1. How much of those schools' budgets are met through donations?
2. Could those schools actually operate at scale?
Much of those schools' success is really due to network effects. You throw a bunch of low-income kids into that setting, and they will crash and burn. Also, when you look at religious schools, the positions are truly considered callings, so compensation is less of an issue.
I'm not proposing to shutter the public schools. This type of beneficence isn't really useful for any substantive, long-term change. It's a PR stunt. My point is only that this $100M would, on the margins, help far more kids if it were directed towards helping individual families escape the public school system.
For example, if I had $100M to blow, I might accept applications from families and then rank them by amount needed to convert out of public schools (from smallest to largest), and donate the money in that order for those amounts. This would have the effect of helping the most kids. It would also counter the problems with self-reporting; ask for more than you really need and risk not getting anything.
>You throw a bunch of low-income kids into that setting, and they will crash and burn.
This strikes me as classism. While there is a correlation between economic strata and educational achievement, I'm not so sure about the causality implied in your claim. Instead, perhaps being financially relegated to the tender mercies of the Newark public school system contributes to such underperformance.
Sorry. What I mean to say is that the kids who are in the existing private schools have some sort of a support structure that has obtained the money for them to go to a private school, and it is that support structure more than the school that increases their academic output.
If I had that money to spend I would put it towards programs like Trio which don't throw money at schools, but instead put money into support structures like tutoring, counseling, and outright paying students money if they excel.
Putting kids in private schools is a somewhat blunt instrument to create network effects.
Much of those schools' success is really due to network effects. You throw a bunch of low-income kids into that setting, and they will crash and burn. Also, when you look at religious schools, the positions are truly considered callings, so compensation is less of an issue.