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Comment by cratermoon

4 days ago

> I would never send my kids there.

Why not, what's wrong with it? What could you do better at home, or what could private schools do better?

I read thst San Francisco decided not to offer Algebra until high school so no one would feel left behind. One of those dystopian decisions that emerged from a well intentioned DEI initiative. A decision that defies logic and surprise didn't help. That would be enough of a red flag for me. https://priceonomics.com/why-did-san-francisco-schools-stop-...

You could literally live next to a school and there’s a chance your kids can’t go there.

There are many kids from low income, broken families who are just really bad students. Bullies. Disruptive. Disrespectful to teachers. It was hell going through public schools in SF.

  • So it's "opt out of being around average people", then?

    • Average people aim to provide a good a start for their kids as possible; average aims to avoid public school if possible. You now only have a set of people defined by behaviour or ability too poor for private, parents who don't care, or ones with no options...

      Basically it's opting out of being around the dregs

      2 replies →

    • If the average student is a bully, disruptive, and disrespectful to teachers then I think I might actually opt out of being around average people if possible.

    • And what's so bad about it? Mind you, it's not just 'being around', but "being stuck with them for 30% of your life for years in a situation out of your control".

    • Average people are cool. We're trying to opt out of being around the bottom 10%.

I wonder the same thing, I have friends who send their kids there and are happy with it. Not surprisingly for SF, most of the parents are educated with good incomes and expect their kids to go to college. That has its own set of downsides of course, but you could do a lot worse.

Don't know why this is downvoted, seems like a reasonable question. I don't know much about SF or public schools in the US. Are they all bad? do we have data comparing public/private schools in these areas?

  • Public and private schools don't take the same tests, so we don't have good days to compare the schools. Even if we did, it would be hard to disentangle the impact of selection bias.

    You could look at college acceptances or similar, but those aren't unbiased either, as colleges look at estimates of class rank, not just absolute performance.