Are you against school vouchers? Why would you want parents to not be able to select the school their children go to?
I don't have children at all, and I don't mind paying taxes to fund schools, because when I'm old I want the doctor who is younger than to have gotten a good education. I don't expect any vouchers just because I don't have kids consuming public education.
Vouchers always seemed to me like an obvious scheme to defund public schools and let them rot, thereby punishing kids who were unlucky enough to be born poor.
So it doesn't defund public schools, but it does break the public school monopoly and allows competition among schools - they can cater to the needs of the community and experiment.
The real issue is: Why are schools failing?
When I was growing up, the vast majority of kids were educated in public schools. They weren't perfect, but they worked at least decently for the large majority of students, and did so for decades. Across the entire region. And they did that as a monopoly system you seen to despise so much.
So we had a system that worked, was scalable, replicable, and maintainable. What happened?
I don't have all the answers there, but at least once thing is clear, there is now an over-emphasis on testing. We had a system that was designed to give citizens important life skills, and turned it into a system that tries to produce drones that can pass tests.
This is exactly the kind of thing we used to criticize Asian school systems about. And now we are trying to replicate their failings. WTF
That's the thing that frustrates me about this debate. People seem to think that educating children well it's such a difficult problem, that it requires constant innovation. That it requires the "power of the free market" to solve. No, it doesn't. We have known how to do it for a long time. It just requires political will.
And that brings us to another factor, one political party is actively anti-science and actively anti-education. This was definitely not the case 30 - 40 years ago. Back then, they were both pro-public education.