Mailbag: Imagining a high-growth New York
Plus American history's biggest "what if" and some more Biden/Harris recriminations!
Donald Trump has really been failing on his promise to deliver warmer weather! Beyond that, I’m trying out a new format for mailbag headlines. Hope you like it.
James: Your daily posts arrive at slightly different times in the morning (6:08, 6:12, etc.) Do you have an auto-send that has some sort of “jitter” to not arrive exactly on the hour, or are you manually sending out the newsletter at slightly different times every morning?
We schedule them to be sent at 6 AM Eastern every day. If they arrive inconsistently, that’s some other aspect of the email plumbing at work. I’ll admit that my understanding of how email actually works on a technical level is pretty limited, but it’s not an ansible — the messages need to go from one server to another server and then down to your devices through some kind of process that unfolds in time.
Alexa: You attended Dalton (I went to Brearley!) and your son now goes to public school in DC. What do you think you got out of Dalton that your son might not be getting out of public school? Is there anything he’s getting from his schooling (or that you hope he’ll get in the future), that you didn’t get from yours? On balance, do you think these fancy private schools are worth it?
When answering the question of “worth it,” I always draw people’s attention to the fact that the cost is really high. I think the net present value of sending your kid to Dalton from Kindergarten through high school is close to $650,000.
I have no doubt that doing this confers real advantages relative to not doing it, but if you have $650,000 to spare, there are a lot of ways you could help your kid out, and it’s not obvious to me that sending them to a fancy private school rates particularly highly.
But here’s what’s definitely true. At private school, we had smaller class sizes and thus more individualized attention from teachers than my son gets. We did not have nicer playground facilities at Grace Church (I went to Dalton for high school) than at my son’s elementary school, but the DC private schools do have nicer playgrounds than the DC public schools (land is cheaper). You also have fewer kids with disciplinary issues at private school. Because my son’s school is incredibly well run by a great principal and a wonderful staff, they maintain pretty orderly classrooms. But the “price” of upholding order is that they are in many ways stricter than I remember my school as having been. Private school is the equivalent of suburban towns using exclusionary zoning rather than police as a source of public order.
Last, but by no means least, the public school teachers are notably less “intellectual” than private school teachers (or at least, they have less bandwidth for this sort of thing). The hallmark of an effective teacher at a diverse public school is performing a difficult classroom management task, being attuned to your kids’ extremely varied needs, and delivering on a curriculum plan whose core mission is to prevent the bottom from falling out on the weaker students. There isn’t as much time to just talk about books with a bright kid or explore individual interests. We pay a math tutor to come see our son once a week and make sure he is doing challenging work, not because he’s some kind of math prodigy but because unfortunately, public schools often lack the resources to focus on challenging even moderately advanced kids. That being said, a math tutor is a lot cheaper than private school.
The real $650,000 question is college admissions.
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