"Equifax flagged 283 contractors for potential 'dual employment,' documents show."

Would this not be a big flag to reclassify these contractors as employees? Being able to have multiple clients is one of the factors to determine if you're a contractor...

In the UK there's a set of criteria (IR35) that attempt to codify the distinction. The hiring business has to make the assessment.

One of criteria is right to subcontract and freedom to work with multiple clients.

If they get it wrong, they're liable for taxes, not the Contractor.

HMRC, the UK tax body is responsible for this, and therefore it is an utter mess in practice and has had chilling effects on the UK IT consulting market.

I think it's a great idea, there's far too many businesses that exploit employees by labelling them contractors.

Of course, idea and execution are two very different things.

In NZ, it's often found in courier companies and telecommunications, where you're an owner-operator! Except you have to do what the company you work for says, when they say, and you have to provide all your own equipment, and of course, pay for your own sick leave, accident insurance and holiday pay. And no you can't work for a competitor, are you nuts?

At one point our tax department started cracking down on this, then stopped, I'm not sure why. But it needs to be done.

And let's not even discuss the infamous Hobbit law, where a right leaning government passed legislation under urgency to make all film industry employees contractors, with no rights to unionise, to keep Peter Jackson (he can get the Sir back when he redeems himself in my mind) and Warner Brothers happy after Jackson's Weta Studios lost an Employment Court case brought by a "contractor" who they very vigorously treated as an employee.

> At one point our tax department started cracking down on this, then stopped, I'm not sure why. But it needs to be done.

Around here (Poland) they tried to focus the crackdown on... contractors, planning on requiring a contractor to have at least 25% of their income from a second client to be considered self-employed and not an employee.

The local IT lobbyists had a hearty laugh about this idea and that was the end of it.

We have a similar rule in Australia that unfortunately was introduced, so called 'personal services income' if you make over 80% of your money from a single source you effectively can't make tax deductions like a business.

Yeah, that's definitely the wrong place to focus - focus on the employers, as they're the ones who reap the benefits of treating employees as contractors.

It's Australia. They don't always have level-headed policy.

And thank God that this idea was abandoned. I won't sign another employment contract in my life, even if you put a gun to my head.

That begs for elaboration. Why don't they fit you?

I don't like to see my money being wasted on taxes. With Polish politicians there's zero chance that taxpayer money will be used reasonably.

Well, as a contractor I pay one third of the taxes I would pay as an employee, so much less waste.

You're still an employee, the only difference is whether you're "employed" by yourself or your.. actual employer.

Even if that was true... why should I care?

Backtaxes aren't fun, especially when they're caused by deliberate fraud.

That's my client's problem, not mine.

The thing is that in IT people actually want to be outside of IR35 because being a contractor is financially better for them.

So you see contractor job ads prominently listing "outside of IR35" as a benefit.

When this was implemented I know people who actually quit because they were told they would be within IR35 from then on, and they found new contracts outside of IR35.

In IT/tech people go the contracting route for the money so unsurprisingly they follow the money...

It's just a matter of rates. You need rates a bit higher within IR35. Less so than people think, and even less now that the corporation tax changes are still going through. The biggest problem with IR35 is no longer tax since the gap has become smaller and smaller, but the uncertainty of the classification and the hassle of dealing with an umbrella company.

> I think it's a great idea, there's far too many businesses that exploit employees by labelling them contractors.

In UK (and Aus), this whole IT/dev contracting business is kind of win:win (govt. loses) though - devs like it because they get paid $$$ day rates and pay less tax, businesses like it because... capex vs opex(?).

The US tax authority (IRS) has a similar set of rules; if you can set your hours and working conditions and have your own equipment or tools it justifies not being an employee. There are of course important corner conditions like hiring a contractor who operates some machine you own.

In general, though some people prefer to be contractors, these rules are in place because some employers try to classify de facto employees as contractors to avoid paying taxes or providing required benefits. Google, FB etc have complex contractor rules for their third party contractor agencies to steer clear of that and make sure they save on taxes and benefits.

> if you can set your hours and working conditions and have your own equipment or tools it justifies not being an employee. There are of course important corner conditions like hiring a contractor who operates some machine you own.

Note that security guards can be structured as contractors despite obviously not being able to choose where or when they work. There's a big list of things that "weigh in favor" of one status or the other. There aren't definitive answers unless you've recently won a lawsuit against the government (which always wants employee status for everyone).

The guards are still usually W-2 employees; but they’re employees of the firm that’s been contracted. Referring to them as “contractors” is more a colloquialism, but it marks someone that works for an outside firm versus someone that’s in-house and on the company team, even if they work in the same office day in and day out.

Yeah, there's a big disparity between UK and US terminology here.

I'm the UK, a "contractor" is typically in business on their own account, applying for jobs directly to the end client.

In the US, it seems like a "contractor" frequently works for an outsourcing company. In the UK we'd typically call these people "temps" or "consultancy staff" depending on the source.

