> But the shiny things keep the poorer parents and mediocre teachers happy while keeping down cost per lesson per child.
Baltimore spends more per student than Switzerland.
> As always the children of the rich and powerful get bespoke education... You could call it elegant education for a more civilized age...
Education for more affluent people is often cheaper per student. The benefit richer students have is that, on average, their parents are smarter, more conscientious, etc.
> Education for more affluent people is often cheaper per student.
A lot of this is accounting.
You don't need to buy chromebooks for pupils when they already bring their own tablets/laptops. It's not unheard that if there is some initiative requiring equipment (music, sports, smartboards) parents fund that initiative outside tuition costs.
Private schools tend to be controlled-admission and controlled-admission schools can have much narrower variance in skill level. The "dumb" kids do not swallow attention of the teacher and the "super-smart" kids do not get neglected. Richer parents can afford private tutors, closing the gap even further. On top of that, they tend to afford more time to coach their children in the right direction.
All of that costs a small fortune, but is not visible if you compare total state funding of public schools versus admission / tuition costs.
I went to chicago public schools and Google gave every kid in the district free chromebooks. So inner city schools dont need to buy chromebooks for their students either it turns out. They were also terrible and pretty much only served to distract
Chromebooks, smartboards, tablets are all horrible for teaching.
> The benefit richer students have is that, on average, their parents are smarter, more conscientious, etc.
Yup. In general the benefit of schools in richer areas is better parents, rather than better schooling itself.
Depressing, but true.
I would avoid phrasing it as "better". Less wealthy parents are likely working more hours, have to spend more time on household maintenance (don't have a cleaner, can't afford grocery delivery), not to mention the overwhelming stress of struggling to make ends meet. It's not exactly a level playing field.
> I would avoid phrasing it as "better". Less wealthy parents are likely working more hours, have to spend more time on household maintenance (don't have a cleaner, can't afford grocery delivery), not to mention the overwhelming stress of struggling to make ends meet. It's not exactly a level playing field.
Sure, and all of that was included in my comment. It's definitely not a judgement of parents, I am one and it's incredibly difficult even with our relatively high incomes.
> Less wealthy parents are likely working more hours
The top income decile in the U.S. works 10% more hours than the bottom decile. Only a bit over half of low-income kids live in a household where a parent works full time.
Does that account for parents working multiple part-time jobs?
I also wonder how it accounts for salaried vs hourly - I work "40 hours" each week but I know that isn't a consistent 40, it's typically less and sometimes more, but I'm always getting paid a set wage whereas an hourly worker is getting paid exactly what they work (barring wage theft that's more common in lower-income jobs)
Baltimore does not spend more per student than Institut Le Rosey, the school of kings... (alumni include the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, the du Ponts)
The fees are well over USD $150,000 a year.
Philips Exeter (Zuckerberg's school ) is a bargain by comparison at $80,000 s year .
These schools emphasis clear and analytical thinking and traditional education.
In contrast the unfortunate children of the poor are subjected to everyone technology and education trend of the moment...
Education in public schools has turned into AI slop being generated by poorly educated teachers.
The Rotchschilds, the Rockefellers, and the Du Ponts would have done very well in life just as well had they went to public schools, while the alumni of Baltimore public school would not become Rotschilds and Rockefellers and Zuckerbergs had they gone to Pillips Exeter.
That doesn’t mean their schools aren’t better. Money isn’t the only reason having a thoughtful, rigorous and well-constructed education is important.
In many things with regards to education you're not paying/applying for a better quality system in and of itself, but for better quality peers. A public school with a e.g. Exeter quality class would have phenomenal results. By contrast an average public high school class at Exeter is going to have mediocre results. We even tested this. Around COVID many top universities rolled back their testing requirements for admittance under an equity based argument. Those universities are now mostly rolling back those decisions because they found that being less selective in enrollment resulted in significantly worse outcomes. Not exactly a surprise, well at least it shouldn't be.
I don't know how the US works, but in the UK public (private...) schools have incredible facilities for sports, the arts, personal lessons and tutoring, and so on.
