[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.