It's Temp/Vendor/Contractor lumped together as "people who work here but allegedly aren't legally employees of thia company, so we can deceive about all the great benefits "all" our "employees" get.

Doesn’t consultancy staff also cover people working for an actual consulting company?

I have worked on long contract - one or two years - for clients in the past helping them structure and put in place large projects and while I was technically there full time it was pretty clear that this was temporary, I was filling a punctual need the business wouldn’t have after and there was a somewhat clear idea of when we would part.

These relations are not necessary a way to pay less or not give benefits. I was actually paid a lot better than if I had been working there.

> In the US, it seems like a "contractor" frequently works for an outsourcing company. In the UK we'd typically call these people "temps" or "consultancy staff" depending on the source.

I think contractor is still used in that case in the UK sometimes too. The obvious example being construction firms.

I was specifically referring to security guards structured as 1099 contractors. They do not have to be employees.

I'd be very surprised if security firms weren't classifying employees as contractors for the firm's financial gain.

*misclassifying.

Are security guards employed as 1099 common? I was under the impression that most companies were just outsourcing and guards were actually full time employees of companies specialising in security in the same way most cleaning staff works for a cleaning company.

I think guards are a bit different. Don’t companies usually contract a security company and they hire employees (or get contractors who might work for multiple companies)? Those companies are free to choose which gigs they want.

There was a significant part of the UK IT consulting market which was not really consulting though right? People turning up and doing the same job day in day out for months or years.

At least in the IT industry people legitimately had some freedoms. I was amused to learn that a lot of lorry drivers were operating as contractors outside IR35. Not even those driving their own vehicles. The driving regulations make it pretty difficult for one driver to do anything different from another driver.

100%.

I’m a contractor, and for many companies and recruiters it was a wink wink nudge nudge arrangement to keep a gravy train running. An element of that will return when the reform is scrapped.

Comically the revert of the revert has now been pushed and we're back to businesses deciding inside or outside of IR35.

There is a lot of misconceptions about this.

> One of criteria is right to subcontract

It's not entirely true. Just because such right exists in the contract, does not mean it is valid. HMRC guidances have a ton of rules where it does not count. For instance if the business could use the sub-contractor directly.

> and freedom to work with multiple clients.

This is also irrelevant, because exclusive supply agreements is a normal business practice. Also people can hold multiple employments and that does not make them "contractors". People can also be contractors and employees at the same time and anything in between.

> If they get it wrong, they're liable for taxes, not the Contractor.

That's not entirely correct either. The client can claw the money back from the Contractor and very much every contract I have seen has clauses ensuring that any unpaid tax the client is liable for will be re-paid by the contractor.

Seeing as I worked on a CEST adjacent tool in the legislative area, if I don't understand it, then you can see why it is such a mess!

Luckily, this mess is due to be repealed, it was one of the lesser-known Trussonomic decisions made in the last few weeks.

Assuming, of course, that Truss does not repeal the repeal. It's not like she is known for doing screeching U-turns...

IR35 is going away. It got the axe in the insane mini budget a few weeks ago.

No, the changes to it are going away, not the legislation. It'll be back on contractors to make the determination of IR35 status again

Which means it’s essentially going away. I first encountered it in 2005 when I first contracted & it has never affected me. It nearly affected me with my previous contract a couple of years ago as the business really didn’t understand it and was “playing safe” by trying to go “inside IR35” for the role, but that’s utter nonsense for a 3 month engagement such as the one I was doing. I’ve always paid employers NI etc. I don’t understand why they don’t change Ltd company dividends & up the %age for the first £100k or so - it’d effectively solve the problem they’re trying to fix (lost tax/NI revenue), without all the messing about.

Even with the current tax rates, it's not clear to me that it's a net tax gain for HMRC to push contractors to being permanent. A contractor typically charges VAT - which can more than make up for other taxes - especially if their day rate is higher than it would be on an employee salary.

I think most people forget that when contractor pays itself a dividend, that money comes from the profit which they also pay corporation tax on. Then it's very much like PAYE. Only difference is that the client does not have to pay Employers NI, which is fine, because they are not an employer.

Saving on national insurance is pretty good.

But taxes on dividends got higher and higher in recent years.

You can still work for years in the UK, accumulate money (or real estate / other investment) in the company - then you move to Dubai and withdraw dividends tax free.

You end up paying 19% corp tax rate on your income that you can access only after you're done with the UK - which is not great compared to lower taxed countries in Europe (Malta at 5% being the best), but you get access to the London only jobs which pay a bit more (even if now that's not really true in a post remote working world).

Definitely better than getting equivalent salary and being forced to stash money in a pension you'll see when you're 60 or pay 40% taxes

The majority of IT contractors are going to be bringing in over £85k/annum, which means they're going to be registered for VAT, which means they will be providing VAT invoices to their client, which means their client is going to claim the VAT back from HMRC.

