Comment by solutionyogi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by solutionyogi | Hacker News Reader

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It's interesting. When you simplify USPS as essential service, it's fine. But if I take your 'essential service' argument and simplify it even further, I am doing 'gross simplification'.

Please don't even get me started on public education in United States. I would gladly allow 3 more USPS organizations to waste taxpayer's money if they get rid of public schools and adopt a school voucher system.

Please look for 'Stupid in America' show on YouTube and watch it. It will seriously change your opinion about public schools. Also, how many times have you heard people moving to certain district because they have better public schools? Have you ever heard anyone moving to certain district just because they have better grocery store?

I fail to comprehend why you think profit motive is a bad thing. Just like a private school has a profit motive, the customer (parents in case of private schools) have an incentive to get best value for their money and trust me, they will.

Please look for 'Stupid in America' show on YouTube and watch it. It will seriously change your opinion about public schools.

I'm aware of the documentary, and as usual, it completely misses the point. I'm intimately familiar with the inner workings of America's public and private schools (both the best and the worst on both sides). For the past several years I've had daily exposure to pretty much all angles of this issue. I suspect you've simply watched a 45 minute Youtube video and liked how microfoundations sounded when it was taught to you in school. I could write for hours on the horrors of private school vouchers alone (did you know when they tried it in Arizona, 3/4ths of the money ended up going to students who were already in private schools? [1]). And lets not even get into the fact that private schools actually don't perform that much better than public schools [2] when you account for the diversity in public schools. Considering that private schools mostly teach to a homogeneous student body, they should be blowing the public schools out of the water. They're actually not that much cheaper either, when you consider that private schools don't need to spend nearly as much money on special education programs and psychological therapy [3]. If I was a school admin I could post the most impressive numbers in the country if I'm allowed to skim from the cream of the crop, but public schools by law are not allowed to do so. However, I suspect at this point expending any more energy on this issue wasted effort since you seem dead set in your ways.

[1] http://www.gregpalast.com/no-childs-behind-left/

[2] http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2006461

[3] http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2007/10/private-school-tuition-1...

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