This was a loophole discovered by the homeschoolers - the state could ban homeschooling but the bar for registration as a private school was quite low.
My kids are in their thirties, so it's been a while, but my recollection is there were three legal means to homeschool and registering as a private school was one of them. Another was to hire a tutor for three hours a day.
I think the third was probably to go through an umbrella school, which my family did initially.
Homeschooling laws vary by state. Some are more stringent than California and others less.
If you're making a slippery slope argument - the answer is that there is a difference between a private school with administration, dedicated real estate and staff teaching 100s of kids, and people keeping their kids home to teach them themselves.
If it's a semantic argument, that homeschooling is a form of non-public and therefore private education, by private schools I specifically mean the large institutions. I doubt homeschooled people would say that they went to private school.
If it's a legal argument - a blanket ban on private schools would have impact on homeschooling in California - that's likely true, but I'm not suggesting how a law would be written, just the result of the law.
at best you'd move the threshold to remove yourself from the system a little higher, from those paying top dollar private schools to those who can hire tutors and/or have one of the parents dedicated to tutoring
there's no effective way to ban private tutoring in the sense and effect of this thread that doesn't also involve banning homeschooling
edit: or simply send the kids abroad, the classic rich-person-in-failed-society way
I'm not seeing this connection that you and others are making between private schools and tutoring or homeschooling. When I say private schools, I mean it in the sense most people think of private schools: large institutions requiring applications, charging tuition and hiring teachers not related to the students, not "any form of education not provided publicly". I don't think homeschooling fits this definition.
The point is to move the bar for removing yourself higher - systems are complicated, there are no perfect solutions. Of course, people will always find a way - at the very least, they can move to another country. Right now though a significant number of people opt out of the public system and I think that's a huge problem.
I don't think that bar shift is enough in America - in America, the super-rich control and fund politics, it's not Finland; you're just condemning the kids of the slightly better off to a terrible education and to have it worse than their parents, which is already happening in housing
> The point is that to ban private schools you’d also have to ban homeschooling.
Why?
You can homeschool your children if you want.
They just have to be at state school during state school hours like anyone else. So you'll have to homeschool in your own time, like everything else you have to do in your own time.
(I'm not in favour of banning private schools, but your argument doesn't make sense regardless.)
Surely you recognize that you're being obtuse with this statement. Otherwise you're suggesting either a zero value for time, or that homeschooling students do their sleeping while at state schools (which is a good recommendation, if you're already stuck attending them.)
> Surely you recognize that you're being obtuse with this statement.
No?
Everyone has to go to school during normal school hours. That's a simple flat rule.
What you do otherwise in your own time to teach about your own values is up to you. That seems completely reasonable, and also practicable for people with particular religious or other social requirements for education, to me.
(If you were in favour of requiring attendance at state education, which I'm not.)
> It’s my understanding that private schools play a minor role in other countries.
Huh my understanding is the opposite!
Almost everyone in the US seems to go to public school. Nobody seems to talk about where they went to school - they just went to where was by their home. For example this list of privileged people at Beverly Hills High School is extraordinary
The US public school system seems to be doing extraordinarily well here - in almost every other country these rich people would have been in a private school wouldn't they? The US system seems unusually egalitarian.
> I don’t quite understand how restricting a private school of several hundred students affects a parent teaching their children at home.
Most homeschooling parents do a variety of things, including teaching in groups with other homeschoolers, and hiring tutors for specialized subjects etc.
If the goal of the ban on private schools as suggested is to force the rich and powerful to send their children to public schools so that they are incentivized to make them better, then you would need to also ban homeschooling because otherwise those people could still school their children privately in cooperation with other rich and powerful parents via the homeschooling model.
It'd mean the same thing it already means for 90%+ people - compulsory publicly funded education from 5-17 years old.