So what? The company still generated the VAT revenue.

The customer gets a refund, but has to charge their own customer VAT on the full amount of the goods they are selling, so the VAT accumulates until it is paid by someone who cannot claim the VAT back

That's why it's called "value added tax" - each supplier in the chain generates VAT on the value they add.

> Which means it’s essentially going away.

Tell that to all the contractors that had HMRC tribunals pre reform.

Not if HMRC investigate you

And it's not even certain that this is going away; even if it does, it won't be before the next tax year at the earliest.

By which point we might be onto the next PM. Or the one after that going by the current rate of attrition...

Which in practice means that yes, IR35 is going away, because HMRC is not going to audit every single contractor, unless they make a significant amount of money, and those that do make a significant amount of money, are almost certainly going to fall outside of IR35

> The hiring business has to make the assessment.

not anymore

Quite, though given the state of the gov, I expect a few flip-flops and anything could be true in 6 months!

In the UK, them using the data in this way would be a breach of GDPR.

You can only use the data for the purpose you originally stated, and this is not it.

I believe contractor in this sense is more like staff augmentation, e.g. Equifax pays a fee to $COMPANY, who, employs (W2) John Doe to work 40h/wk at Equifax as a "contractor." It's very common in local/state/federal government to have these C2C (company-to-company) contracting arrangements to get around regulatory or legislative limits on government employee pay.

This is actually much more of an issue than someone just holding two W2 jobs, because these "contractors" are almost always billing hours, and if you're billing the same hour to two people that very quickly approaches actual fraud.

I've done this type of work in the past and I agree. It's probably contracting between companies, but the worker is likely an actual W2 employee of the contracting agency.

The catch however, is that this doesn't necessarily absolve Equifax of miscategorizing workers -- this was the subject of the famous Microsoft Permatemp lawsuit. It is possible for a W2 worker of a temping agency to also be considered a common law employee of the contracting corporation. In Vizcaino v Microsoft, the temps were found to be Microsoft employees -- even though they were also w2 employees of third party staffing agencies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp#Vizcaino_v._Microsof...

Good to know. I’m a contractor and am just starting my own business separate from my main contracting role. Was curious what precedent there is for this dynamic

Edit: I was under the impression being a contractor would give one flexibility to do whatever they want when they’re not billing hours, depends on the contract wording of course

Word of unsolicited advice:

1. Paying a business attorney in your state upfront for q&a is cheaper than paying them later when things go wrong.

2. Please don’t get your legal advice from HN.

The only legal advice anyone should accept from HN is "contact an attorney in your jurisdiction"

I dunno. “Only ever break one law at a time” is pretty universally good advice.

But yeah. Call a lawyer… Preferably well before you need one in a hurry.

> “Only ever break one law at a time” is pretty universally good advice.

If you’re breaking zero laws, stop.

> depends on the contract wording of course

This. Also, as a contractor you can generally be let go with no reason and little notice (also depending on the contract).

Of course that cuts both ways; if you have multiple clients you can also jump ship quite easily.

In fact, I've seen contractors (who want to be contractors) who limit the hours they work for any single client so there's no question as to whether they're an employee or not.

If you are in CA you have a "right to moonlight" provided there is no conflict of interest.

In probably 47 other states you could be fired for your activity outside of work even without a conflict of interest.

You can still be fired "for no reason" in CA at any time. It's still at-will employment.

The State of California prohibits firing for certain causes and if you are fired for those reasons you can file a complaint with the Labor Commissioner and they're authorized to collect lost wages from your former employer on your behalf.

Which, while probably true, is unrelated to what I said.

The article says that they don’t know if any contractors were terminated; they only know about employees.

They could terminate them if they could show that the contractors were faking the hours.

To what extent can you demand hours from a contractor?

If I contract you to do 10 hours of a task per week, and you say you did 10 hours but actually only did 5, you faked the hours and have violated our contract.

Right, but you can only put so much control in the contract before you're not contracting. And that's going to depend on jurisdiction too. So I was hoping for a contextual overview of that tradeoff.

I think the typical line on this sort of thing is that you can contract someone for a set number of hours, but if you also dictate when those hours will be worked you’ve probably reclassified them as an employee. The other key test in the UK is the ability for a contractor to substitute themselves for another person to get the job done.

To the extend that he had contractual confirmed to you.

If they were billing by the hour, or being payed to standby.

A lot of the time 'contractor' is used to refer to a W-2 employee of a staffing company rather than an independent contractor.

So the company in question has what legal right to investigate the employees of their contractors? Did the contractor’s employees sign off on this? It seems unlikely.

A better remedy would be to fire the contract partner if you feel the work isn’t meeting the value you expect.

You can investigate whatever you want.