Meanwhile the state sector has a lot of crumbling buildings and hand-me-down textbooks.
Public school kids still manage to screw up but they're more likely to land on their feet. Access to the upper levels in careers like law and finance is very much about "polish" (cultural identity) although working class kids sometimes gain entry, often as charity cases.
At the same time public schools used to be notorious for brutal bullying. So survivors are often emotionally traumatised and have had empathy beaten out of them.
In the US public (US terminology) schools are quite well funded, contrary to what many think. We recently hit a record of just under $18k per student per year for high schools. [1] I went to school in some quite low income areas, and the facilities were great. The big issue is that much of the student body was not.
So the facilities, textbooks, and so on were regularly vandalized, stolen, or simply destroyed. But nonetheless we had a nice gym, auditorium, track/field, and so on. We even had things like laser disc players back when that was pretty bleeding edge. In modern times I'd expect to see various luxuries like 3d printers and stuff like that even at low income schools in the US, at least if they haven't been stolen or [intentionally] broken.
If I had to choose for my children between Exeter peers at a US public school, or US public school peers at Exeter, it wouldn't be even remotely close.
[1] - https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2026/school-s...
You are dramatically mistaken about the funding and education quality for low-income school districts. You might find some with good sports facilities, probably from a grant from an outside organization or local college, but anything related to academics, facilities, counseling… forget it. Most public school teachers have to buy their own classroom supplies That is fucked up. I’ve seen districts that don’t have enough available cash to buy food to give everybody a lunch. In one school, a teacher got very sick — they didn’t have enough money to pay a sub, and there wasn’t any other class being taught that we could have been folded into… oh well! Just sit in the library for that period, and everybody gets an A for the year.
My childhood was split between a low income district and an upper-middle-class district. Neither sets of children were likely to vandalize a goddamned thing. In the low-income district, the vibe was militaristic. We were expected to sit with backs straight and our hands folded when not writing. We moved in orderly single-file lines between classrooms and had to line up in formation outside before we were allowed recess. The education was extremely basic. The 5th grade students were barely on ‘chapter books.’ Science class was rote memorization of extremely basic physical science with no experimentation except for one class, the highlight of the year, where we each got a AA battery, two wires, ands a light bulb and had to go through a prescribed set of “experiments” where we would put the wires in various, obviously wrong configurations and finally make a circuit. Art class was still macaroni collages and music class was zero-education sing-alongs from the same song book they used in the 60s. In the upper-middle-class district we were reading Greek mythology and pulling out philosophical themes, exploring people’s emotional motivations, and exploring the historical context. Took pictures with cameras obscura that we made ourselves, made our own Leyden jars and did some very well-designed and open-ended experiments. Art was mostly graphite work from “drawing on the right side of the brain“ where we discussed things like negative space, and we made simple pottery in the school’s ceramic studio.
To imply it was the fault of the student body of that low-income school district that they might have been less engaged or have worse outcomes in life is fucking bananas. Gather more information before making these sweeping generalizations.
You're speaking of elementary which I can't say much one way or the other about in part because I remember things as a child would - I didn't have a 'mature' understanding of what was happening around me back then - I've also never looked up the data on it. I'm referring to middle/high school. And there at least, anything remotely like what you're describing would be highly atypical.
As for the data I've already cited the $18k spent per student which also leads to another common misconception. Low income schools receive more average public funding than high income schools, thanks to various redistributionary measures. Similarly for things like vandalism, 67% of schools report file at least one criminal report on property crime per year. [1] The most common rate is 3-5 per year, followed by 6-10 per year. And that dramatically understates the rates, because most things, as in the vastly overwhelming majority, are not criminally reported.
[1] - https://www.ed.gov/sites/ed/files/offices/OUS/PES/studies-sc...
You can’t make those funding generalizations because the end amount that schools spend on students is defined locally. I just looked in the Massachusetts school funding database. The town I’m not going to out myself as having attended spent ten thousand dollars per year less per student than the Upper-Middle-Class Weston, and the fantastically expensive Cambridge spent 7k per student more than that annually.
