I don't know exactly, but my experience is that most parents say private schools do a better job (teachers are better engaged and aren't checked out, apathetic pencil pushers). In the areas with good school districts (and there are a handful of those), things swing to another extreme: too much pressure, like Singapore-style schools, which causes children to buckle under the pressure later in their lives.
It's not that the schools are shit. They all have issues. Some get much better funding than others - clearly, but they're all leagues better than what you'd get in many rural parts of America.
The issue is that the kids going to the "poor" schools are poor. Their home life is shit because they're frequently sharing a two bedroom apartment with another family. They're dealing with parents who are unable to afford a better housing situation (not just renting a house - but they can't even afford to rent a place without another family being in it - lots of multigenerational housing happening too, which has pro/con) and who frequently have to work much more than some dual income FAANG tech couple - and they have a much worse quality of life. The parents aren't very involved because they just have other priorities.
This leads to the kids randomly dropping out middle of the year. Every year, the kids I know who went to Santa Clara schools ended up with their class sizes shrinking throughout the year because kids would just disappear middle of the year. That has the pros of less kids per classroom as the schoolyear goes on but it has downsides like... well, you can't make any long term friendships! On top of that, if you are in a family that is doing well - you're gonna be unrelatable to the other kids. And it goes true with the parents too.
One of the reasons my friends have put their kids in private schools is because their kids are around people like themselves, the parents operate under a collective agreement (they are all too involved in their parenting style), and there's just a commonality in background. At the public school, kids of all backgrounds could be interfacing and it just didn't give much social cohesion. Everyone had different goals. Some kids/parents wanted to just get to the next grade along with some babysitting - others wanted much more. Public school mostly is for handling the first people.
> Their home life is shit because they're frequently sharing a two bedroom apartment with another family
This sounds like a spoiled rich person talk: it's unimaginable how people manage to survive without a separate bedroom. And a private gardener, one should add.
A mere hundred years ago having a room per family was considered to be okay.
In USSR two generations living in the same one-bedroom apartment was a usual thing.
Somehow people managed to finish schools, go to universities and just do whatever normal people do.
Once you have a roof above your head, your living conditions are not shit pretty much by definition. We all got a bit too spoiled.
There is a positive (in the control systems sense) feedback loop with school quality. Whenever test scores drop a little, the most affluent and engaged parents tend to panic. They transfer their children to private school, or move to higher rated school districts. The public school they left behind then suffers further declines in test scores and funding, and the downward spiral continues.
There are data and experiences available for making these judgments. There might be a class divide underlying it, but to walk away with the assessment that one type of school on average does better than another is not a classist sentiment.
I always went to schools that are considered "bad" (including community college and undergrad!), so I'm genuinely curious as to what goes into these judgements.
It is not. Remember that public schools (they are essentially free for the parents) are competing with private schools that are charging 20k+ per year per pupil. Most people who have to work for a living will not shell out 20k+ or (50-60k if there are siblings involved) simply because they are classist: they see clear advantages in private schools.
This year, most bay area public schools are online. Many private schools are still operating in person. For young children, this makes a world of difference. Just one instance of where private schools come out on top.
> Most people who have to work for a living will not shell out 20k+ or (50-60k if there are siblings involved) simply because they are classist: they see clear advantages in private schools.
> Most people who have to work for a living will not shell out 20k+ or (50-60k if there are siblings involved) simply because they are classist: they see clear advantages in private schools.
Just because they see it doesn't mean it's actually there. Private schools attract the students that would do better in any environment (because of both socioeconomic class factors and involved parents making non-default choices), and measures of student performance reflect this. There's very little evidence that they do anything to actually improve outcomes, but what most people see (aside from marketing, which private schools put plenty of money into as well) is statistics that show correlation without controlling for other variables, from which it is easy to make incorrect inferences about causation.