If you read the article and look at the differences, they fired the Equifax employees outright. They "flagged" a bunch of contractors. That almost certainly means they sent that list of contractors to their employer companies and requested additional verification of hours and/or requested they be removed from their projects.

I’m more interested at what point they’re violating the FCRA, because I feel like they have to be somehow

That’s actually illegal on the part of the company.

You get a lot of this up here in Canada. Companies hire you as a contractor, but prohibit you from working other roles.

They can’t prohibit you from working other roles. That’s the whole point of being an “independent contractor”.

Most contractors I know take on many clients.

I'm pretty sure this isn't legal in most provinces.

It isn't, but everyone does it, including the federal government.

I can provide another anecdatum to that claim.

> Being able to have multiple clients is one of the factors to determine if you're a contractor...

This is very common misconception. People can have multiple employers just like contractors can have multiple clients. It has no bearing.

It is not a misconception in the U.S. This is one of many factors in determining the correct classification.

https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...

Well, the article linked does not say that.

> Services available to the market

Does not mean the business cannot have a one client at a time.

>> Services available to the market >> >> An independent contractor is generally free to seek out business opportunities. Independent contractors often advertise, maintain a visible business location, and are available to work in the relevant market.

But it does mean that. If you aren't free to seek business opportunities, your services aren't available to the market. It's a factor, not the factor.

In my country (Brazil) if the company shows any care about people working on two jobs, it's enough evidence to determine they are employees.

(Famously, this made Uber grant some rights to their drivers here.)

Yeah, I'd love for someone who is familiar with this to weigh in. I was under the impression that this was one of the features that defines contractors.

If I'm paying you as an employer for a tenporary full time stint, say 50 hrs. work/week and you're not actually punching in and out of time clock for me to track you, I might have suspicions that you're in fact short changing me on the time or quality of work you contracted if you're also working another job. I might be wrong, and you'd have a right to contest that, but I'd probably be right more than wrong on average.

If you are an actual employee of mine it's even more likely you are in breach.

In breach of what?

No employment contract or agreement I've ever seen has prohibited someone from holding two W2 positions. Competing, sure. Sharing trade secrets is already illegal. Double-billing hours (e.g. on invoices or hourly work) is already illegal.

You're falling into a number of traps, not the least of which is thinking anyone who does contracting would ever agree to 50h/wk for a single client. "I'd be right more than I'd be wrong" is not sufficient justification to put additional requirements on a contract that almost certainly were not there to begin with.

Sure but this has nothing to do with the ethical basis of using such data to discover that or the legal basis of the contractor/employer designation.

> Executives, especially in the tech industry, have said they're worried that some remote employees are distracted.

“Distracted” like the time that Equifax leaked hundreds of millions of pieces of personal data. Maybe instead of blaming the workforce they should worry about making the company a place that people want to work exclusively. Equifax does not matter at all as an organization.

Yeah I don't buy the complaints about remote workers being distracted. Isn't this the sole purpose of performance reviews? If the employee isn't doing their job, just fire them.

Sounds to me like the execs just have control issues. "WE get to fly around in the private jets and strike business deals on the golf course, not you!"

I think it highlights another problem: performance reviews are heavily bias and management typically has no clue how their reports are actually performing.

Sadly, they do matter. Lots of power, low accountability. Equifax and the other two have a very large impact on USA citizens day-to-day. I hate it but, we can't pretend they don't matter.

If Equifax leaked personal data it was because of bad security practices… the ones that are implemented by distracted workers.

Specified, delegated and approved by distracted executives?

Criminally negligent executives, in my personal opinion.

I don’t see how any of this was the executives fault. They have no idea of computer security and hired people who they thought were competent to handle it.

No, they didn't. The executive in charge had no freaking idea what was going on, at all. As noted earlier in the threads, it was a music major with no experience, they hired a fall guy/gal - please dont say stuff you have no idea about.

What do you think an exec's job is? Watch TV and hope for the best?

Nope, the people that were 2 levels under execs hired them

Execs hired incompetent (or maybe just "profit oriented") management and that incompetence trickled down to the bottom.

Of course that is not applicable to 'boards' and 'CxO'. Quick search suggest some of them sitting at at least 2 'boards' or also 'partners' or something. So yeah, rules for thee but not for me.

In their defense, board seats are not a full time job. The commitment could be as little as a few hours a month or quarter. “Partner” could also mean quite a few things, such as a partner at a venture firm for example. Which also may not be a full time job.

The difference here is that as an employee you commit to provide 40 hours of service to your employer. From the stories I’ve heard of these double jobs, this isn’t a weekend job working at the local coffee shop for an extra few bucks which doesn’t impact your primary responsibilities. Instead it’s a professional job with overlapping hours. Which means an employer isn’t getting what they paid for and these people are deceiving them.

You could give the same argument for second jobs as well, could be a small gig getting done in an hour, a music class that someone teaches to their neighbourhood kids or someone doing trading on the stock market. It is all additional income, just the semantics of how one gets them is different.

