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juliawise comments on Review: Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids - LessWrong
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Cambridge, MA. Lots of lefty professorial and computer types, also lots of Haitian and Cape Verdean immigrants in housing projects.
In different neighborhoods. Specifically, would your children be playing with the children in the projects?
Probably. They'll certainly be going to school with them. We haven't bought a house yet, but all the areas we're considering have projects nearby.
I'm willing to assign significant probability that when you actually have kids and see them experience first hand the actual quality of the school, you'll arrange for them to go to a charter and/or private school (or possibly even home-school).
Would you please share your own experience with American public schools, if you have any?
I went to an inner city public school for several years. The last year I attended (I was pulled out and homeschooled afterwards), one of my teachers made a cell out of bookshelves to put students who had misbehaved. They were all black. When called on it, she said she was 'getting them used to it.' There was also a lot of petty vandalism, bullying, and the educational quality was pretty miserable. If it makes you feel any better, I'm almost certain this experience was an outlying data point.
I wasn't in an "inner city" school.
I was. The experience was good. I learned to double-dutch jump rope, and play the dozens. I didn't learn to dance the Cabbage Patch, no matter how many times my classmates tried to demonstrate it for me, but that was my failing and not theirs.
Then I took the SAT, got a good score, and on the strength of my high school and my zip code was offered a good scholarship to a private liberal arts college.
What I'm trying to say is: the piece Eugine_Nier is missing is how drastically parental wealth, income, and educational attainment affect the kids' educational outcomes. If you look at the research, these factors drastically outweigh the quality of the school or the teacher. That's not to say that teachers have no effect; but, so far as these things have been quantified, the family background is more important by an order of magnitude.
In other words -- if you are doing relatively well, and if you read a lot of books, it almost doesn't matter where you send your kids to school. In fact, sending them to a diverse "inner city" school could be very helpful from a social point of view.
It was for me.
In other words your school was ok provided you are willing to do all your learning outside of it.
Wait -- that's not how everybody does their learning?
I learned a lot in school, especially once my parents got me out of the public school system. I would argue that sending child to a school where they're not going to learn anything is an example of a lost purpose.