I mean, wouldn't all of this parental energy be better spent in the direction of actually making the educational offerings BETTER rather than trying to guess the secret password to get into the private lounge where you HOPE that they're better??
Only if you can repurpose *all* the parental energy, which, as an individual parent, you can't. As an individual parent, you can do almost nothing to influence the quality of a school, especially in the time your child is actually there, *especially* if you also have a full-time job and a child with high needs, i.e., no time.
I'm sensitive about this argument because in the UK it's often used to argue that it's wrong to send your child to a private school, or even that they should be made illegal: "if you put your energy into improving your local school everybody would benefit". It just doesn't work that way.
