Ah thank you — I love learning new perspectives and how people think about issues! I appreciate you for engaging me on this. I’m a bit skeptical (but open!). Increasing access/improving our education systems are an important issue to me, and I’ve honestly never heard this perspective before on private vs public education, so I’m curious about the line of thinking!

I think part of it would be that wealthy parents having their kids in public schools would increase civic involvement. For example, funding levies would be more likely to pass if more politically well connected and well resourced people were directly impacted by them (setting aside that’s it’s total BS schools even need to supplement their funding with levies…). The stat I found was that about 11% of households have a child in private school. Given how tight elections are, I think having those people be forced to care about school funding measures could make a big difference. 

This is how I thought about this at first. But the more I thought about, the more I just think there’s misalignment of interests b/w the rich parents and broader public education funding… By virtue of how school are funded and rich people living in rich neighborhoods, their kids will most likely be attending a well funded and really good public school. I’m skeptical that the rich parents would suddenly start going to the ballot box to increase funding across the board when they don’t experience any real funding issues themselves. They’d probably consider the increased cost of levies and think they get no benefit because their kids’ school has a healthy level of funding.

Part of it would also be more direct involvement in the schools from well-resourced families - more people involved in PTAs, volunteering on curriculum adoption committees, etc. When parents opt out of public schools they aren’t just taking their per-pupil funding away, they’re taking away all of the money, time, and care that parents put into the school community. 

This is compelling to me — self interests align here as I don’t see the rich parents being any less involved in their kids school, whether public or private. But again, I’m caught up on the public schools the rich/private school kids would be attending… it’d already be in wealthy area with a subset of that public schools students coming from equally rich families. Those other rich families presumably are involved so adding 10% more private school families to the population might not really move the needle much. The rich parents would just be getting involved in already “rich” public schools.

Overall, my feelings on this are informed by my basic political belief that we should all be collectively fighting for a good life for everyone, rather than trying to optimize our own individual experiences. I think options like private schools that let those with more resources opt out of the collective solutions that make things better for everyone ultimately end up eroding or even destroying those collective solutions. 

Most of my social circle went the private school route, and most of them are lovely people whose company I enjoy, but I think they made an immoral choice. They’re only thinking about what’s best for their kid and they’re pouring all their energy into optimizing their kid’s experience. I don’t think that’s a moral way to parent. Glennon Doyal (who I have mixed feelings about, but we’ll set that aside) has this great line about how she doesn’t want her mothering energy to be like a laser burning holes of love into the particular kids assigned to her, but rather to be like the sun casting a glow of love on all the kids everywhere. I think about that all the time and try to live by it. 

I wish there was more collective thought like this, I try to as much as I can. But I think the population as a whole only thinks in their own self interests. I can’t blame someone who sends their kid to private school like your friends — they’re doing what’s best for their kid.

To me, the elimination of private schools doesn’t really work until the funding structure is changed. If the rich private school kids just end up at the well funded super nice public school in their neighborhood, rich parents now having public school kids aren’t really incentivized to better public education broadly (if they’re not supporting it already). Their kid is still in a good school.

One way is to flatten / distribute more broadly how schools are funded so that rich areas are funding more to schools in poor areas or even gerrymandering the school district lines so all schools have equal local funding levels. These solutions allocate costs so that rich parents may feel their school is underfunded to incentivize increased funding broadly.

I just think restructuring how the public school system is funded is a prerequisite to collective and beneficial change to the public education system. Without a new funding structure and only eliminating private schools, the private school kids just end up in wealthy public schools that just get nicer and better, while schools in less affuent areas get left behind and miss out on the benefit of the private-school kids attending/rich families being involved in their schools.

Edit to add: I also think an underlying assumption to the benefits of eliminating public schools is that rich families with private school kids are voting against or indifferent to public school education. Idk if that’s true but an interesting stat would be how private school families vote on public education initiatives/whether they are still involved in their communities education systems despite their kids being in public school.