I like roads and schools.
Then we're in agreement that taxes are a necessity. Can we also agree that taxes should be collected fairly (even if we might disagree on what a fair balance might be)?
By building systems where teachers are not held accountable for output of their work you just have a broken system that doesn't help anyone.
Roads are a very small amount of tax money, not worth mentioning.
Without the tax funded school I, and the vast majority of my peers there, likely wouldn't be literate or numerate. I wouldn't have been in a position to win the lottery of a private school bursary.
The quality of the teachers at the the private school was certainly a little better but the worst were about as bad as any public school and the best not much better. The main difference was simply the level of funding.
> By building systems where teachers are not held accountable for output of their work you just have a broken system that doesn't help anyone.
I've found that teachers are the biggest critics of these systems. Rather it's the general public and administrators that have decided the role of the teacher is to do little more than act out a pre-defined curriculum with zero individual agency. In such an arrangement there's no individual output to judge.
Those choices aren't a feature of tax funded schooling. They're administrative/societal decisions to structure schooling in a particular way. It does not follow that schools must be structured this way if funded through taxes.
> Roads are a very small amount of tax money, not worth mentioning.
On a state level they're roughly ~6% of total expenditure. 3% greater than policing or prisons and only 3% lower than healthcare or education. Total expenditure >$200 billion total in 2019[0].
I don't think I've ever met a person who believes their roads to be particularly well maintained, which would point to a much larger figure being required to adequately maintain the infrastructure. It should also be noted that the $200b figure is pre-infrastructure bill.
[0] https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...