If you give a business $15,900 per student ($1.59million per 100 students), they can run much better than most public schools, especially than those public schools in crappy school districts.
If that's true why do private prisons have such higher recidivism rates? This is simply false.
> Mamun et al. (2020) report on studies that demonstrate that recidivism rates in private prisons are between 16.7% (Spivak & Sharp, 2008) and 22% (Duwe & Clark, 2013) higher when compared to public prisons. [1]
When providing services, private companies do worse because their charter is not to provide services per se, it's to make money. These are antithetical in the world of social services.
Private enterprise isn't a solution to every problem. It's a solution to a lot problems. However police, fire, healthcare, education, regulation and so on are services in the public interest and should be provided therefore be provided by the public.
- Private fire departments that used to show up at your house and demand payment in order to put the fire out, otherwise they'd just let your house burn to the ground. In Rome, they'd literally show up at your house, and buy it from you for pennies on the dollar before putting it out.
- Private prisons fail the people in the way I've described.
- Private healthcare fails Americans each and every day. 45,000 Americans die each year due to lack of access to care. One person dies every 12 minutes. Their goal is to deny you cover because each treatment they avoid paying for pads their bottom line and benefits their shareholders. It costs twice as much per capita as Canada, 60% as much as Norway - and yet fails to cover everyone and yields worse outcomes.
The generalization is simple: when your task is to provide services to the public, then profit must be secondary. In private enterprise, profit is primary. You fail the people when you provide core social services via private enterprise because you have fundamentally failed to align incentives.
Private social services are designed to fail the people.
These are still definitely a thing. Though I expect they must be regulated so we don't end up in a Rome-style situation.
Edit: Found it. If you're in an area with something like Rural Metro, they put out the fire either way. If you don't have an annual membership with them, then they will invoice you. Nobody offering to buy your home for pennies on the dollar or standing around waiting for your credit card to clear before hosing down the flames.
My understanding is there are very few, and each dollar profiteered off this basic service is not spent improving the fire department. Do you have statistics on this?
Why? The point of a public school is that they serve the public good, not shareholder value. The issue isn't that public schools are a money pit, the issue is whether they're educating students.
A business will seek a profit. That should not be a factor at all in public education. The costs of public education should certainly be considered, especially the question of how much is spent and the quality of the education. That should always be under careful review. However the purpose of public education is to spend our collective money educating the populace. It should be a cost, it shouldn't make money. It's not meant to, it's meant to educate.
I understand you have a strong believe that public good is not for profit, but this simplistic view is patently wrong. Public good and profit are not two things contradictory to each other. It is just very common in the market that businesses serve both profit goal and public good. It is 90% about how the world improves in a market dominant system. There is something fundamentally wrong in your worldview of the society and the market. But hay, I don't think I can change your mind.
Profit is not a goal of public education. Education is the goal of public education. It should be the singular goal.
Yes, my belief is that public education is a cost borne collectively by a society. We take some of our profit and spend it on public education, it does not produce profit.
Yes, we should care how our money is spent in pursuit of public education. I'm not advocating waste. But the question we should ask is whether the money we spend results in a worthwhile education for students.
It is my experience that public good typically loses to profit when contradicts the other.
Maybe in a competitive environment a private business could do better. But if you're creating a local private monopoly, you're just pouring a large chunk of the funding into the pockets of overpaid bosses or shareholders
Schools that charge under $15k/yr are mostly low-quality religious schools, with a few rare gems (mostly from the Catholics)
Full tuition at schools that people mean when they talk about how good private schools are, starts around $40k on the coasts (day rates, not boarding), and $18-20k at lesser-but-still-sometimes-decent schools in less-affluent areas.
[EDIT] Of course, per-pupil spending and tuition aren't entirely connected—on the one hand, many students don't pay the full rate (much like with private colleges) but on the other, the better private schools usually have other sources of funding of various sorts. Endowments, scholarship funds, lots of supplemental and sometimes quite-large donations from parents and alumni for various purposes.
How big is the business and how is it structured? How much administration is local and how much transparency into operations is given to the community?
Does it have profit responsibilities that need to be extracted from the funding, or is it a non-profit? In either case, does it receive funding from other sources besides the school's own community? What do those sources of funding expect for their contributions?
How big is the moat that allows or prevents competion from forming, and how healthy are the current forces of competition? Are there regulations that ensure market efficiency? Who's responsible for those regulations?
Does it have a formal responsibility to operate a school even when it can no longer do so profitably? Or might communities just be abandoned without any school at all until a new vision is capitalized?
Boarding schools exist, as do affluent areas next to poor ones.
Anyway, there are several ways to compare systems, some private schools operate in whole or in part on a lottery system so you can track students who do or don’t get in. But the most common method is to model parent education and income as a predictor of performance and then compare outcomes.
As you suggest poor students are underrepresented in private schools, but some do get in. The important thing to remember is a student who received a scholarship isn’t representative of the general population.
Eh, private schools right now have the parents as the customers. The parents generally have their incentives oriented towards well educated, well behaving kids and want it for not be too expensive. And can judge quality and make individual purchasing decisions, and have no incentive to waste funds.
If the public starts paying (blindly!) for it, the incentives change. Private schools would become more like private prisons probably, and we’d be back where we started.
> Mamun et al. (2020) report on studies that demonstrate that recidivism rates in private prisons are between 16.7% (Spivak & Sharp, 2008) and 22% (Duwe & Clark, 2013) higher when compared to public prisons. [1]
When providing services, private companies do worse because their charter is not to provide services per se, it's to make money. These are antithetical in the world of social services.
Private enterprise isn't a solution to every problem. It's a solution to a lot problems. However police, fire, healthcare, education, regulation and so on are services in the public interest and should be provided therefore be provided by the public.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2021.6721...