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.
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.
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.
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.
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.