Funny. I just joined a Win7 machine to a Samba domain. There is a hoop to jump through, but any business running Samba can manage setting a couple reg keys.

Seems to work, so far.

I do find it interesting that many private schools have an annual tuition that's less than the average amount we are paying per student for public schools and manage to turn out higher test scores and better educated/adjusted students.

This misses two points:

1 - Most private schools are partially subsidized by their religious sponsor, so tuition is lower than the actual cost of providing the education. This serves to spread the indoctrination provided to a wider group of people, a goal of all religions. I wonder what the actual cost to provide the education is, on a per student basis. The non-subsidized private schools that I know of are more than $8300 / year / student.

2 - Private schools can give the boot to students who are unable or unwilling to perform academically. They can also expel those who disrupt classrooms. They actually have authority and cannot be sued by parents, since those parents have agreed to a set of terms at enrollment. This then cuts off the bottom of the sample set, and comparisons with public schools that include not only their own bottom performers, but those formerly of private schools, will drag down the overall performance of public schools.

I think that this undermines any idea for a market solution; indeed the point of public education is that since society benefits from an educated populace, society should bear that cost, and that to be equitable, quality education should not be available only to those with money.

No doubt, public schools in the US are not delivering nearly as well as they should, but as an idea, other places have more successful implementations that lead me to believe the problem is in our system, not in the underlying idea.

Lastly, you assertion that private school graduates are better adjusted is questionable. Reinforcing narrow minded beliefs about everything from gender equality, sexual orientation, and racial divisions, and then using guilt as a primary lever of control, does not produce well adjusted individuals. Not all private schools are like that, and certainly not all private school graduates are like that, but to blithely assert that such people are better adjusted is just too much.

I agree with your comments and want to add the following Win7 debilitation:

I stopped using the Windows 7 beta, even though for the most part it is less offensive than Vista, due to it's inability to join a samba nt4 style domain. See here for MS confirming this as an issue with utmost importance: http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba-technical/2009-January/062827.html

If this gets fixed, I would be happy to move away from the steaming pile of Vista, to the merely warm pile of 7, but given MS' track record with compatibility, I'm not holding my breath.