimore public schools, where not a single student in 23 of the district's schools exhibited even minimal math competency.

It's the third highest-funded large school district in the US. Last year, the district was funded at 21k/student, compared with the OECD average of 12k.

America spends enormous sums of money on education and gets less bang for the buck than probably any country in the world.

https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/update-balti...

https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/state-test-r.... https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-ci...

Isn't occam's razor here that, in fact, these enormous sums of money are not going to education? Like that this is all strong evidence of bureaucratic misappropriation, corruption, text book companies, etc? Or at least, I struggle to think of what other reasonable point one could make about the insight.

Yes, and it's highly applicable. But how exactly do you fix that practically speaking? Especially if you are a parent trying to ensure that:

1. Your own child get's a good education.

2. Other people's children also have the opportunity to get a good education?

Your options for solving #1 are in many ways more achievable than the options for #2 requiring only a certain level of sacrifice on your part. Your options for #2 require political action against: School administrators and Education Unions, as well as having conversations like this. Allowing a parent to use the public education funding to choose where their child get's educated is a useful safety valve that opens up the same choices that a wealthier parent has while also adding a useful incentive to a school district to get their act together. If a school district's response is that they need money and you are hurting their ability to improve when more money has not in fact improved their performance in the past then maybe it's time to stop believing them.

Sure, there are a lot of factors like that.

- Bloated school administrations and the employment of all kinds of semi-professionals that were not needed or did not even exist in the past, and which are not common outside of the US.

- Excessive credentialist requirements that sometimes actively harm learning outcomes: for example, not only do degreed teachers not produce better learning outcomes, much education science is bunk that actively harms learning outcomes. If you employ only more expensive Master's in Education teachers who you have teaching three-cueing, you end up with worse results.

- Grift and graft where various school contracts are awarded to enrich particular people; there was a video going around of an extremely nice school with a swimming pool, large auditorium etc compared to an absolute junkyard of a school elsewhere, but the nice school was actually built for much less money than the junk school.

- Endless interventions that serve to do nothing but set money on fire, like the fads around filling classrooms with iPads and Chromebooks. All of my children's math education and homework takes places exclusively on computers. There was actually another recent story where Baltimore schools are buying every student a Chromebook. Lots of educators have a sort of cargo cult belief that handing kids computers makes them tech-literate and prepares them to be a SV programmer.

- Discipline. Unfortunately there are some uncomfortable truths that people don't want to address and take serious action to remediate. A few dozen really bad students in a school can absolutely destroy learning. You can find myriads of videos of classrooms where teachers have been forced to totally give up. The only day they even bother to give a lesson is if the worst actors decided to take the day off. Relatedly, in many places, policy is to do everything possible to not hold students back, which compounds issues over the years.

I am very sure there are many more items we could add to the list. Some items will apply much more to some areas than others. Unfortunately there is no one silver bullet solution. The point is that adding more money does not do anything to solve the real problems with American education. You just end up handing more money out for graft and waste to enrich people are not actually making a difference educationally.

Taxes have not gone down in any of the cities mentioned. In fact property taxes have been increasing a lot since the value of homes have increased.

The other point is none of the issues need money to solve them: The advent of remote learning during the pandemic altered students’ routines and led many to conclude that in-person attendance was optional. School districts have eased grading policies that penalized students for missing class or turning assignments in late, further reducing incentives to attend. After years of Covid quarantines, parents are more inclined to keep kids home for minor illnesses or mental-health issues. Technology isn’t helping: There’s evidence that absenteeism had already begun rising in the years before the pandemic, coinciding with the explosion of smartphone and social-media use among children — which increased distractions and weakened students’ connection to school. Those problems only worsened while schools and other activities were shut down.

>Why aren’t America’s students showing up?

Thye probably just don't want to be there.

>The pandemic showed students that adults treat them and other adults as chattel.

Exactly more than ever.

>draining education in order to have lower property taxes.

Not exactly this. There is no lower property taxes. They are trying, not very successfully, to keep property taxes from increasing as exorbitantly as they would otherwise.