So, now I pay transparent /deterministic property taxes in a town in NJ.
I have only a small number of educational outcome samples to draw for my children. Consequently, I pay for the higher Sharpe NJ strategy instead of blindly accepting high variance hexadecimal dice rolls from the NYC DOE.
Remember, when trying to obtain the best possible outcomes for your children, if you aren't paying in money then you are paying in time. Witness how much effort went into this article and how many very industrious parents will study/internalize it to try to obtain marginally better outcomes for their children next year. You are always competing in expenditures, just with the NYC DOE it's your time versus other parents' time.
Presumably one can pay to reduce variance.
Had I the chance to redo a bunch of things, I might have stayed in the city and gone the private route years ago for any kid with a sufficiently bad random NYC DOE draw. One of those "what ifs?".
This giant act of fate set her up with an education that eventually led to full-tuition scholarship and then (full-circle) she donates her talents to the foundation which made all her miracles possible.
But the randomness of such a system just baffled my public-education-in-Texas brains, where you go to the school where your residence is zoned [or private school].
Also, having attended one of these schools (admittedly in a different decade), students who were not ready for the work didn't do well. Not to say those kids weren't also smart kids, but you had to be a certain kind of kid to mesh with the school.
It was a fantastic place, not just for the education, but for spending 4 years with a gigantic group of diverse, interesting kids, almost all of whom were truly brilliant. To this day I think it had more to do with my success than college or grad school.
It might make sense to link to the most recent (2023) survey results instead, since relevant changes were made: https://medium.com/algorithms-in-the-wild/results-from-the-2...
