[surge]

The less fortunate are the ones bullying other children, holding back the curriculum so that no child is left behind, putting someone else's child in harms way because of some undefined benefit to other's with worse parents isn't a fix. Fix the socio economic problems first so those kids have better parents. Don't put my kid in with them thinking its going to socialize other kids better rather than what normally happens is they get harassed and bullied by those who are hostile and the teachers have no power or are apathetic to confront.

It creates greater harm putting good kids in with the bad then it does for the unfortunate but angry, hostile children. Same as it does putting a prisoner in for a non-violent crime with a bunch of felons, they're likely to come out a worse, more hardened criminal. You have this theory that it brings the other kids up, maybe slightly, but often it just brings everyone overall down. Collectivist mentality should be what's the greatest good.

[carlob]

Except that most of the research that has been done on this subject shows exactly the opposite: social mixing in schools has a great positive effect on the less fortunate and almost negligible effect on the more fortunate (we're talking here about a situation where the composition of a class reflects that of society as a whole, not some extreme example like throwing a wealthy kid in a inner city class).

Also societies that have good public schools (that are universally attended) like Finland, tend to have much less socioeconomic inequality in the following generations. That is: school is the solution to social inequality, not viceversa.

[surge]

Most research? What research? By research do you mean an opinion piece you read once? Most research says homeschoolers perform massively better on average then public school kids do. So what research addresses that, if kids perform not as well in public school.

https://www.dailyinfographic.com/homeschooling-by-the-number...

[carlob]

It is well known that school results are mostly explained by socioeconomic status (I read somewhere up to 75% of the variance can be explained that way). So if you don't take into account other factors that graph doesn't prove anything other than people who can afford private schools and homescholing are on average richer. My guess is that the rest of the data can be explained by smaller class sizes and better resources.

If you want more research this [0] article has a good bibliography on the effects of socioeconomic diversity in schools

[0] https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...

[merpnderp]

Socioeconomic status doesn’t explain why parents with only high school degrees who homeschool in the US will still have kids performing at the top of public school kids’ scores, while strong parental involvement does. Over and over the only truly meaningful external factor in student performance is parental involvement, of which homeschooling is highly indicative.