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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3732 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 18, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I want to raise my kids somewhere they'll have intelligent peers, an actually challenging primary school system, and no danger of state abduction if they say the wrong thing to a school therapist.

Yes to all. So my kid is in a carefully selected private school. In the suburbs of a major city. This is a service you could buy today.

Private schools' main benefit is selection effects, but they select based mostly on income. You're paying out the nose just to be among other people who can and are willing to pay out the nose. This is a problem because while income is correlated with IQ it's not a particularly strong correlation, and you'll still end up with plenty of slow kids in class who drag the rest of the class down.

To be clear, what I'm looking for is a school system that sorts people based on intelligence and allows the quick kids to actually move ahead. I expect you'd pretty quickly have elementary school kids doing college-level tasks (to the extent "college-level" means anything) if they're allowed to set the pace rather than letting it be set by the slowest rich kid in the neighborhood. Given a group of kids 2 standard deviations above average (so 5% of all classrooms) you should probably be entirely done with high school before 9th grade using only half-days.

Private schools are definitely the best existing solution, besides maybe one-on-one private tutoring, but they're insufficient. They don't get the outcomes they should be getting. And the things I mentioned (challenging education, intelligent peers, sensible mental health policies) aren't the only benefits of living in a sane jurisdiction, just the most salient.

I think this used to be called "Gifted and Talented" programs when I was in elementary/middle school. I don't know if they still exist.

Even if they don't explicitly point this out, language immersion programs have a similar functional effect for ensuring your kid has higher-than-average-quality peers (and, if your kid is legitimately over-performing, it's a great distraction). They're also less likely to be targeted by progressives because it's not a sciences/excellence thing.

Yeah, I was in one and it was utterly insufficient. The peers, at least, were great, but the curriculum was still quite slow. Still better than nothing, but a long way from what's needed.

To be clear, what I'm looking for is a school system that sorts people based on intelligence and allows the quick kids to actually move ahead.

Isn’t this just selective public schools like those in some big cities like NYC where the student body is like 75% Asian?

If it is I'd like to learn more about them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specialized_high_schools_in_New_York_City

How much do you pay for that though? Seems like a humongous cost.

Cheaper than building your own Galt’s Gulch?

If everyone was paying private school tuition rates I think you could actually build a Galt's Gulch for no additional cost.

Possibly.

If true, that raises the question—why is private school so overpriced?

My understanding is that private schools are commonly cheaper per student than public schools. And somehow have smaller classes. Public schools are wild profligates with our tax dollars.

I have never found a serious source for this in aggregate (probably publication bias), but I have a suspicion that outcomes correlate negatively with funding. It's not hard to look and see that the districts that spend the most per student tend to also be the worst performing overall.

Some of this is higher costs in urban areas, and frequently bad districts can have some really good magnet schools. And I'm also not really of the opinion that this means cutting funding would improve outcomes.

I mean, is it overpriced? Education is just expensive and we don’t see it up front with a public school because the government pays the bill. Indeed, Catholic schools typically cost less than public schools spend.

One of the Bernalillo County (where Albuquerque, NM is) Republican Party’s big talking points is that the Albuquerque Public Schools district’s total budget is poorly spent by government.

Divided by pupil, the cost is a few thousand dollars more per year than tuition at Albuquerque Academy, the swankiest of our two prep high schools and the one with the biggest, showiest campus. At that price, we should be turning out Silicon Valley/Harvard/MIT-level high school grads, but we’re not.

If existing tuition could fund education plus Galt’s Gulch, but you aren’t getting the latter, then yes, it’s charging too much.

I agree that those public schools are probably also overpriced. Catholics probably aren’t the only ones delivering education at that price point, but I haven’t really looked into it.

IIRC Catholic schools spend the same as charters for better results(how much of that is selection effects is an interesting question- Catholic schools avoid idiocy like the whole word method so it’s probably not 100%). So delivering education for that price point is definitely doable, public schools do a lot of cost disease.

Secular private schools are expensive probably in part because they’re funding things like chefs in the cafeteria and public-school quality athletics complexes. I’m not sure the difference can fund galt’s gulch- I think you can make a private club gated parallel society compound in the middle of nowhere, but it’s going to entail a big drop in standards of living or a wealthy(like billionaire tier) outside backer.

Well, there are all sorts of costs/benefits to moving out to the middle of nowhere. The real price of doing so isn't the cost of building a fence or housing or whatever, it's the price of moving away from any large center of commerce. Transplant a few thousand people directly from NYC to Podunk and even after improving their housing substantially you'll have hundreds of millions of dollars left over to build whatever else needs to be build, including a school.

Other prices, such as tuition, are also inflated by this--teachers need a place to live, after all. Taxes will be lower. Food will be cheaper. Everything will be better except for the one thing that keeps hundreds of millions of people from doing this--economic opportunity.

So yeah, if everyone kept their same incomes and bought in to such a society, I think you could build and run a comparable private school for a fraction of the price, but the "if" is certainly no settled matter.

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Gatekeeping through price is its main feature, so it's just following demand.

That seems likely. But then where does the money go? Higher salaries? Marginal improvements in materials?

You could imagine a private school which gets 90% of its performance from <90% of its dollars. In a public city, it has to spend the extra dollars on inefficient stuff to keep the poors out. In this gated community, the gatekeeping is done, so it’d be able to stop spending.

I suspect distinguishing which dollars are which is nontrivial.

To a lesser extent this is true of housing in general. I think plenty of people would be happy living in much smaller houses/apartments if they were sure they could do so in a good neighborhood with other successful, like-minded people.

It makes me wonder about the legality of constructing some kind of "landshare" where people need to literally buy their way into the community. Most of the money would be going not towards the land they're buying, but some kind of community trust holding an index of stocks. This way you still get the price gatekeeping without the inflated land prices.

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