Reply to About to switch to private and about to lose some friends

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm OP and I can't believe it but I'm back.

So people read it as an insult to their own parenting if I put my kid in private? Would I offend people if I moved to a neighborhood different than the one they chose or bought a different car? It seems like unless people are unsure of their own decisions they should not be offended. If they really think their school is better they should pity me for throwing away my money on something so ill informed right? I don't hear pity though, I hear hostility.

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OP,  how do you feel about the political argument.  By leaving public you are withdrawing all of your resources, and you are one small piece in a larger trend that creates public school disinvested (because they aren't a priority to the middle class and wealthy parents who don't use the schools) with an overrepresentation of kids who need more resources to succeed?[/quote]

Not OP here, but I will offer that the above argument is just a hypothesis, and I think a very incorrect one.

If you don't use the public school, you continue to pay tax dollars into it while not using up a spot for your child.  So the tiny incremental effect of your decision on the school is to increase the amount of resources available per attending child.

Meanwhile, you are contributing much more $ to education, by paying for private, than you would be if you attended public.  This increases the total amount of local resources spent on education.  It increases teacher demand relative to supply, and exerts small incremental upward pressure on teacher compensation.

By leaving public you are not "withdrawing all of your resources," as you continue to pay tax dollars toward education. You would actually be withdrawing more resources if you withdrew from private.

No doubt there are room for different analyses of all the factors, but the automatic assumption that people who withdraw public for private are somehow hurting the public schools is in my opinion based on a very incomplete and incorrect picture of the actual effects of that decision.  They shouldn't be blamed anyway if it's the right decision for them -- it's irrational to expect otherwise -- but given how dubious the case is the negative judgments are wildly out of place.[/quote]

+1. It is akin to saying that middle/ upper class people who live in the neighborhood and don't have kids at all are disinvesting in the public schools. People sending their kids to private school is a tiny group nationwide, that is certainly not even close to being a factor in the problems of our struggling system of public education. [/quote]

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