States with High Taxes vs. States with Low Taxes

Pretty much what Warburg said. The private industry always has more incentive to do well than the government because the government can always fall back on the taxes of the populace if they screw up. A private enterprise could lose everything.

So let me get this straight. You don't like public schools because you have to pay taxes for them. Yet you support moving exclusively to private schools, which will more than likely cost you more, BUT OMG YOUR TAXES WILL BE LOWER! Let me paint a picture for ya.

You very well know that New Jersey has some of the highest property taxes in the nation, since you live in Jersey also. I'm not gonna argue that taxes are way too expensive here, because I agree. However, I will say this. The public middle school I went to was one of the better school academic wise (in my opinion) out of both public and private schools. Now since my mom had this phobia for sending me to a public highschool, I went go Holy Cross (in the end for only the first month) on a partial scholarship. Now without the scholarship, Holy Cross costed 8,000 dollars a year. Now the taxes I believe were 6,000 a year hear. With the largest scholarship you can get, it still cost about 5-6 thousand a year to go to holy cross. Now I don't know how much other private highschools cost, (I heard most of them cost more but am not sure on that) but effectively, that equals more per year than the taxes we pay in the state with some of the highest in the nation.

Like I said, I left Holy Cross after a month and a half due to it being ridiculously expensive. When I went to my local public school, I found it to be much better academically wise, and much more student friendly. Ultimately, I came to the conculsion that it was a better environment, and just better all around, and we were not paying an extra money for it.

Yeah, private school is for phonyes! Where the hell is my red hat?

Which is why I said most. There are assholes and cynical bastards in all industries.

Fixed.

I thought I made that pretty obvious.

Obviously, it was just my repressed memories coming aflot. Oh gawd why

Like I said earlier, if public schools weren't around, the price of private schools would go down.

I'm glad you had a positive experience. Not everyone is as lucky.

Gonna back that up?

What?

It's simple economics. If businesses are able to compete, they'll naturally drive each other's prices down in an effort to get more customers. The reason private schools are expensive now is because no business can compete with a "free" service so they aim at a more elitist audience that they know can pay them enough to survive.

Just because you liked your public school better than your private school doesn't mean one is better than the other. Different schools have different people in it, students and faculty. I'm going to assume you went to a religious school since it's called Holy Cross. You don't seem to me as a particularly religious person to me, but there would probably be more zealous people in a religious school than a public school. That might grate against your personal preferences. I don't presume to know why you liked public school better than private school but the different people who go to each school can definitely affect a person's perception of that school.

I think there is little to argue with you on this point, as far as the driving down of prices goes.

However, what concerns me is that when competition like this takes place, the standard of education can fall. You would get 'budget' schools, for people unable to afford better schooling, where the quality of education would be far inferior to more expensive establishments.

This I do not like the sound of.

Not to sound cynical, but that's pretty much what public school is now. Some schools get more federal funding, and others get less. Some public schools are pretty good, like the high school I go to, and some are scary to be in.

Well I guess your current system sucks, then.

I think it would be better if you evened out your current funding, however.

Although I guess I'm a bit of a hypocrite on this. There's no way I'd go to an innercity state school in this country.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2009/08/the_trouble_with_private_schoo
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/19/opinion/19wed2.html

Food for thought.

The problem this article talks about wouldn't exist without public schools

This one is just... weird. How would variables such as "

race, gender and parents’ education and income

" affect a child's scores enough to drop it down? Just reading this article about the report leads me to believe it's incredibly biased toward the public school system. Oh, and look! The National Education Association, populated by mostly public school teachers, said that public schools were doing a great job. Shocking.

What?

If you read further, it said both have the same problems.

The article was talking about how private schools are somehow making public schools worse. Without getting into whether that's true or not, that problem wouldn't exist if public schools didn't exist.

They do, but what the article suggested was that private school children did better on tests than public school children. Then, they took seemingly arbitrary things like race and gender and somehow twisted these into making private school grades equal to or lower than public school.

I'm sure there are some private schools that are much worse than some public schools. That doesn't mean that all public schools are better than all private schools. On average, private schools just provide better quality. If they didn't, then no one would send their kids to them.

If private schools didn't exist, more smart kids would go to public schools. Thus the public schools would turn out better. The less intelligent students would benefit from having the very intelligent students as their peers. Since all the great teachers wouldn't be going to private schools, then they would swell the ranks of public schools, as they would still need a job. This would also make the public schools better.

Again, if private schools didn't exist, public schools would get much better, for the fact that smarter kids would be going there, and their parents who would normally send them to a private school would demand the school improve its education system. This would not be very hard, as all the teachers who taught at private schools would swell the tanks of public schools. Everyone wins, and nobody pays anything extra.

The kids are only smart because of private schools, except in the instances of home schooling or anything similar to that. Taking them from that environment and surrounding them with students of lower intelligence will lower the smart one's intelligence as well. It works both ways. Plus, it wouldn't be "extra" if public schools didn't exist since the money taken from taxes would be used to pay the private schools. Lastly, and this is just personal preference, if I had the money to send my child to private school and the government suddenly, and immorally, took that right away, then I would rather just hire one of those out of business teachers as a tutor for my child.

I feel like I use too many commas...

If all the teachers who teach at public schools begin to teach at private schools instead, the intelligence of the lesser intelligent kids raise. The intelligent ones who went to a private school would still more than likely be hanging out with other intelligent kids (which happens now anyway) and for the most part, the same kids they would be hanging out with if they went to a private school.

I feel like we are getting nowhere...

A single teacher can only teach so many kids in one class. Private school teachers will be outnumbered by public school teachers and they could start teaching the private school kids as well. It's all an effort in futility where the private school kids are forced to go to schools where they wouldn't learn as much.

If the intelligent kids only hang out with other intelligent kids, then how would they influence the other, not as smart kids? Plus, I've seen AP students fall to "the dark side" as it were. A really smart kid I know started hanging around with the wrong crowd, who weren't AP students. A few months ago him and his group of friends got busted for drug abuse. He nearly got expelled.