Saw a video with Ana Kasparian from the Young Turks & Ben Shapiro discussing education.
Got to a point where Kasparian brought up support for banning private k-12 schools in the US and compared it to Finland, which made the same policy.
Wanted to discuss this and break it down on why I find this stance bizarre.
First point, there’s the coincidence, where a policy existing doesn’t lead to it actually having anything to do with the result.
57 million Americans are kids or teenagers in k-12 right now and 10% of them go to private schools.
To be clear, there is a myth private schools in the US are a lot better over public schools.
Which on surface seems true, when looking at how 8th graders in private schools average 18 points higher in subjects such as math over public school. Issue though is most people in private schools come from stronger economic backgrounds and more likely to have things such as dual college educated parents, more stable home life and other factors which does get an edge.
When comparing private versus public school students from similar economic backgrounds, the results are normally pretty much the same. The private school students traditionally have higher performance, but it’s more in line with something marginal, like 1-3%.
But here’s why this idea of banning private schools is just insane.
Private schools in the majority of the country don’t actually take any resources from public schools. The only think some school districts offer is bus services, but the cost on that are so low, it’s not even .1% of the budget.
What the result of a ban would do is bring in no actual money to the schools, but cause an enrolment increase of 10% in classroom sizes.
So Ana Kasparian is saying “Let’s ban schools which produce acceptable results, but with no extra money, increase enrolment on schools 10%.”
Bigger deal would be something like NYC, where 18% of kids attend private schools for k-12 and 10% go to charter schools, which she also supports banning.
NYC banning private schools would get no additional funding and increase classroom size nearly one fifth.
Doesn’t make a lot of sense.
On a policy level, this idea is insane.
Ban something that works fine.
Add more kids to public schools.
Don’t add money.
Boom!
The next thing to touch on is the topic of Finland.
I’ve noticed this over the years, where this category of the US left exist which focus on places such as Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland and so on as dream nations to take policy from.
I’d point out Finland has a population of 5.5 million people today.
1 million of them are under 18.
Comparing that, NYC alone has 1.7 million kids.
New York State has 4 million kids.
Finland is 80 million acres as a country, but one state with under half the acreage has a population of kids being about 78% of their total population.
Which if we breakdown NYC schools to Finland as a comparison versus the US, we’d see an area like Manhattan which is almost as many kids as Finland be comparable to them in terms of results.
But the real key to Finland and a lot of countries is this.
Finland, the median wage is $48,000.
America, the median wage is $34,000.
And that’s not what Finland is doing right, but it’s just Finland largely represents a smaller chunk of Europe.
In Finland now, 66% of job openings currently are in software or tech.
The country along with places such as Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland represent most of Europe’s tech & financial sector in a similar way that NYC, Boston & SF do in America.
It’s a generally wealthier place, but if we compared results to something like Cambridge, Massachusetts, Manhattan or SF, the numbers get much more favorable to the US.
America has more diversity.
Finland doesn’t have counties where 80% of people are working in manufacturing or agriculture.
Finland doesn’t have parts of California or Texas, where a 20% of kids have English as a second language and that creates challenges in teaching.
Finland doesn’t have as many people who are lower income, but other parts of Europe do.
There’s this tendency in the left, which I find strangely ironic, in which they cherry pick countries where they are 85-90% white, they have the highest percentage of financial services jobs in the world and have extremely low immigration numbers from lower income nations and general diversity.
They get cherry picked over some policy gaps, but many parts of Europe with similar policies and worse results are ignored.
Anyway…
For the core message on this post.
I think a lot of public schools are great and should be strengthened, but this delusional idea of just banning private schools which are doing fine and causing a 10% hike in enrolment with no extra money is for lack of a better word, stupid.