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If you had to deal with this guy doing this to all of your threads, you'd probably ignore him too, even if he found a nut every once in a while.
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I just have to point out that this is untrue. Look at his last 100 posts and several OPs (or any time before that) and see how many times I've responded to him...none apart from this thread. I respond to maybe 1 in 10 of his OPs (mostly when he posts thinly disguised AC rants in SMP that are contradicted by evidence) and virtually none of his posts. There is no pattern of trolling at all like you suggest.
As for the person who said the article is light on data - it references this report, which is one of the most comprehensive reports ever done on public vs private schooling:
http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard...es/2006461.asp
Some highlights:
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In the first set of analyses, all private schools were compared to all public schools. The average private school mean reading score was 14.7 points higher than the average public school mean reading score, corresponding to an effect size of .41 (the ratio of the absolute value of the estimated difference to the standard deviation of the NAEP fourth-grade reading score distribution). After adjusting for selected student characteristics, the difference in means was near zero and not significant.
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14.7 points difference on a 500 point scale...and this includes the subset of the wealthy, who do better in in school
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In the first set of analyses, all private schools were again compared to all public schools. The average private school mean mathematics score was 7.8 points higher than the average public school mean mathematics score, corresponding to an effect size of .29. After adjusting for selected student characteristics, the difference in means was -4.5 and significantly different from zero. (Note that a negative difference implies that the average school mean was higher for public schools.)
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7.8 points on a 300 to 500 point scale (depends on the grade - not sure of the details).
This is including the fact that the elite private schools attract the best teachers available, and many are academically selective - which means they're already skewed toward picking up the most capable students already. Even if there was no effect from private school education, private schools should significantly outperform public schools...yet they don't.
Why are private schools failing as badly as public schools? Surely competition from the significant middle-upper class in the US is sufficient to provide market driven improvements in school quality and outcomes? BTW, private schools make up roughly 10% of the nation's schools. In other countries, this volume of kids would provide half or more the nation's education needs. Are you saying that this is insufficient to work? That the wealthy and those who care about their kids enough to pay for private school, are unable to choose the best one in their area and petition for improvements? It's a bizarre position that you guys have on this point.
One other point - the US trails significantly behind the Western world in terms of student proficiency - near the bottom, in fact. Yet they have one of the most decentralized educational systems in the Western world, and similar private school percentages to other countries who outperform them. So why are they failing?
RDuke asks above: Do you think this is fixable? Well, clearly it is, as other public school systems outperform both the public and private schooling system of the US.
So, you can keep posting "statist clown" pictures if you want, and blindly asserting your AC mantras, but the silence of you guys regarding the actual evidence is deafening....