Ah yes, "school choice", a nice rebranding effort for privatizing another industry so Betsy Devos and other aspiring oligarchs can destroy a public good for their profit.
Tell that to the kids going to schools with massive gang problems. Even if they want to succeed it's a constant battle. My wife teaches at one of these schools and she has no problem understanding why kids would want out.
the correct response would be to one 1. fight the gang problems 2. stop tying school funding to localities which perpetuates poor districts being poor and underfunded.
Clearly the solution can't be privatized 'school choice' because the people who need it the most will probably not be able to afford it, and it segregates society further, giving everyone even less stake in repairing their communities. It's a self-defeating cycle.
>the correct response would be to one 1. fight the gang problems 2. stop tying school funding to localities which perpetuates poor districts being poor and underfunded.
Don't be dense. Those are generational issues to solve. There is enough inertia in the system that solutions if there are any, will take decades to manifest. You know this. And nobody will sacrifice their children at the altar of 'social justice' as espoused online by 20something who doesn't know any better. No, they want their children to be safe, and get a quality education.
I think you’re being downvoted because Devos, like most education free market pushers, isn’t looking to profit on school choice. People really think free markets are better. Similar to UBI, people like the idea of freedom.
Sure - despite being proven that charter schools (ie, free choice) have worse or equivalent scores to public schools [1]. There is not agreement here, there is controversy and the facts are not on the so-called "free markets" side.
Honestly, no surprise (though 'equivalent' is more correct - nea.org isn't a dispassionate objective observer). The dirty secret in education is the quality of instruction, the condition of the building and the textbooks, whether or not iPads are readily available, all of that take a backseat to the circumstances in the child's private life. Stable home and engaged parents that take a personal interest in the child's education will mean those children will do well. We try to put too much on schools and teachers to make up gaps in parenting. A student that drops out or graduates functionally illiterate is a failure of the parents, not the school systems.
Having said that, don't dismiss the idea of choice. Parents, for all kinds of reasons, may not want to be funneled to the specific school or schools they are limited to geographically, and may want to have a different kind of instruction (i.e. they want CHOICE). Opponents of 'school choice' always miss this point.
Choice for "some" is at odds with fair access for all.
Charter school discriminate in responsiveness to requests [1] in admissions against special-needs and the poor (ie, the hard cases). Public schools simply can't do this.
>Choice for "some" is at odds with fair access for all
So instead of implementing policies to make sure the choice is available to all, your approach is to remove this choice from everyone and funnel them through the same monolithic system?
Nothing you argued, even if true (and I suspect you're not an objective observer either), is unsolvable through policy or regulatory changes.
Why not try a charitable interpretation of 'school choice'? People I know that support vouchers and charter schools do so because they genuinely care about quality education. Maybe they are misguided, but they certainly aren't doing it to create EVIL profit for the EVIL billionaire class.
If they care about the quality of education then they should take steps to ensure that public education is higher quality. Perhaps starting by not voting for people who want to dismantle it.
As I said, that's a separate issue. All I asked of OP is to not impune motives on people who mean well.
Charter and voucher schools ARE public education, they just aren't part of the traditional monolithic bureaucracy. The ability to try different approaches and run different experiments to see if it results in different outcomes, and make fast adjustments, free from the existing hierarchy, is the quality improvement that proponents are striving for.
> Charter and voucher schools ARE public education, they just aren't part of the traditional monolithic bureaucracy.
They also traditionally get to pick and choose who can attend, which often means excluding costly students like any that have disabilities.
> The ability to try different approaches and run different experiments to see if it results in different outcomes, and make fast adjustments, free from the existing hierarchy, is the quality improvement that proponents are striving for.
Great. Let's apply "move fast and break things" to education. What could possibly go wrong?
>They also traditionally get to pick and choose who can attend, which often means excluding costly students like any that have disabilities.
We both know that's not why you take issue with school choice because these kinds of issues can be easily adjusted through policy changes - but you're not proposing policy changes. You want to completely get rid of the entire thing.
And by the way, in the cases of kids with extreme behavioural issues, those kids are also routinely expelled from the public system schools. So again, what are you arguing?
>Let's apply "move fast and break things" to education. What could possibly go wrong?
Can you try and not distort arguments? Nobody except you argued this.
Right, except they have children already and things need to change very quickly to benefit them, and most of us just don't have the time or energy.
It's not reasonable to expect everyone to crusade for reform. I want what's best for my kids now, and if that's a charter school, that's what I'm aiming for.
Please. It's been decades, not months. These problems are still here. Voters are supposed to just hope it gets better instead of doing what's best for their children?
These problems are here because we keep electing people who's goal is to dismantle public infrastructure. We keep doing that because of the same narrow thinking that causes us to throw everyone else's children under the bus for the sake of our own.
We've inherited the world we deserve. If we want to make it better, we have to earn it. If you don't want to do that, fine, but then you don't get to complain about the results.