
I Think Private Schools Should Be Banned - kwindla
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/political-confessional-i-think-private-schools-should-be-banned/
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milsorgen
Yes let us drag everyone down in the vain chase for this nebulous ideal of
'equality'.

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intarga
There's more to it than that.

In my country (the UK), our politicians and all their donors/lobbyists are
privately educated, and send their children to private schools. This gives
them little incentive to make sure state schools are well funded and run,
since that only affects "the poor". This only serves to compound the above
situation

I was privately educated, and am grateful for the quality of education I
received, but I lament that half my compatriots who I share a nation and
political system with did not receive the same. My country is broken and
divided along these lines, as recent political happenings like Brexit
illustrate, and it desperately needs mending. If we need to abolish private
schools to achieve that then so be it.

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JSeymourATL
Related: School Choice - The Case For Vouchers >
[https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/vouchers/choi...](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/vouchers/choice/provouchers.html)

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skybrian
What I'd like to see: vouchers, but only for integrated schools. (For some
definition of integrated.)

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hodgesrm
If the goal is to help as many kids as possible it's easier to make public
schools better by funding them properly and ensuring they are well run. That's
effectively what happened where I live. Private schools were much more popular
20 years ago; several have gone out of business since then.

At the same time, that's not enough to help everyone, especially economically
disadvantaged groups. We still have an achievement gap. Kids show up with
vastly different levels of preparation--some of the kindergarten kids have
visited Rome and know where it is. Others have never even been to the zoo.

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intarga
The point of the article is that the surefire way to make sure schools are
properly funded and run, is to make sure the children of the wealthy and
powerful attend there too, not just poor.

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hodgesrm
"Surefire" does not not seem like the right adjective.

Eliminating private schools would enrage a large constituency across the
entire political spectrum, so just getting it into law would be a huge fight
that would make it hard to focus on improving public schools afterward.

The next problem would be to ensure that public schools are actually funded
equitably across neighborhoods and that well-to-do parents don't turn their
local schools into de facto private schools.

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anm89
I think the thought process behind this is generally good, something like
"change the incentives of public school funding to help the worst off segments
of our population get a better education". This is something we should spend
more effort on.

The problem is I think the author making this specific suggestion on how to
achieve that is having a hard time understanding the implicit statement they
are making on the other side of this coin: "you don't have the right to decide
how your child should be educated, a committee will decide intimate details of
yours and your family's lives, where they go every day, what happens when they
get there, what the curriculum is, what happens if it doesn't go well, what
values should be encouraged, what narratives will be portrayed'.

For reference I'm not some radical libertarian I'm fairly centrist and
progressive, but the ability to have autonomy in deciding what is getting
blasted into your kids head every week day for the first 17 years of their
life is not something to scoff at. If that means not every single person gets
the exact same opportunity I'm ok with that (and outside of possibly this
person's utopic vision that would be true in the other scenario as well).

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intarga
Those things are not mutually exclusive.

For example, in England we have academies, which are exactly what you
described, directly accountable to the Department of Education. However, we
also have community schools, which are accountable instead to local
authorities, and we also have voluntary aided schools (like faith schools),
which receive some state funding through the local authority, but are
primarily funded and run by a foundation.

You still get to choose where your child goes to school, and if you really
want to you can also homeschool them.

Private schools are not about choice, they're about quality. Unfortunately,
that comes at the detriment of the quality of state education, and ultimately
social equality and mobility.

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anm89
"Private schools are not about choice", according to who? That's a subjective
opinion which you are presenting as a fact.

The authors argument revolves around removing choice so everyone gets the same
thing so we are forced to make that one option higher quality. I'm not saying
that is the only way to do it, but that is what this person is arguing for and
that is what I'm arguing is a bad idea.

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intarga
I made the case above that choice in education is not exclusive to private
schools, and there I perhaps worded that statement poorly and should have said
"Choice is not the defining characteristic of private schools". You still have
just as much choice in the type of education your child gets without private
education.

The author's argument revolves around removing the choice of paying for
quality, not removing choices of the type of schools and education available.

If we got rid of private schools, we'd still have all the choice, but the
choices and quality would be available to everyone, not just rich families.

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mimixco
State control of education is one of Karl Marx's 10 Planks of Communism.

No, thanks.

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intarga
1\. Not everything that's communist is bad: see single payer healthcare and
social security.

2\. Abolishing private schools does not imply state control of education.
There are plenty of public schools that are either controlled by local
authorities instead of central government, or controlled by an independent
foundation.

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mimixco
A local "authority" is another word for "the state." Why do you think rich
people don't want their kids to go to public school? Could it be because they
don't want to raise another member of the plebescite?

