Comment by brightball
3 months ago
This seems to reflect a lot of what I hear about as well. Everything is too entrenched from a decision making standpoint for any one person to make a difference in reforms.
A free market fixes anything where people have the ability to "vote with their wallet" and simply stop paying for services which aren't meeting expectations when they find another that does. Things like employer sponsored health insurance are insulated from you choosing a different option for yourself and we get the situation that we currently have because of it.
Education is the same way but the only ways to vote with your wallet are...
1. Buy a house zoned for the school that you want.
2. Pay for private school.
3. Home school.
4. In some areas, school choice where you can choose from another of the available public options may be viable too.
The only long term solution here that has potential to fix things legislatively is a true school voucher program that would let you take the tax money assigned for your kids education and put it into whatever option you believed was actually best for their education.
This _should_ lead to a start-up like small business ecosystem with lots of small Montessori style schools especially for younger kids. Most likely a "neighborhood schools" model would pop up and parents would end up walking their kids to school again, even in suburban areas.
Most likely you would still see bigger options for high school still as teenagers crave more socialization. Sports would likely revolve more around communities than individual schools too.
You'd of course see some specialties. Schools advertising why they were the best option for your kids and then having to prove it in order to keep them. Yes, there would definitely be religious schools as there already are now.
My guess is that a lot of the current home school co-ops that are popular in my area would simply become suddenly funded because the parents involved as pretty happy with the model. I had a lot of biases against home schooling until I saw how these co-ops work and it's really effective. Basically just like a normal school small school with parents teaching different lessons on different days. Each parent's commitment is a half day a week to teach and they still do school plays, etc.
Voucher programs are just going to flood the "education market" with substandard schools teaching things like humans walked with dinosaurs a few thousand years ago before the great flood. They're going to extract profits from our tax dollars to give us a worse quality service.
We'll see a lot of new schools open up, spend a few years collecting profits, then get shut down for substandard quality after effectively failing to teach kids for those few years. Meanwhile the public schools which can't be choosy will end up with fewer resources and have worse outcomes for the kids who have parents who can't afford private transportation to the few nicer, choosier voucher schools.
Being able to read the Bible would be a big improvement on say the Baltimore school system, which spends $22,500 per year per student: https://www.city-journal.org/article/are-baltimore-students-... (“According to the 2022 NAEP test, only 10 percent of fourth-graders and 15 percent of eighth-graders in Baltimore’s public schools are proficient in reading.”)
Literally, madrassas in Pakistan that just teach the kids to read the Quran would be an upgrade.
Those numbers do not mean what you seem to think. 1st, proficiency on that test is a pretty high bar. There are kids making perfectly adequate progress who don’t score proficient. Second, average per-pupil costs are meaningless. Baltimore city pays for two of my kids’ educations. One costs the city about $8k (the money that a school gets for a kid with no extra needs). The other costs well over $100k, due to significant disabilities. Baltimore has a disproportionate number of kids with significant needs of some sort, including learning disabilities, extreme family poverty, and ESL learners. Those kids need extra resources. A voucher system isn’t going to change that.
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I tend to see big per student spending in public schools as suggestive that they've been loaded up with a disproportionate share of the kids with IEPs.
>madrassas in Pakistan that just teach the kids to read the Quran
I thought they were just teaching the sounds of the Quran. Like the Pakistani kids don't know any Arabic, and they don't learn to read or understand Arabic. They just memorize and recite the Arabic sounds of the Quran that they've been taught.
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Why would it give people worse education? Besides who are you or any of us to decide what is and isnt a good education for someone elses kids? It's not your job to police ideas.
Are you really arguing schools getting taxpayer money to teach kids humans walked with dinosaurs and all modern biology is a lie a good educational outcome?
Do you really not see how that's a bad outcome?
Do you not see that removing the funding from the regular public schools to go to teach that nonsense will lead to worse outcomes for those kids who can't leave those regular public schools?
Sure, maybe some students will potentially have some better outcomes if they manage to go to a good private charter school with their voucher that happens to be a decent one. For everyone else it's a worse outcome, unless you think it's a good thing to teach every animal alive today are direct descendants of the ark that was just a few thousand years ago.
