I'm a comparatively wealthy parent, I've bothered to look at the data, and I'm sending my kids to public schools.
I really don't believe it's about giving their kids a better education, because the studies pretty consistently show that public schools have superior outcomes when you adjust for socioeconomic status of individual students and special needs. The private schools of course don't accept these students. It's about exclusivity.
No, they wouldn’t. Schools have extremely small effects on student learning, if that[1]. Private schools buy a safer, more class homogeneous environment which is worth a lot but you can get the same effect by living in the right suburbs.
[1] Education and Intelligence: Pity the Poor Teacher because Student Characteristics are more Significant than Teachers or Schools
Education has not changed from the beginning of recorded history. The problem is that focus has been on schools and teachers and not students. Here is a simple thought experiment with two conditions: 1) 50 teachers are assigned by their teaching quality to randomly composed classes of 20 students, 2) 50 classes of 20 each are composed by selecting the most able students to fill each class in order and teachers are assigned randomly to classes. In condition 1, teaching ability of each teacher and in condition 2, mean ability level of students in each class is correlated with average gain over the course of instruction. Educational gain will be best predicted by student abilities (up to r = 0.95) and much less by teachers’ skill (up to r = 0.32). I argue that seemingly immutable education will not change until we fully understand students and particularly human intelligence. Over the last 50 years in developed countries, evidence has accumulated that only about 10% of school achievement can be attributed to schools and teachers while the remaining 90% is due to characteristics associated with students. Teachers account for from 1% to 7% of total variance at every level of education. For students, intelligence accounts for much of the 90% of variance associated with learning gains. This evidence is reviewed.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/spanish-journal-of-p...
At any rate, I've seen that data and think it's perfectly applicable to what I was saying. My argument wasn't really about the spend on "the school" per se, but more that the resources could be better spent on the behalf of students if it wasn't directed to a private school, whether that's spend on the community environment or specifically on the students themselves (like with tutoring, or sponsoring a club). Directing money towards a private school is counterproductive to both the individual and the wellbeing of your own community. This does assume day-schools. Boarding schools are an entirely separate beast, and I don't have a strong sense of why parents choose them, despite having taught at one for a few years. Mastery learning can be applied in any setting. The thing that remains is, do you teach your student how the world is, or how act in order to be enculturated into an elite "in" group? I would argue that the former can confer the benefits of the later, but that the reverse is much harder.
You also mention community over and over as if every community in the US is similar in demographics or culture which is also not the case. All Muslim people I know, for example, send their children to private school, some driving nearly 50 miles both ways twice a day (200 miles!) just to do it after getting a taste of what the local public school system had to offer!
My own children all went to public school and if I had a chance to do it over again I would have put them in private school.
Parents are making this choice to give their kids a better education, and anyone with the same opportunity would do it too.
Diverting resources, whether those resources are students, tax dollars, or parental volunteer time, away from public education harms the students who attend public education and harms our society.
Rather than put the time and energy into building a proper community, those with means instead prefer to wall themselves off from the rest of society, which harms everyone.
They didn't say sending kids to private school was a way to actively defund public education just that wealthy parents do both which is true. What's your motivation to vote and support politicians that advocate for better funded public schools when it doesn't effect your kids but raises your taxes?
People are all different and their motivations are complex. Not everyone is angling for ultimate personal advantage and maximum externalization of downside, even amongst the wealthy.
School vouchers offer the potential to poor that money into a system that is working instead. Maybe that richer parent is trying to help not hinder other parents. Public schools appear to be fundamentally broken in many communities. More money won't fix that brokenness. Firing a bunch of teachers and administrators might work but good luck getting that to happen with the current state of education unions. Enabling parents to put their money into systems that aren't broken is a reasonable alternative to that.
There is already a live experiment where education unions are totally neutered, and it didn't fix anything. Private schools "work" because they get to expel anyone who doesn't pay enough money to outbalance any problems they cause. Public schools obviously cannot do this.
Private schools "work" because they get to expel anyone who doesn't pay enough money to outbalance any problems they cause. Public schools obviously cannot do this.
Because the main purpose of the public school system isn't to provide the best education for the most capable, it's to provide an acceptable education for the average student to eventually work a basic labor job, to provide daycare for working class parents, and to keep teenagers mostly busy so that they commit less crimes.
Expelling every problem student would totally fail at these goals, and would create an underclass of problem teenagers who have mostly nothing to do but commit crimes and get eachother pregnant. This would be a massive failure and much more expensive than public school. It would worsen the lives of the millions who would have otherwise grown out of these negative tendencies.
Further, it's not the only secret to private schools success, only one reason. Other reasons are costing money and therefore disqualifying poor people, parents who pay money for their children's school are more likely to be invested and involved in their child's education, and private school teachers are paid much more money than public school teachers. All of these factors contribute. I just listed a one, since the only reason you listed was unions.
A more interesting comparison is between public schools and charter schools which are not allowed to use selective admissions (must admit by lottery etc.), which is much closer to the public school system. My understanding is that they do a little bit better on average at the cost of more outliers. And even they avoid the most checked-out parents who couldn't be bothered or are actively hostile to filling a free application for a school.
Oh - and you said you didn't only blame unions, but the only other targets in your post are teachers and administrators, which private schools also have. Can you expand on this?
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p1304.pdf
In California, property tax revenue has been increasing steadily YoY... a $3.2Bn increase in 2020 alone.
What percentage of their wealth do they pay? What are their effective tax rates compared to the working class? Why are capital gains taxes so much less than most income taxes? Why does our "progressive" tax rate stop growing in the 150k range or so? Which one of those groups can afford lawyers to structure their incomes to pay even less?
The rich are not paying their fair share and generally have been paying less and taking more for decades, I don't know what you are on about.
I believe it actually stops at around 700k for married couples and 575k for singles.