Finland has no private schools – and its pupils perform better than British children
inews.co.uk
Finland ranked seventh in the world in OECD's student assessment chart in 2018, well above the UK and the United States, where there is a mix of private and state education
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Private schools grant an "out" for the wealthy (and by extension, powerful). If they can pay for better results, they're actively incentivised to lobby to defund public schools. If the private option doesn't exist, they're incentivised to lobby to improve public schools (the ones with kids, in any case).
I'm afraid if private schools were removed the really wealthy would just send their kids to study in another country like they already do, and the middle class would lose this option, and we get worse as a whole
Nah just pay for after school programs. I wasn't happy with the level of progress I was seeing with my kids on certain subjects. So after a few attempts to push the schools I gave up and hired tutors. I am not really in the financial position to do this but the alternative is worse.
On the one hand, a significant number of people are motivated to improve public education. On the other, a handful of billionaires' kids move overseas. That's an insignificant trade-off, isn't it?
Countries that invest heavily in public education have the best education standards in the world - see Finland as one example. Even assuming a couple of billionaires aren't better off, why would I care - especially given the massive benefit to the broader population.
What I think would happen is that I would lose private education for my kids and the public ones will still be shit, like all public services in my country
Why would you think that given the fact that this is more or less what the countries with the best education standards in the world do?
We have and had services that have no private option and they're invariably horrible
Why don't they work - bear in mind that we're addressing funding issues, and getting the decision makers more staked into the outcomes.
Dunno, I live in Brazil, I'm used to things not working. Getting from here to what they have in Finland is unlikely
For better or worse, I get the impression that an increase in social spending isn't something you'll need to worry about under the Bolsonaro government.
The problem with this solution in Brazil isn't the solution itself - it's the fact that you have an austerity-focused right-wing government that wants such investment to fail so that they can kill it.
Oh, Bolsonaro is gone, now we have Lula, moving from the extreme right to the extreme left. He wouldn't kill public education, just intensify the communist propaganda that already happens there
My mistake. This policy is socdem stuff though, so leaning in the general direction of communism, and it's been shown to improve educational outcomes better and more equitably than just about any solution out there while massively improving social mobility, and by extension, the concept of meritocracy.
If a government has no interest in rolling this out properly or ability to do so for whatever reason, of course it'll fail - but that's not so much a failure of the policy - it's a failure of the government. If they're unwilling or unable to roll out good policy, I think it's worth asking why.
Government doing everything works better when the government has enough money for it, our taxes, with an already high tax burden, makes about 100 usd for person/month IIRC. There is no policy that will work around that
Yeah - I mean solving for broader governmental failure in a country I didn't understand well is probably a little beyond the scope of this conversation - that's a far broader issue that negatively impacts this solution, but really isn't a reflection on its efficacy. Seems like there's little changing that situation without broader structural change.
Whatever the situation though, I hope it improves.