Dave writes:
I would like to make one comment regarding education. I live in Chicago and unless you are “connected” to the right people (or are lucky) that can get you in the best public schools, your only option is private school. We send our kids to private school because some of the public schools here have graduation rates in the 50% range. The kids at our private school go to some of the top universities in the country. Not to mention, it is widely known that the Chicago public school system is the most expensive and worst performing school system in the country.
Are they nonprofit schools or for-profit schools? Are they religious schools such as schools run by the Catholic church? Those tend to be nonprofits.
If the public schools are awful, private schools might be a better option.
Education is in no way superior at private schools. The only good thing about them is they throw out all the problem kids and knot-heads. That private schools in Chicago get better results than public schools does not mean that private schools are better than public schools. In a place like Chicago, most of the best students will come from moneyed families that can afford to send their kids to private schools.
I went to great public schools and I have lived in towns that had superior public schools. I also taught school all over the LA area and found that public schools are as good as the kids who go to them. Rundown ghettos and barrios do not tend to have wonderful schools because the student base is low quality. More middle to upper class areas have great public schools because the student base is very high quality. It’s selection bias.
We have done numerous experiments about this question.
Maybe urban public schools are failing because the student base is so low quality. No one wants to admit that, so they blame public education or the poor suffering teachers or other fall guys. A number of cities have hired private corporations to run their public schools, falling for the lie that profit-motivated schools do better than “socialist” nonprofit public schools. These experiments have all been horrible failures. The privatization of education was much more expensive that having the state run them, and there was no improvement in scores. In fact, scores typically declined when public schools were turned into private schools.