[earthicus]

> Access to good private education takes more money than the majority of Americans have.

I went to a fairly traditional private school (cost: $8k/yr) and absolutely hated it, but still did well. Eventually my hatred turned into a complete mental breakdown, I refused to go anymore, and after a search transferred to a super fancy independent study school (cost: $15k/yr) where I got to meet one-on-one with my teachers, or in small classes of less than 5 students. This school cured my depression in a few months and developed my intellectual and artistic passions over the next couple of years. Several of my friends followed me there in the next year or two, with similar positive effects on their sanity. If only everyone had this opportunity! Alas, Seattle spends only $15k per student in their public schools :-( Here's the data for all 50 states as a whole [1].

> Charter schools often pop up, look sexy, and vary extremely widely. Again some good, a lot of "meh" and some bad.

This is famously true of different public school districts as well. I'm not willing to discount anything that help move us away from the deranged format of traditional schools.

[1] https://education.cu-portland.edu/blog/classroom-resources/p...

[tmaly]

Something must be wrong here, how can a super fancy school with 1:5 ratio cost 15k and the per-student cost of public school cost 15k?

[earthicus]

The source i linked to gives a breakdown of how the public school money is spent in the second section, titled 'Where are schools spending their money?' You can see that Public schools have many legitimate expenses that private schools don't, along with bureaucratic overhead.

However, the reason my school could get away with such a small ratio, even compared to other private schools that cost the same, is because it is an independent study school - I only went two days a week for a few hours a day.

Imagine you have one teacher working for 10 hours and 10 students. If each student goes all 10 hours, your ratio is 1:10. If each student goes only 1 hour, your ratio is 1:1.

[jelliclesfarm]

Pensions. Public school systems are unionized.