Comment by Glyptodon
4 days ago
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%.