Do private schools have a place in society?

@steddyeddy,

you ask for facts yet you don't seem to be willing to hear other people's and are content to present your opinion as fact.


I'm quoting from; Danny Pfeffermann, Victoria Landsman, Are private schools better than public schools? Appraisal for Ireland by methods for observational studies, The Annals of Applied Statistics. Volume 5, Number 3 (2011), 1726-1751.

In observational studies the assignment of units to treatments is not under control.
Consequently, the estimation and comparison of treatment effects based on the
empirical distribution of the responses can be biased since the units exposed to the
various treatments could differ in important unknown pretreatment characteristics,
which are related to the response. An important example studied in this article is the question of whether private schools offer better quality of education than public
schools. In order to address this question we use data collected in the year 2000 by OECD for the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Focusing for illustration on scores in mathematics of 15-years old pupils in Ireland, we find that the raw average score of pupils in private schools is higher than of pupils in public schools. However, application of a newly proposed method for observational studies suggests that the less able pupils tend to enroll in public schools, such that their lower scores is not necessarily an indication of bad quality of the public schools. Indeed, when comparing the average score in the two types of schools after adjusting for the enrollment effects, we find quite surprisingly that public schools perform better on average. This outcome is supported by the methods of instrumental variables and latent variables, commonly used by econometricians for analyzing and evaluating social programs.

Two things I want to say to you;
1. The review of student standards (above in bold) actually SAYS that the public schools are better in Maths than private ones. On your estimation should we be taking money from the public school Maths courses as they are doing better and giving it to the private ones - that would be fair according to you - do you want to comment on that?

2. Colleges have created special programmes and there is advanced funding available for people from "disadvantaged backgrounds" to go to college. Yet since free fees were introduced (to get "poor" people to go to college) none of these iniatives have created an increased trend of people from the lower socio-economic areas going to college - THEY DON'T WANT TO GO - so why should I and my nephew, niece, my future children. This leads back to the point that people in private schools do well because their peers want to do well, it has very little to do with funding.

sorry if I rambled a bit, i'm tired and not entirely sure my point will come across clearly

Jo King wrote: »

Where did this nonsense start? All the parents who avail of private school are piggybacking on the state funding for schoolchildren. All that is proposed is that the piggybacking stops. How does that cost more money?

Two things

1) You're failing to see the effect that changing the funding dynamic has on school populations

2) They're not piggybacking. They are contributing as much, if not more, than non-private school parents towards to state education fund.

There are legitimate arguments around equity, but abolishing private schools (or removing the so- called 'state subsidy') would increase the overall cost to the state of providing education. Essentially the direct contribution by parents would be gone. It would be the same if private health insurance was banned; the state's healthcare bill would rise (which is why the Govt plans instead to introduce compulsory health insurance, with reductions for those on low incomes).