[Aurornis]

People who send kids to private schools pay taxes (which fund schools) but don’t take resources from public schools.

Forcing them to use the public schools would further divide the tax funding across more kids, reducing the funds available per kid.

This suggestion is reminiscent of California trying to reduce educational inequality by eliminating advanced math classes and putting everyone together. It was a terrible idea, but it made sense to someone looking for what they thought was an easy solution.

[ceejayoz]

> People who send kids to private schools pay taxes (which fund schools) but don’t take resources from public schools.

They're working very hard to change that. https://apnews.com/article/texas-school-vouchers-ec901398f7f...

"Texas will implement a $1 billion school voucher program, one of the largest in the country, that uses public dollars to fund private school tuition under a bill Gov. Greg Abbott signed Saturday, capping off a yearslong effort by Republicans… Texas joins more than 30 other states that have implemented a similar program, of which about a dozen have launched or expanded their programs in recent years to make most students eligible."

[erikerikson]

I get your math and appreciate the insight within it.

At the same time, PTAs accept cash which when not being spent on private school is available. The challenge is getting those parents to allocate it when it will be spread across the entire student body. Far more impactful is the factor of alignment of incentives that given wealthy families' generally greater proximity to power can deliver funding.

I liked this: it's not private school vs public school, it is private school vs public school plus a tuition's worth of enrichment.

Your other comment does get at why my kid is in private school: you can't ignore special education needs.

[Aurornis]

> At the same time, PTAs accept cash which when not being spent on private school is available.

I think this is magical thinking underlying the concept: That wealthy parents will step up to provide money to privately fund the public schools for everyone.

We have plenty of evidence that the is just isn’t the case, though. People spend that money on things like sending their kids to school with their own lunches and hiring private tutors.

When parents have lost faith in a school’s ability to provide good education (or lunches, or activities, etc) they don’t think the best course of action is to send the school a lot of money and hope for the best. They take matters into their own hands, outside of school.

The entire concept is built on layers of wishful thinking that just aren’t supported.

[erikerikson]

We are wealthy parents who stepped up and gave substantial amounts to the PTA

We made our decision (noted before) when the school spent its energy to manage us rather than fix problems and serve our student. To be fair, there were ties they had no control over but they definitely failed in ways they could have done better too. When things that matter to us are out of our power we put them back under our power to the extent we can.

The problem with defection is the large scale/long term reduced prosperity trajectory.

[devilbunny]

> things like sending their kids to school with their own lunches and hiring private tutors

And summer "enrichment". That was popular among the small group of well-off families that insisted on sending their kids to public schools (in, essentially, a school-within-a-school that actually taught the kids instead of warehousing them for six to eight hours a day). Expensive camps, summer programs in Europe, that sort of thing.

[amanaplanacanal]

The idea is around the wealthy having the incentive to financially support public schools.

[Aurornis]

Public schools are funded by taxes. Wealthy people already pay those taxes.

If you force everyone to use the public schools, you’re just dividing the tax money across more students.

In the context of school lunch, they would just send their kids to school with a packed lunch.

The whole concept of forbidding people from taking advantage of other educational opportunities is half-baked class warfare fodder. It doesn’t make sense if you think about the numbers, but it appeals to people who are more interested in punishing wealthy people than fixing the situation.

[dagw]

Full disclosure, am a parent who sends their kid to a charter school and strong advocate for parents to be allowed to choose where to send their schools.

That being said, the strong version of the argument being made is that if all schools are funded nationally (so that schools in more affluent areas don't automatically get more money) and rich people and people of influence were forced to send their kids to the same public schools as every body else, then those people would be more inclined to use their influence to try to make public schools better and would be less inclined to fight against raising taxes to improve public education. Of course this would go against those peoples narrow self interest (since many of their kids would probably end up getting a worse education) so it is unlikely to happen

[Aurornis]

I understand the argument, but I’m trying to point out that similar claims were made about eliminating advanced math classes in California and it did not work at all.

I think the claim appeals to some people because they’re bought in to the idea that a small fraction of wealthy people control everything from school budgets to taxes, and therefore if you force them into your space and restrict their rights to other options they will use that extreme influence to improve the situation for everyone.

Yet in practice it doesn’t work, and we’ve seen it play out. In California the parents who cared about their kids’ math scores just gave up on school math classes and hired tutors or did their own at-home tutoring (at great sacrifice, especially for the non-wealthy). With school lunches you would just see parents with means sending their kids to school with good prepared lunches. I suppose the next logical extension is to ban wealthy parents from sending their kids in with lunches and hope that it will set off the chain of events that’s supposed to make them fix the problem for everyone.

Where I live our school budgets and funding are partially up for vote on the ballot every election cycle. It’s not for the wealthy to decide, it’s just a public vote. And things still aren’t passing easily. I think people reach for the wealthy as an easy excuse for who to blame, but whenever I look at the ballot results it’s impossible to ignore the fact that the general public is averse to increasing school budgets right now.

[ethbr1]

> the idea that a small fraction of wealthy people control everything from school budgets to taxes

It's not control.

It's simply that there exists a (relatively-speaking) small fraction of wealthy people. To wit, income inequality.

If we had less income inequality in the US, there wouldn't need to be nudges to align wealthy people's interests with everyone else.

If we're fine with large amounts of income inequality, then we're going to need to put in some utilitarian guardrails, given that $ = political power and political power controls school funding.

[amanaplanacanal]

The wealthy have much more influence on the politicians that write the funding bills than poor people do. Surely you realize this.