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by carlob 2577 days ago
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.

1 comments

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...

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...

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.