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Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

You just described why so many people support school choice and voucher policies. It is absolutely mind boggling to me how anyone can consider more options to be worse than a one size fits all model.

EDIT: In keeping with the trend, took about 30 seconds to get downvoted.

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> It is absolutely mind boggling to me how anyone can consider more options to be worse than a one size fits all model.

It's pretty simple, really: you're looking from your own, self-centered perspective. From the point of view of the society, it may be desirable to restrict options available to individuals in order to mitigate negative effects of everyone making self-interested choices.

Whether or not options should be restricted in schooling is a topic for cost/benefit analysis, but as a general point, I don't see anything mind-boggling about this perspective.

If that is the case, public education does not exist to educate children (or at least this is not its primary goal), but rather exists as some sort of bizarre redistribution program. High IQ parents are then expected to feed their children into the hopper for the gain of others.

How is "getting a good education" a negative effect? It is the opposite. If smart people do the things they need to do to become even smarter, everyone benefits.

Smaller schools have less educational diversity. Suppose you want a gifted and talented education, but also want to play baseball. At tiny schools that may not be an option, but at a larger school you can have upper tier classes and a wider range of clubs.

EX: My high school had a swim team and a chess club. We had almost every AP class, lot's of general ed, even some handicapped students. When they split the school a lot of that was lost.

IMO, it's the disruptive students that need to go not the gifted. Unless your talking boarding schools even NYC does not really have enough exceptionally gifted students for their own high school.

You're also assuming that such a shift must play in the current model. There's no reason that sports couldn't be separated into community activities totally separate from the educational aspects of multiple smaller schools.

I can't find the link, but I've heard strong arguments for models where school days are 4 hours long and kids go to community centers afterwards where they do homework, play sports, games, club activities, hikes, music lessons and just hangout. As a bonus, the people in these areas DON'T need a masters degree to do their job as we separate educational aspects of schools from social aspects.

Dozens of small schools could easily work together in a community under this model with changes in the classroom schools having no impact on the activity centers. You could even go to certain schools on different days for areas of specialization/interest being taught.

There are a whole world of possible options that open up if we don't lock in the model that we have today. IMO, it's not about defunding the schools. It's about WANTING to fund them.

You would need the same number of teachers if the day was 4h long unless you had some students start with community centers and then swap. Now, if population density was high enough your model might work, but you are going to sacrifice a lot of time busing people around in the middle of the day.

Unless, these are simply different building right next to each other. Which is fine, but you could do the same thing in one building.

This makes no sense - you are proposing restricting the options of high performers so that they don't make self interested choices. Why not restrict the choices of low performers instead?

Because with this definition of the problem, the "low performers" don't have options to restrict.

My point, as applied to this case, is that giving the option of "smart-only schools" will predictably lead to people taking it, which may lead to issues described by 'habosa here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13483591. It's a reasonable question to ask if this is what is beneficial to the society (including its economy), and if the answer is no, then not giving such an option in a first place is an entirely logical approach.

Then why not just rephrase the problem, so the "low performers" can simply be removed from the education system entirely? That's what you're proposing when you tell someone gifted they can't have education that _actually educates_ them.

Personally, the biggest concern I would have with school choice / voucher policies is maintaining accountability and quality standards.

The recent fraud investigations in the USA for-profit college market (eg where several scam-ish type outfits churned out expensive but useless degrees to people lured in by slick marketing) absolutely shows that, sometimes, more options can be worse.

That could be really easily addressed. In order to accept voucher money, you must be a non-profit and your expenses must be transparent.

I agree that for-profit institutions have no place in education.

The issue is that funding for public schools is extremely limited. Having more choice means even less funding for those that need it the most. Ideally, there would be endless funding and so more choice doesn't negatively impact those at the bottom. But that's not the reality we face.

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