Sending a troubled kid to a great private school probably will cause the kid to do better: because all the other students are doing well the bad students peers are working hard so the bad student sees that example and is likely to succumb to peer pressure and do better.
For this to work the troubled kid needs to be kept out of the gangs and whatever else outside of school will lead to bad examples. However selection bias already does this: parents who care enough to send their kid to a private school are involved enough with their kid that they would probably do this anyway. In short these are kids that might have been troubled, but they still would have been at the top of the troubled group.
You can almost postulate a sort of "memetic herd-immunity" where if a large enough proportion of the student population is inoculated against bad study habits, a few stragglers will be ok. But if the balance tips too far, the stragglers start joining up and reinforcing each others' bad study habits.
> Sending a troubled kid to a great private school probably will cause the kid to do better ... However selection bias already does this
Funny thing, though. We've done a bunch of studies on this and it doesn't actually help. The people who care about their kids more getting them into better schools, yes - but placing the kids of parents who don't care into better schools, no.
This has been shown time and time again. The best results to the contrary managed this by ... drumroll ... designing selection bias into the study.
The original article already provided evidence, based on analysis of the performance of similar students who do and do not get into a selective school. As it says...
"Except that attending those high schools simply doesn’t matter in terms of conventional educational outcomes. When you look at the edge cases – when you restrict your analysis to those students who are among the last let into such schools and those who are among the last left out – you find no statistically meaningful differences between them."
So unless you're calling out the original article, how about offering counter-evidence?
Eh, not really. I've learned over the years to avoid providing sources because more often than not the person won't believe you either way and will only use the source as a tangible target for disingenuous attack through motivated misinterpretation. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning)
I typically provide sources in response to replies like: "That's interesting, but I can't really find anything on the matter; can you point me to something?" But if there is no indication that the person actually tried to find corroboration independently I take it as a sign that he is not actually interested in corroboration. I'm sure this is inaccurate sometimes, but it's the best approximation I can come up with.
I went to five high schools growing up and this is not what I experienced. I personally and through others found the exact opposite to be true. Yes you can send students(whether bad or good) to both bad both public and private schools but sending bad students to good public or private schools doesn't make them a good student.
I also doubt that it's meaningfully true. I think the troubled kid would do better in a private school because there are better resources available, and the teachers would not be overburdened with large class sizes filled with similarly troubled students like in a public school.
I worked as a reading tutor at an elementary school for a year in the US. It was a terrible, terrible job because of how strictly prescribed the methodology was. We tested every kid in the school, and the test was to time the students for a minute and count how many words of a text they could read (an incredibly dumb metric). We did this twice a year and then tutored the kids that were at a slightly below average reading level, meaning that I was not even seeing the particularly troubled / low-performing kids. I had about 25 students that year and got to know a lot of them. Some of the kids didn't need my help at all, they were extremely smart but had read slowly and carefully on the test and so ended up embarrassed by having to be pulled out of regular class.
But the kids that were actually struggling to read at grade level almost all had bad situations at home. There was a boy who had to move in with his aunt mid-year because someone shot up their house while looking for the kid's older brother, a girl who had four other siblings and was frequently hungry because of her father's gambling and drinking, a kid who changed schools because his father was arrested for beating the kid's little sister, a recent immigrant girl who had 15+ siblings and step siblings that her mother somehow ended up taking care of, a very strange boy with a morbidly obese mother and no father, and probably some more I'm forgetting about. My co-worker had a student whose parents were both serving life sentences for murder. This was not even in a particularly rough city or a particularly rough school (the school is maybe 60% Hmong, so many of the kids needed ESL much more than "how many words can you read in a minute?"). The point being, if you don't change home situations like that then there's not much hope for a student's education at either a public or private school.
I won't even go into the daily prescribed routine of exactly how I was supposed to tutor the kids, and the constant evaluations to make sure I was, for example, counting down the timer with the correct fingers and correct hand. That seriously is / was an official Reading Corps policy and it was among many other inane policies in a broader system that was also deeply misguided.
In a country with actual social services, there should be a feedback channel to identify such cases and help them directly (not necessarily funding but sometimes too).
Of course this won't work in some countries because both socialism is frowned upon and individualism is glorified. You fall because you're a failure not because you were dealt a bad hand by life.
> because all the other students are doing well the bad students peers are working hard so the bad student sees that example and is likely to succumb to peer pressure and do better
What about the non-troubled kids? How much of a negative effect can a few troubled kids have on non-troubled kids?
One kid acting out in a class can ruin the learning atmosphere for the entire class.
For this to work the troubled kid needs to be kept out of the gangs and whatever else outside of school will lead to bad examples. However selection bias already does this: parents who care enough to send their kid to a private school are involved enough with their kid that they would probably do this anyway. In short these are kids that might have been troubled, but they still would have been at the top of the troubled group.