It is true that higher-level employees at companies not uncommonly sit on boards although I assume this is something that high-level employee discusses with their management--and as you say it's typically not a big time committment though can lead to conflicts. And it's not unusual for even individual contributors to be on some unpaid non-profit board but that would generally be out of scope of most employment agreements.

Most CxO positions are full-time although there are, e.g. fractional CFO-type positions for smaller companies.

Boards are usually explicitly not full time. At the previous place I worked, I know from the paperwork we gave the government that the board only worked 2-8 hours a week (and even that might be generous)

I have three children. It is literally impossible for me to survive on any salary companies are willing to pay. I work multiple jobs.

Idk the solution. It costs me $3,000 a month just for school. That’s a second mortgage.

Either they increase pay 50%. Which they don’t want to do. Or I work three jobs. If they don’t like it, pay more.

I actually don’t even have a choice, it isn’t even an option. School must get paid for. It isn’t a lifestyle expense. It is a necessity.

You're getting a lot of heat for investing in your children. This makes me sad, though I suspect the people are good intentioned, trying to help you "solve" your problem.

I can think of many scenarios where 1K/month/child is the best option. I don't know the quality of schools available in your area, but I do know it can vary wildly, and good school can make a huge difference.

And you have my deep respect for the sacrifice you are making for your children. We need more people like you.

In particular, how many of the "public school is good enough" folks are paying four figures extra on their mortgage payment to be in an area where that's true.

In any major metro, an extra 2-3 bedrooms in a district with great schools is way more expensive than living in a place with the worst schools and paying tuition.

I think the reason for the heat is framing it as "it's impossible to survive".

As someone who went to public school and is doing just fine, I am wondering why that's not the solution.

My impression (from across the pond) is that the quality of public schools can vary quite a bit, because they're funded by local property taxes, which means schools in rich neighbourhoods have better funding than those in poor neighbourhoods.

And I have no idea how much freedom Americans have to choose which public school to send their kids to.

By comparison, all Dutch schools receive the same funding, whether public or private, have roughly the same quality and are subject to the same standards, and people are mostly free to choose which school to send their kids to. (I think in Amsterdam, some primary schools have a certain postal code area from which they accept students, and for secondary schools there's a massive ranked lottery system where a small percentage of kids do not end up in one of their top-3 preferred schools.)

> My impression (from across the pond) is that the quality of public schools can vary quite a bit, because they're funded by local property taxes

Sort of.

Per Wikipedia:

The largest source of funding for elementary and secondary education comes from state government aid, followed by local contributions (primarily property taxes)

As a side note, my city passed a $70 million dollar bond to build a new elementary and middle school. The school is currently ranked in the bottom 5% in the state.

Also:

Schools in the United States spend an average of $16,993 per pupil, which is the 7th-highest amount per pupil (after adjusting to local currency values) among the 37 other developed nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)

$3,000 seems like a bargain by comparison.

Selection bias? The person who who went to public school and didn’t do fine is not so likely to be posting on HN?

Try again, plenty of people on here probably had varying experiences in public schools and came out just fine, and some are struggling, you'll find both here.

Yo, don't @ me. And yes, those of us with poor public school experiences are here on HN.

Went to public until 5th then private school through HS, all were dumpster fires in their own way. Just my .02, and while this was over a decade ago, I'm inclined to believe shitty and free is better than shitty and expensive. If your kids are even remotely motivated and smart, what they do outside school is 10,000x more important so might as well put the money towards that.

Where I grew up public schools were measurably worse than alternatives. Using objective metrics like average number of gang wars in a given year.

Since there's something like 100k public schools in the US, with very different performance and governments in charge, I don't think people here are really in a position to judge someone's parenting choices over the internets.

Also by the way, public universities run about 12k/year, so they may well have their children in public school.

Yeah you raise a good point, I was in a city with generally serviceable schools. Really, I just tend to get frustrated at the belief system that all public schools are awful and any good parent should send their kids to private school. Even when the public option is ok we can't have our kids hanging out with the prole kids.

Even when they hand with the proles, they get their real education at afterschool private programs.

This is still just one data point. Can you compare your public HS experience to your private HS experience? Can you compare public school A to public school B? Private A to private B?

A school being private doesn't magically make it great. It has to still work hard for that. A public school being good requires hard work too. But let's be honest, usually it boils down to parent involvement which is usually fueled by economic status. Rich(er) people have time and/or resources to actually be involved in their kids lives. They also tend to have fewer kids so more time/resources per kid. The initial thing a private school does these days is pool the rich(er) cohort of kids together.

I live in a part of my city known as the 'private school corridor' because there are so many. And, the public schools are notoriously horrible in the city's ISD. So, it's pretty much required if you have the means. The other alternative is to move to a suburb (different ISD), but even those are pretty easily seen as correlating good school districts with high home prices. Yet, I've seen studies in my area that say if everyone sent their private schooled kids to the public schools they would average out and be pretty well rated. But it's a first mover disadvantage to do so, so nobody does.