Also, kiss special education funding goodbye. It won't be profitable to handle these students. They'll be trapped in those even more underfunded public schools. Hooray, great outcomes!
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They better not teach that. We all know dinosaurs aren't real!
I joke but religious education isn't all bad. One of my smartest friends in High School went to Santa Clara University and really liked it.
Many Catholic high schools are also among the highest performing in the country.
The claims around religious education are one of the biggest remaining examples of socially acceptable bigotry.
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Or private equity owned schools. Imagine how bad product they could effectively deliver. The would not even teach humans walking with dinosaurs... As they would do bare minimum of teaching anything at all...
Why would parents send their children to those schools? Never mind who owns them; I would expect the kind of hypothetical schools you’re describing to go bankrupt quickly. Private equity is not in the business of losing money in predictable ways.
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> As they would do bare minimum of teaching anything at all...
As compared to what again? Remind me how good government has been doing.
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Come on, be serious. In a huge country with 50M students attending primary/secondary school you can always dredge up a few horror stories but those are far from the typical case. On the scale of ways that schools damage kids, teaching them the unscientific mythology of certain Christian sects is hardly the worst. The Catholic church, which is one of the largest private school operators, has no official position on paleontology or evolution through natural selection.
> The Catholic church ... has no official position on paleontology or evolution through natural selection.
That's certainly an indictment.
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I am serious. If you're thinking most of the families are chomping at the bit to repurpose tax dollars to Catholic schools you've clearly never interviewed the average homeschool family South of the Mason-Dixon. They don't even think Catholics are Christian; many would align a priest with Satan!
Most families I know who currently home school do so so to avoid vaccine requirements because germ theory/biology is a lie or because they're worried their kids will be exposed to the idea of the fossil record or that gay people exist in the world or put thoughts like dinosaurs died before humans into kids heads.
You're delusional if you think of these aren't major homeschooling points in the US. Willingly holding your nose to ignore the extreme stench of the anti-intellectualism the rest of the movement massively embodies.
This will be the outcome in an extreme majority of school districts. If anything, this recent election shows fundies vote. To them it's even more than life or death, it's eternal death to miss voting.
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Even if there were more ways to "vote with your wallet" is abundantly clear that a lot of parents, respectively, (a) couldn't care less anyway, and (b) can't actually tell a good charter or voucher school from a bad one.
When the purpose of schooling is ensuring a civic floor amongst citizens the effectiveness of things like the home school co-ops mentioned can't come at the expense of population at large unless we wish to surrender the republican form of government for something else.
You need to contrast suggested ideas to the current systems, not an idealized standard that the current system is nowhere near achieving.
For instance NAEP scores consistently demonstrate only about 25% of students achieve "basic" proficiency in math, reading is even worse. Its going to be difficult to do worse.
And I mean that very literally - some percent of people would become competent in e.g. basic math with 0 public education due to family or personal interests. I can't imagine it's "that" far from 25%.
> A free market fixes anything
https://bitworking.org/news/2008/01/the-free-market-fairy/
Nothing magical about it. It’s pure economics and rational decision making. The institutions we complain about in this country every day are completely insulated from it. Everything else survives or fails on its own merits.
Supply and demand. It’s a natural law.
According to Saint Frederick Von Hayek as popularized by J. Howard Pew and his crew. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V_AZRZfu9I
Pure economics and rational decision making are the exact reasons for engaging in regulatory capture, bribery, and oligarchy.
Why on earth would democracy (or any other form of shared power) be a rational choice for you, from an economic standpoint, if you already are wealthy enough to neuter it to the point where nearly all profits and decision-making authority are allocated to you?
Dictatorship is the ultimate in rational decision-making for a rational self-interested actor. Philanthropy and benevolence are not rational for the wealthy and powerful.
Income inequality and regulatory capture are features of the free market, not bugs. They are baked in by design.
Most countries in the world "patch" those bugs by regulation that moves them away from being pure "free market" economies. Antitrust regulation is a well-known example of this.