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Comment by cmurf | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if it could work for public education. Perhaps even in lieu of teachers unions.

Much more narrowly, I wonder if it could work for certified flight instructors. Most CFIs are young, know little about business, marketing, tax compliance. And as a consequence are often exploited by employers who misclassify them as independent contractors only to pay them less, without benefits, and still direct their schedules, coerce them into noncompetes. A co-op would help protect their interests while raising standards, in a cost efficient way.

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One of the challenges of a co-op school is that people tend to be "in the market" only whilst they have school-aged children, roughly ages 5 to 18. In much the same way that student involvement in higher education tends to focus strongly on the few years such students are actively being educated, which means that faculty, staff, and corporate influence in higher educational institutions tends to overwhelm student power.

That said, yes there are co-op schools, with the Co-Op School in Brooklyn, NY, being prominent: <https://thecoopschool.org/>

> I wonder if it could work for public education. Perhaps even in lieu of teachers unions.

In a very real sense, public schools are already customer-owned cooperatives governed by a set of trustees elected by the customer-owners.

That said, once you have a school owned by the teachers it's no longer a public school. Public schools are funded by and governed by the public. A cooperative school owned by worker-owners is by definition not a public school.

between the microschool and ESA movements going on right now, there will likely be many publicly-funded & worker-owned schools popping up over the next few years (amongst other much stranger hybrids).

In many jurisdictions, a teacher co-op can already obtain a charter to have an "open to the public, funded by the public, and accountable to the public" charter school. If we're going to be pedantic I think that would fit your funded+governed definition. owned+operatred might be closer to what you are gesturing at though, or perhaps local democratic oversight? Regardless, the old public/parochial types of school categorization is not nearly nuanced enough to be particularly useful for where things are already, let alone soon headed.

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