I also live in the south and this whole private school thing really started during integration, so there's that whole issue to contend with too. The impacts of red lining and white flight are pretty stark here. I don't think it's the motivating factor for most people any more, but inertia.

This is why our public schools have stats like "5% white" and "86% low income" on Great Schools. 5% white seems really low, the city is ~56% based on another google search.

> Rich(er) people have time and/or resources to actually be involved in their kids lives.

More commonly, to pay other people to be involved.

I'm sure the vast majority on HN went to public school. In my country only the absolute elite such as monarchs go to private school.

My kids school called us in for a meeting. My son froze up on tests. They had a standardized test coming up, and they wanted to label my son as illiterate so that he could have someone with him while he took the test, they thought that would help him do better. To be clear my son could read just fine and he just froze up on tests. Both of my children were placed in private school that week. The sad thing is we were the super involved parents, donated a ton of time and supplies, coats/gloves/hats to the coat drives to make sure the kids didn't go without, etc. But I'll be damned if you are going to label and stigmatize my child because standardized test scores are your true priority.

The private school never had a test?

The private schools priority was education. They had the normal tests on the subject matter taught, and may have been required to do the federal government standardized tests used to judge schools, but they did not focus on those tests results. They focused on education, not federal/state government standardized tests.

test taking is a skill you should be working with him on.

Does he have some sort of generalized anxiety? Like it or not, an inability to take tests is going to negatively affect his life.

> School must get paid for.

You pay for it with your taxes. It's a lifestyle choice if you want to send your kids to a private institution when public school is already covered.

I hope that doesn't come across as rude, because that's not my intention. But private school is not some necessity of life that you're forced to pay for -- definitely not "literally impossible" to survive without.

Technically yes, but depending on your location your public school system may be chronically under-funded, to the point where sending your kid to a public school would put them at a big disadvantage in high school or college (and so then for the rest of their life).

Yes, you could move, but as it turns out properties are more expensive in good school districts.

I'm a product of one of the shittiest public schools in my state. While I attended, they were forced by the state to convert to an "international baccalaureate" school because the alternative was closing.

I say that because yet, among my peers from that school, I count engineers, astrophysicists, doctors, IT workers, psychologists, pilots, and more.

So I would vigorously argue against the idea that students who attend underfunded public schools are at a disadvantage for life.

The biggest impact I noticed is home life and the involvement of parents. If you are a parent who cares and pushes your child, that is worth way more than the quality of the school as assigned by some ranking system.

Additionally, my exposure to a rough-and-tumble school with people of varying backgrounds (i.e., not a single socioeconomic stratum) gave me empathy and social skills that are extremely useful in everyday life.

I'm not saying your choices are wrong, but I strongly disagree with the premise that a less-than-ideal public school leads to lifelong negative consequences.

If school funding has no advantage on life performance then we need to drastically cut all funding and just save the money.

That seems so unlikely to be true I can't be bothered reading the rest of your comment.

A single example of a school spending program that has positive results would collapse your argument.

You’re setting up a false dichotomy. There’s no one input that’s responsible for 80% of a successful education.

School funding is obviously dominantly important up to a point (they need books, rooms, teachers, etc.).

Past that point, marginally more engaged and educated parents are worth much more than a marginal $X of funding per student per year.

I went through a public school with a tri-modal distribution (that almost perfectly mirrored our county’s tri-modal income distribution). A handful of people dropped out functionally illiterate, most people came out “just fine” and went to a local community college or state school, and a handful of people went to top tier universities paid for by pell grants, scholarships and PLUS loans.

The main variable correlated to which modality you fell into was a combination of the socioeconomic status of your parents, and how engaged they were in your education (i.e. not going through a divorce, not rich but working 100 hours per week, etc.).

A passionate teacher or extracurricular sponsor (drama teacher, athletics coach) might have temporarily filled-in for or amplified this normally parental role for a year or two with a similar effect, but only for a couple students at a time. They would usually target their efforts on kids on the cusp of a modality (failing but with a lot of potential shown elsewhere, or very smart but from a troubled home).

There’s a study on kids that just barely missed the cutoff to get into the #1 public school in NYC. Their post-HS outcomes were indistinguishable from those on the symmetrical other side of the divide. On either side of the divide, you had parents encouraging and pushing their kids just as hard. Interpret from that what you will.

Basically, the world isn’t black and white. It’s damned complicated. Public school is complicated. Anybody who claims a simple solution, especially tied to funding or teachers, deserves suspicion IMO.

Providing an example would surely help your case. US schools are currently removing gifted education (which costs nothing extra, just has higher standards) or because they found that spending more on non-gifted students didn't close the achievement gap.

