[hugh3]

You also need to pay good developers better than bad developers, and fire the worst developers, and have competition among companies for the best, and have some way of knowing who the best and worst developers are.

Imagine what the state of the software industry would be like if developers were hired like teachers! Anyone with an appropriate qualification would be given an office and told to write code. Every year their salary would go up. The codebase would get worse and worse, and everybody would complain about it but nobody would ever fix it.

Privatise the whole school system, equip children with generous vouchers, let schools compete for students. Throw in an accreditation scheme and a bunch of compulsory examinations upon graduation if you're concerned about quality. And if you must, throw in a government-run "backup" school just for any students who can't get accepted into any private school. I don't see any drawbacks of this plan.

[jbooth]

Uh, how about we just abolish last-in-first-out? That solves all of your problems without privatizing the whole school system.