
Silicon Valley investor tries to create 'microschool' in yard, backlash ensues - 7402
https://www.sfgate.com/education/article/Silicon-Valley-investor-backyard-school-15455085.php
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uberman
People who can afford to, hire private staff to fill many jobs and provide
many services: coaches, tutors, advisors cooks, drivers, security, cleaning.
even private schooling.

Where is the issue here? I genuinely don't understand. How is this any
different than sending a kid to a private school?

I only wish I was rich enough to hire my kids a private teacher.

~~~
posguy
Quality education for every student would be held by many as a human right,
hence countries like Finland where all schools are required to charge no fee,
and the public education system is superb.

~~~
gameman144
This makes total sense, but wouldn't a backyard school be a completely
reasonable indictment of the local public education system in this case?

In other words, it would seem that one wouldn't start a backyard school unless
they thought their children would be better off than in public schools. The
outrage here seems to be that the public _agrees_ with that assessment:
students who have access to this backyard school would have an advantage over
students going through public school programs during the pandemic.

From both sides, it seems that the ball is in the public schools' court. For
the investor, there wouldn't be a need to start a backyard school if he felt
that the public schools were offering a reasonable alternative. For the public
school parents, there wouldn't be as much outrage if they thought the public
schools were offering the same quality of education as this backyard school.

Definitely agree that quality education for all is the desired outcome here,
but given that it's not in place yet, starting a school to give your own kids
every advantage makes sense, as does pushing representatives to fix and fund
public schools more fully.

~~~
zwaps
As I understand it, public schools are not bad because decisionmakers think
they are good. So it's interesting to read that "competition" by private
schools would increase the quality of public schools. At least empirically,
that doesn't seem to be the case.

There are two arguments that have been brought up.

1\. This sort of disjointed system is not desirable as it propagates
inequality in opportunity. This should be fairly obvious and not contentious.

2\. Private schools and these pods, as their extreme form, face a similar
issue as insurance markets if there is capture in governance (which seems to
be the case in the US). On the one hand, wealthy people have an incentive to
bundle their funding in private schools, which will lead to higher average
contributions. They also have an incentive to petition government not to use
their other tax contributions for public school, as they do not profit from
it. Even more, their kids profit from this distance. Given that wealthy people
are powerful in the US, this seems to be a more likely reason why public
schools are not well funded.

So economically speaking, private schools on a large scale could be damaging
to the quality of general education, much like a fragmented insurance market
may eventually split into high and low classes.

Countries like Finland have public education on-par with the best private
schools elsewhere. One component may be funding for education generally. But
it will probably also be true that there is more funding towards public
schools in relative terms, since powerful actors (in any sense) have an
incentive to make schools for their children decent. In the US, wealthy people
in general have zero direct incentive to fund public education.

Therefore, it seems to me that the solution is not to introduce competition.
Speaking with US teachers and administrators, it doesn't seem that they could
provide better education if incentivized by better private schools. What I
hear instead is that public education is simply underfunded in the US. That
would speak for the argument above.

~~~
TomMarius
It's easy to talk about 'not introducing competition' from your armchair. It's
way harder when it's _your children_ not getting the education and childhood
they deserve; and it's not just about education itself, actually IMHO (from my
personal experience) it's _mostly not_ about the education but rather about
the environment at the school; I won't send my children to a public school not
because of low quality teaching, but because of bullying (both by other kids
and by the teachers) which the institution was unable to solve for decades or
maybe even hundreds of years, and because I absolutely don't believe in exams,
preparations for exams, and marks, and because I have zero control over public
schools as a parent. Even a high quality school with the classic
subjects/preparations/exams/marks system still would be a reason to move to a
freer country to me if I lived in Finland, and in fact I have a coworker here
in Prague that did just that.

Even the richest person on Earth can't fix the public schools with their whole
fortune, not even a group of the top 10 could - they wouldn't be able to
provide funds for more than a year. And private education is definitely not
reserved to the rich, I don't think the majority of parents that send their
kids to private schools have more than average income.

~~~
zwaps
Well if you reject the assertion that parents of kids in private schools have
higher than average income, I think the discussion is not fruitful.

Be it true or false, this is the axiom on which the whole debate is based. If
it were not true, I think there's no economic or incentive issue with either
form, and there should also be no ex-ante reason to prefer private over public
schooling except for idiosyncratic preferences about the approach, given that
both forms should receive equal funding.

And indeed, I think there are countries where precisely that is true. These
are the ones where the public school system is considered good, and where
private schools typically place emphasis on a different manner of education.

However, for the US, I think most people would disagree with you. Funding for
private schools is incredibly high and driven by above average contributions
of wealthy parents, whereas funding of the public school system is allegedly
more than poor.

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0xy
As much as the school district wants to complain about this, it's not illegal
and they can't stop them.

Homeschooled students perform better than public school students, in addition.

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ffggvv
twitter is definitely the worst platform for our culture and public discourse.
not sure why Facebook gets all the hate.

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rdtwo
Meh somebody on Twitter got triggered... every one else is jealous. The entire
system is failing during covid so is that really all that surprising that
wealthy people are opting out

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julienreszka
Envy really is one of the greatest sins. May those people find inner peace one
day.

~~~
shean_massey
Exactly. WTF is the complaining about. Alternative title: Guy wants to do the
best for his kid while other parents wine about it on Twitter. If he wasn't
wealthy, and sourced the funds from elsewhere, nobody would bat an eye. He'd
maybe even be applauded for the resourcefulness. But no, he's rich, I'm not,
it's unfair, boohoo