> The biggest impact I noticed is home life and the involvement of parents. If you are a parent who cares and pushes your child, that is worth way more than the quality of the school as assigned by some ranking system.

Agreed.

My comment is from experience as well though. A lot of my classes in HS had to be slowed down to the slowest student (no child left behind I guess), but the better students were frequently bored. I'm glad I was lucky enough to be able to take advanced classes, but I still think one's school has an impact. Exposure to certain topics or classes can certainly impact a student's life (in my opinion). For instance, high schools with a compsci class, I'm sure will have more students becoming SWEs than high schools without.

One simple (and perhaps actionable) way to express this idea.

Say you're two parents who are very conscientious about wanting your child to have "good outcomes" in life (i.e. have a good schooling experience, go to a good college, have a good job).

It is better, for your kids, for the family to live in an environment in which you (the parents!) are living comfortably and with minimal stress, than it is to attend a top 50 high school, (assuming that means trading off against comfort & stress).

By comfort/stress, I mean to say: money isn't a weekly, monthly, or even quarterly issue, jobs are low-stress, and you have a lot of spare energy/time to invest in your kids after school, on the weekends, and in the summer/holidays.

There are plenty of schools in the top 500 or top 1000 in the US that are in geographies check these box for you, your spouse, and your family, that don't cost $1000/month/child.

You might not be min-maxing your retirement accounts by taking jobs that allow you to work in-person/remotely there, but the compounding dividends paid by investing in your family and community carries much more value.

I think there are "shitty" schools, and then there are _shitty_ schools.

A "shitty" public school is probably generally underfunded, but at least has the decent-enough quality of teachers/parents to lead the motivated kids to the right information. That way those kids can go on in their own time and study enough to make it to professional jobs in the real world, although most of these kids will never make it to top-tier colleges due to optics of their schools.

A _shitty_ public school lacks even generally-caring teachers, and often suffers net-negative because of the parents. Kids in these schools grow up ignorant of what to learn, much less how to learn it.

The poster you're responding to is the poster child for the helicopter parent that plans their child's life and then bribes school officials to get them into an ivy league school.

Little Johnny is better than the plebs around them who attend the public school in their district.

The funny part is that school teaches you to do things "by the book" and that, itself, has its own downsides.

> I'm a product of one of the shittiest public schools in my state. ... yet, among my peers from that school, I count engineers, astrophysicists, doctors, IT workers, psychologists, pilots, and more.

Are you serious? How did they manage to apply for and pay for the education needed to score those jobs?

A friend of mine was also a product of one of the shittiest public schools in her state, and she was apparently the only person in her grade to continue on to university.

US has public universities and college scholarships. And, you know, students don't pay for college out of their own income from high paying jobs they got based on high school education.

public schooling and low-tier education were undoubtably the worst experiences of my life. the criminal behavior (hard drugs, regular violence) and resentment of the teachers are the closest thing to hell I have experienced. you got out lucky.

You could live in a shitty apartment in a good school district, if you are really determined to sacrifice and give a good education to your kids.

100% of the immigrants do that

Those districts are very likely to have housing markets that include precious few "shitty apartments" and zoning that makes it impossible to build more of them. That's a fundamental fact of modern America.

And raise traumatized children like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32946010.

That person would be traumatized at private school too.

Instead of paying $12,000/kid/year you could just send them to public school.

Having been through public school in the U.S., I would not send my own child to one if I had any other choice.

I on the other hand went to public school and would send my children to one. Anecdotally, some of the most successful people I know went to public school, many of which had parents that could easily afford to send them to private school.

Then you went to a bad public school.

No, I went to three bad public schools.

And people I know went to many bad public schools.

The way you say this implies that there's some easy way to move your kids from a bad public school to a good public school. This is of course laughably wrong, since moving schools requires buying a home in a nicer/more expensive area.

If you’re sending 3 kids to private school for $1000/month each, you could afford instead another $400k of mortgage or so on top of what your mortgage already is with todays interest rates.

That’s almost as much as the median home in America. So assuming you already live in the median home, you could send your kids to private school, or you could buy a house that’s twice as expensive.

Where I grew up, the median home is less than the national median, and the public schools are pretty good.

Or maybe get vouchers or tax refund for that dumpster fire.

I think that's defeats the purpose of public school. As a society, we decided we need to collectively contribute to every child's education, regardless if they are own. I have no kids, but I pay my school taxes so that other people's children can have an education.

Paying for other children's education gives you benefits like lesser crime and will keep the value of your property high.

And the continuation of modern civilisation to boot!

How is a voucher not collectively contributing to every child's education?

You would not pay those taxes if they were optional. Most wouldn't anyways. Most people live in a paycheck to paycheck world and would love to get a free pass on that tax bill.

"We" also have not really decided anything as a society but were born into the decisions of prior generations and it could be changed. See Roe v Wade, marijuana, etc.

The parent wasn’t disagreeing with the collective payment responsibility (and I don’t know where you got that), only with the public school model that gives no choice as to which schools the money is spent at.

