[buwka]

Shocked at some of these parents' responses regarding their sweeping characterization of public schools vs private schools. I despise this public vs private school debate since its just too broad of a scale. Given the reliance of American public education on local property values you have plenty of astonishing public schools. Unfortunately, a handful of miles down the road in the next neighborhood you may also have decrepit underfunded schools.

When deciding where to live find a neighborhood that values education and takes pride in its school district. Unfortunately this may come at the cost of higher real estate values, but fundamentally the school your child attends will be one of the most defining aspects of their childhood. The local public schools here compensate their teachers significantly more than the private schools in the area. Furthermore, their average test scores are about a percentage less across all standardized tests while allowing of all backgrounds instead of having the ability to choose their student body like the private schools.

I attended a public school but had many close friends in some of the private schools around me. In terms of college outcomes my friends from school and friends from the private schools attended similar pretentious schools. However, I feel that had I attended a private school I would have spent all my formative years in the same bubble of snobby traditions and deciding where to summer. My high school had plenty of astonishingly wealthy students but our culture was much more actively unimpressed when peers bought an s-class for their 16th or took their race car to school.

[actfrench]

People are definitely buying better schools for real estate and it's pricey.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/housing-costs-zoning-and-... https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/propert...

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/realestate/your-address-a...

[pddpro]

I think all these negative responses come from those who can afford a private school for their kids.

[actfrench]

As someone who has taught in private schools that cost upwards of 50k, I don't think they are all that great. Teachers are generally paid the same as in public schools and it's still slightly smaller classes of kids who have way too much homework, are taught using the same curriculum and have little freedom to direct their own learning. At Dalton, kids regularly get 4 hours of tutoring every day after school to help them do homework and the teachers come to expect that and teach to the extra support. I doubt that all the families who dislike public school here are rich. An increasing number of low-income families are pulling their kids out of school and homeschooling. Others are sending them to lower-cost private schools, parochial schools. You don't have to be rich to value and spend on education. In fact, education is one of the first things lower-income families will spend on (though it's been shown to be a poor investment). One of the things this article talks about is how more Latino and Black families are homeschooling than ever before.

[buwka]

I think a better term may be those trying to “justify” their school choice. After their home one of the next largest choices, both financially and as a parent, is where to educate your children. Paying 50,000 a year and people will definitely justify it after the fact. Just because you have the disposable income doesn’t mean you should only like at private schools because that’s the expected thing to do.

[mlyle]

I'm a private school teacher; my kids attend the school I teach at. Some random thoughts:

* First, there's enormous variation in private schools. A whole lot of sectarian schools are utter crap and worse than public schools when you control for the neighborhoods they're in.

* But there are also a lot of private schools with significant structural advantages: students who want to be there with systemic support from all families and faculty who just want to see how far they can run in a supportive environment.

* I teach in a crazily idyllic environment. There's been no fights in literally decades. It's cool to be a nerd or a jock. It's happy and green. I am sad that this is such an exception and not the rule.

* I have the utmost respect for public school teachers. I'm well aware, in many ways, that my job is "easy mode" for education. I think it's great that we have a diverse system, and having the public system exist and able to provide a quality education to people of all backgrounds is an essential public good.

* My children are mathy, somewhat introverted kids. Being able to pick an educational environment where they're expected to present often, do drama and the arts, etc, has made them grow into much broader individuals than they would in other places. This kind of choice doesn't often exist in the public school system.

[buwka]

This description reminds me of my public school. My point is that there's enormous variation in both private schools and public schools. I think there should be more nuanced terms for public schools than lumping them all together.

In high school I described my public school as faux-public given that the school district was dependent on local property values (yes, definition of public school) while support from the state was negligible to the overall budget.

In the four years I was there we had maybe a fight (more of a tussle) about once a year, our football team won a game about every two years, and our science olympiad or other extra curriculum program placed nationally every year. If students were working on projects it wasn't surprising if the teacher left to make photocopies or do other things while we worked. In terms of outcomes, in my math/hard sciences about 75% attended ivies. There are many great private schools in the area but given that they have the same test scores (while being able to choose their student body) and same college outcomes I would not recommend discrediting a school simply because it is public

[actfrench]

There's a huge variety in private and public schools, but it's rare that the school is not 9-3pm or 8-6pm. A few exceptions like Fusion Academy do 1-1 tutoring. We need a more modular approach to education that's not all teaching kids the same curriculum during an uninterrupted block of hours. .

[actfrench]

I think that most parents make decisions out of fear, rather than what they really think is best. A friend of mine used to work at Noodle and said that they did a study there which showed that most parent's primary reason for choosing an elite private schcool is for their own networking purposes, rather than the quality of their child's education. I have not seen that to be true in the parents I've met who send their kids to private school, but it's still striking.

[buwka]

Schooling, whether private or public, is so universal that there's endless different cases and motivations. The area I grew up in this was definitely a contributing factor. A lot of families sent their children to the same private school, belonged to the same country club, summered in the same places, and attended the same religious organizations. They were all culture aspects that fit together for this particular community. This can quickly lead to people spending their lives only ever in one extremely privileged bubble.