Try again, plenty of people on here probably had varying experiences in public schools and came out just fine, and some are struggling, you'll find both here.
Went to public until 5th then private school through HS, all were dumpster fires in their own way. Just my .02, and while this was over a decade ago, I'm inclined to believe shitty and free is better than shitty and expensive. If your kids are even remotely motivated and smart, what they do outside school is 10,000x more important so might as well put the money towards that.
Where I grew up public schools were measurably worse than alternatives. Using objective metrics like average number of gang wars in a given year.
Since there's something like 100k public schools in the US, with very different performance and governments in charge, I don't think people here are really in a position to judge someone's parenting choices over the internets.
Also by the way, public universities run about 12k/year, so they may well have their children in public school.
Yeah you raise a good point, I was in a city with generally serviceable schools. Really, I just tend to get frustrated at the belief system that all public schools are awful and any good parent should send their kids to private school. Even when the public option is ok we can't have our kids hanging out with the prole kids.
This is still just one data point. Can you compare your public HS experience to your private HS experience? Can you compare public school A to public school B? Private A to private B?
A school being private doesn't magically make it great. It has to still work hard for that. A public school being good requires hard work too. But let's be honest, usually it boils down to parent involvement which is usually fueled by economic status. Rich(er) people have time and/or resources to actually be involved in their kids lives. They also tend to have fewer kids so more time/resources per kid. The initial thing a private school does these days is pool the rich(er) cohort of kids together.
I live in a part of my city known as the 'private school corridor' because there are so many. And, the public schools are notoriously horrible in the city's ISD. So, it's pretty much required if you have the means. The other alternative is to move to a suburb (different ISD), but even those are pretty easily seen as correlating good school districts with high home prices. Yet, I've seen studies in my area that say if everyone sent their private schooled kids to the public schools they would average out and be pretty well rated. But it's a first mover disadvantage to do so, so nobody does.
I also live in the south and this whole private school thing really started during integration, so there's that whole issue to contend with too. The impacts of red lining and white flight are pretty stark here. I don't think it's the motivating factor for most people any more, but inertia.
This is why our public schools have stats like "5% white" and "86% low income" on Great Schools. 5% white seems really low, the city is ~56% based on another google search.