Local taxes are where much funding comes from but the redistributionary measures come from both the state and Federal in 'normal' funding as well as a wide array of various program based funding, like Title 1 at the Federal Level. This is why looking up the total amount spent per student is a bit trickier than it might seem. This [1] paper breaks down all funding, with details by state. Check out page 23. So for instance in Massachusetts high poverty districts receive the highest public funding by an very wide margin, with $27,468/student contrasted against a statewide average of $21,767.
What your experience may reflect is more of a rural/urban divide rather than poor/rich. If you happened to live in a low income rural area with few minorities, then your public funding is going to be much less than an urban school with more minorities. You also need to account for basic cost differences, which is going to be factored into redistributionary measures. A dollar goes way further in rural areas than it does urban, which yet further reduces the amount of funding that rural areas receive. Finally schools with higher minority populations tend to have worse outcomes (higher crime, lower scores, etc) which means by the inverse you also receive less funding if you have fewer minorities.
There's even a hint of this possibility in the data. In Massachusetts, the highest poverty districts do indeed receive, by an overwhelming margin, the most funding. But the second group with high levels of 'mid poverty' receives the lowest funding amongst all 4 groups. The data doesn't specify, but I'd expect that this group is significantly comprised of rural and low minority populations.
[1] - https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2024//2024309.pdf
You’re trying to make conclusions about local situations using federal funding data. No matter how many words you type about it, your approach is fundamentally inadequate and you’re making sweeping generalizations based on it. I’m out. Have a nice day.
That's not federal funding data. The paper provides specific numbers on the total funding including local, state, and federal. Looking only at local funding, as you likely did, is completely misleading.
The UK also handles class differently than the US which may account for a lot.
In the US class is largely defined by current net worth. The UK seems to preference heritage and education for determining class hierarchy.
Education is essential in general. But as far as the classic definition of "success" is concerned (usually revolving around wealth of some kind), education is like luck. It could make the difference between 2 people in otherwise identical situations and status. But education alone sadly has a vanishingly small chance of competing with "old money" and generations of accumulated wealth and influence.
You’re essentially just repeating the point I was responding to.
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Ah, cause they inherited a ton of cash ya?
JD Rockefeller actually went to a public school (in the US, not UK meaning).
> The Rotchschilds, the Rockefellers, and the Du Ponts would have done very well in life just as well had they went to public schools
sure, because of their names.
There is absolutely no evidence this is true. There are always a few first generation talents who build empires from dirt and nothing (for values of nothing that usually include war, grift, and slavery).
But once an empire is established it becomes largely self-sustaining, and the inheritors get a huge head start over everyone else in their cohort.
Inherited wealth is not self-sustaining at all: if you spend it down, it disappears. Most inheritors of large windfalls will not manage to pass down that wealth in turn; it takes a rare ingrained cultural attitude to make it genuinely "self-sustaining", and even then that really means leaving the wealth as it is and managing it well - not using it to pursue any immediate "head start" in living standards over your peers.
Are you defining "poor" to mean everyone who doesn't send their kids to Philips Exeter?
The public schools in at least my corner of Switzerland are better than the private schools, including Le Rosey. This seems to be the opinion of nearly everyone I have met.
You only attend Le Rosey for the network.
"Public school" in a place like Switzerland is a different world than in the US though
> Education in public schools has turned into AI slop being generated by poorly educated teachers.
Sure, because no one (in government or school admin) wants to spend the money on more teachers. I also take issue with "poorly educated" - the teachers I know have a masters in education, but that only goes so far when you're dealing with an overcrowded and underfunded classroom.
their parents are smarter? lol dayum.
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What statement did you find antisocial? That richer people are on average smarter?
>There's a reason that people don't like engaging with you . . . nobody wants to fucking talk to you.
He has 708 times as much karma as you have, which would be impossible if no one wanted to read his comments.
I saw your comment because I follow him, not vice versa.