Science Education in America: Why I'm Homeschooling My Kid in Science

[ALawPoker]

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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.

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I don't really care to sift through old threads to determine the extent of your trolling, so I'll take your word for it that it's not as bad as I suggested.

Would you agree though that you and Boro aren't exactly chums and the discourse between you is usually unproductive? I don't really care who says what and am fine with retracting my claim that you are entirely to blame, but I think you'd agree that it should be no real stunner if Boro just doesn't want to deal with you (even if you raise a legitimate point once in a while).


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In the first set of analyses, all private schools were compared to all public schools.

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Stop right there. If we're determined to talk about this from an AC/state angle, then there are no "private" schools compare to.

I personally have no interest in defending the "private" schools that exist in a saturated market, and would be entirely open to the idea that public schools maybe even outperform them. This should not be seen as the same argument as "in the absence of all government interference, private schools would be better still." It's possible that given a certain arrangement of laws (such as my sub sandwich example) the market just could not provide a product that was a better quality than the one government forced people to pay for.

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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?

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Is it enough to overcome the enormous barrier that is artificially free schooling existing in the "market"? Apparently not, if it's true that private schools perform as bad. You shouldn't look at these schools as a result of what the free market would provide.

If what you want is to compare public schools vs private schools in an unfair market, then all your arguments apply. But the latter is not something I care to defend, because I admit it might be equally flawed (or in some cases even worse).

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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?

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One of the most decentralized systems? How so? The difference between US public education and European public education is awfully small compared to the difference between either and a free market (which is, I think, what you claim to be arguing against).

A better example would be to look at the US university system, where public interference is small enough to be at least a passable insight into what a market provides. I don't think it's coincidence that the US system blows everyone else away.

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So, you can keep posting "statist clown" pictures if you want, and blinding asserting your AC mantras, but the silence of you guys regarding the actual evidence is deafening....

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Maybe ACers are silent because your evidence and questions don't have anything to do with AC, so we have nothing to defend. I have to say, you're awfully good at deflecting the actual issue into something slightly different that makes you appear to have raised a good point. Since my hunch is you actually believe what you're saying, I think you must do this on a subconscious level. Either way, you have quite a knack for it. You should be a politician, or maybe a cable news personality.

If what you want to do is empirically compare public school systems with varying degrees of interference and slightly different sets of laws to determine which one is worse, then carry on. But it really has nothing to do with AC or our positions on education, so don't be surprised when we show no interest.