Ah yes, "school choice", a nice rebranding effort for privatizing another industry so Betsy Devos and other aspiring oligarchs can destroy a public good for their profit.
Clearly the solution can't be privatized 'school choice' because the people who need it the most will probably not be able to afford it, and it segregates society further, giving everyone even less stake in repairing their communities. It's a self-defeating cycle.
Don't be dense. Those are generational issues to solve. There is enough inertia in the system that solutions if there are any, will take decades to manifest. You know this. And nobody will sacrifice their children at the altar of 'social justice' as espoused online by 20something who doesn't know any better. No, they want their children to be safe, and get a quality education.
Sure - despite being proven that charter schools (ie, free choice) have worse or equivalent scores to public schools [1]. There is not agreement here, there is controversy and the facts are not on the so-called "free markets" side.
Having said that, don't dismiss the idea of choice. Parents, for all kinds of reasons, may not want to be funneled to the specific school or schools they are limited to geographically, and may want to have a different kind of instruction (i.e. they want CHOICE). Opponents of 'school choice' always miss this point.
Charter school discriminate in responsiveness to requests [1] in admissions against special-needs and the poor (ie, the hard cases). Public schools simply can't do this.
[1] https://www.futurity.org/charter-schools-students-1937902/
So instead of implementing policies to make sure the choice is available to all, your approach is to remove this choice from everyone and funnel them through the same monolithic system?
Nothing you argued, even if true (and I suspect you're not an objective observer either), is unsolvable through policy or regulatory changes.
As a general principle, decentralization is good.
Charter and voucher schools ARE public education, they just aren't part of the traditional monolithic bureaucracy. The ability to try different approaches and run different experiments to see if it results in different outcomes, and make fast adjustments, free from the existing hierarchy, is the quality improvement that proponents are striving for.
They also traditionally get to pick and choose who can attend, which often means excluding costly students like any that have disabilities.
> The ability to try different approaches and run different experiments to see if it results in different outcomes, and make fast adjustments, free from the existing hierarchy, is the quality improvement that proponents are striving for.
Great. Let's apply "move fast and break things" to education. What could possibly go wrong?
We both know that's not why you take issue with school choice because these kinds of issues can be easily adjusted through policy changes - but you're not proposing policy changes. You want to completely get rid of the entire thing.
And by the way, in the cases of kids with extreme behavioural issues, those kids are also routinely expelled from the public system schools. So again, what are you arguing?
>Let's apply "move fast and break things" to education. What could possibly go wrong?
Can you try and not distort arguments? Nobody except you argued this.
Earlier:
>The ability to try different approaches and run different experiments to see if it results in different outcomes, and make fast adjustments
How is that not "move fast and break things"?
> And by the way, in the cases of kids with extreme behavioural issues
I specifically said children with disabilities. I think it says a lot about you that you're trying to re-frame that as kids with behavioral issues.
I don't think you're arguing in good faith.
Here's an example of charter school: A school that runs their curriculum partially in a foreign language (e.g. French for social sciences, but math in English) so that children pick up a second language while doing regular studies. Is that an example of "move fast and break things"? Implementing something like this would be very hard in a public system. The inertia is too great. That's just one example of a charter/voucher school being responsive to local needs in a way that would be hard for the largely public system (and I'm not saying charters/voucher replace the public system).
What you did was purposely apply a term from programming and startups to my argument for charters and voucher schools. It doesn't apply. Education is never going to be run like a startup with a 20-something founder. EVER. No parent will let a school 'break' their kids' education. But within those constraints, you can try things a little differently to tailor how and what you teach.
>I specifically said children with disabilities. I think it says a lot about you that you're trying to re-frame that as kids with behavioral issue
No. It was an example that shows the public system is also struggling with kids with disablities (in this case, kids with behavioural issues). But that wasn't the salient point. Ignore it. The primary point was just above it: "We both know that's not why you take issue with school choice because these kinds of issues can be easily adjusted through policy changes - but you're not proposing policy changes. You want to completely get rid of the entire thing."
It's not reasonable to expect everyone to crusade for reform. I want what's best for my kids now, and if that's a charter school, that's what I'm aiming for.
We've inherited the world we deserve. If we want to make it better, we have to earn it. If you don't want to do that, fine, but then you don't get to complain about the results.
Who's "we" here? The people putting the politicians you're talking about into office are not likely the people who would benefit most by sending their children to charter schools. So what is that person supposed to do?
Everyone, generally speaking. It isn't like the kinds of anti-public-service politicians I'm talking about only ever get votes from the 1%, or even just the 50%.