Comment by hedora
3 hours ago
> except now public money will be going to private entities
Right, now you've come full circle to the core of my proposal: If the charter schools are not producing students that perform well academically, then they do not get paid. Instead, the investor that funded the charter school takes a bath.
This is capitalism at its finest:
- The local government provides a competitive backstop. If you do worse than that floor, then you do not get to compete.
- If your product is not fit for purpose, then you do not get paid. Private money subsidized the experiment, and only in places where the existing system had already failed.
- If the charter school (or anarcho-communist parent commune, or whichever team you want to root for) manages to reliably produce students that go on to perform well, then they solved an "insolvable" problem. Yay competition!
Over time, as the average district improves, so do the academic standards and the goalposts. Schools that once did well but are no longer competitive get phased out, so the funding model builds continuous improvement in. Nothing stops the public school districts from outcompeting the private entities. (In theory, the public districts have an unfair advantage - they don't have to turn a profit.)
The charter schools will do fine because they will attract wealthy students from all over who can afford to travel farther for a better school. So these charter schools will monopolize public funding for educating the wealthiest students, while poorer students will attend the nearest school regardless of quality and the schools will suffer as students struggle due to issues outside the control of the school (home life, familial financial struggles, etc.) The extremes at both ends will just be magnified.
Schools in poorer neighborhoods struggle because the people who live there are struggling.
The charter school model is attempting to solve the problem in a vacuum, but the problem does not exist in a vacuum.
> If the charter schools are not producing students that perform well academically, then they do not get paid
Some people have never heard of Goodhart's law and it shows lol. It leads to terrible ideas like this which make the same mistake again and again.
I want you to think -- really think -- about the ambiguities in "perform well academically". How do you measure this? Test scores? Grades? If it's grades, then you've just given everyone at that school an incentive to never fail anyone, no matter what. If it's test scores, we already know that leads to teaching to the test, which hurts academics in general. It massively incentivizes cheating and fraud. It incentivizes kicking out any student who has any problems whatsoever.
For every complex problem there is an solution that is clear, simple, and wrong.