Suggesting a tax refund is pretty clearly proposing they should not have to fund public schools.

Refund or voucher to the parent suffering it. Still not seeing how you went from that to “don’t you understand that non-parents should fund public schools?” The premise is that those hurt by it, parents, recover money to otherwise educate their kids. Nowhere in that was a claim that the childless should get money back for being childless, so I don’t see how addressing that is responsive.

I think you’re saying that If your kids are not using the service, then you should not pay the tax.

This doesn’t sound any different from someone having no kids, not using the service, and expecting a refund.

No, they're hugely different. One of them accepts that the state should still be paying for education of children regardless of whether your personally have children -- just with better options than failed public schools. Which is why lectures about how "we should all be paying for kids' education" is very unresponsive. Which is why I said so. And have not yet gotten a substantive reply that addresses the criticism.

I’m still not understanding your point.

I must pay for socialized education regardless if I use the service. I might choose to not use this service because I lack children or I may choose a different provider. But this doesn’t mean I don’t have to pay my taxes if I don’t want to use a gov service.

What makes adults with kids special that they don’t have to pay this tax when they don’t want to use the service?

I'm struggling to think of a single public service that you can get a refund if you don't use it. Even private services like health insurance don't refund you money because you chose a provider outside your network.

The majority of private schools are religious. We don't usually let tax money go to religions.

Like Notre Dame and Brigham Young?

But I don’t care if their kids use it. They are not funding their child, they are funding the system of public education.

Which vouchers are. Why is this so hard to understand?

No, they aren't. Perhaps you're having trouble telling the difference between people who don't understand your argument and people who disagree with it?

The purpose of a public school is the opportunity to educate children at little to no out of pocket cost. It has nothing to do with specifics of the tax system, or whether a voucher program exists.

Also, if you are American, voluntarily donating money without oversight to a local school has as much return as breast cancer awareness.

If you give your kids a stable home they will do fine in public school

I don't get a refund for having no kids in public school. Why would anyone else?

Sorry to hear, that sounds like a real struggle. Serious question: have you considered giving up one of those jobs and home-schooling your kids with the time gained? There were quite a few articles about how unreasonably effective real tutoring (as opposed to exam tutoring) is, it's made me wonder how practical it is for people who aren't independently wealthy.

Do you have a spouse? You might be worried about public school quality, but at some point it would be cheaper to just have the spouse stay at home and home school.

Except the stay at home spouse doesn't get any pension/social security benefits from this, plus it tanks their career with massive impact on future earnings.

SS is split with a partner.

That makes the spouse financially dependent on the partner for life, which can be a bad situation.

Nope. You get the same social security benefits (50% of what the earning spouse would get at your age) after divorce if you were married for at least 10 years.

They get 50% of their spouse's benefits at that age.

As long as they were married for at least 10 years.

Not to forget that OP could do the home schooling and the spouse keeps working.

Homeschooling is like a second job, though. One where you can't bullshit and lie your way through it.

If you can snag a WFH job, you can homeschool after grade 5 pretty easily. School is half daycare and a lot of students doing work, and half foller topics you don't need to study.

This is the way to do it IMO. I've worked with people with kids and OE people. The people with kids aren't double-dipping dragasses.

and where you don't get paid and which doesn't give you any credit on your CV when you go to look for your next job and where you don't get any social security benefits.

I don't think the OE crowd is loading up their CVs with these concurrent jobs. And kids are the original social security.

Huh? Why would the spouse do it instead of OP?

And why do you think having a full-time tutor is cheaper than group care at a school?

Potentially OP could do it. But from the wording of the comment, it sounds like OP is the main earner in the household, so if they have a spouse then the net income opportunity cost from not working would be lower for the spouse.

As to why it's cheaper, that's a calculation they have to make. If the spouse's net income (looking at marginal tax rates) is greater than 3k a month, then it's not cheaper.

I mean, the teacher quality varies a lot, and the average teacher is unlikely to be smart enough to teach the child of a HN commenter optimally, so it's not hard to match their effectiveness.

> That’s a second mortgage.

Sounds like student loans.

@anonreeeeplor spend less on candles

Semi-related, but Equifax runs The Work Number, which is basically your "employment credit report / record"; they hoover up the data by agreements with employers that they will share employment info with them.

You can freeze your employment record with them here: https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze/

I highly recommend you do this, as any employer could just decide to look you up using this info and you wouldn't be notified at all (unlike, say, a hard pull on your credit in a regular credit report).

Well I'll be damned. They have everything from my (accurate) current salary to my weekly paychecks from my movie theater job in 2006.

Are there any other sites like this for the other credit agencies? Are there other services that do something like this that aren't the big three credit agencies?

Shockingly, this contains your salary information. Which is pretty dangerous for salary negotiation.

Why? you either have a BATNA or you don't.