freewayninety wrote:
I dissagree with having only private schools. This would cause problems. They would be much more expensive and they would compete for the students.
Why would they be more expensive? You are aware that private schools typically outperform public schools by significant amounts, and do so for a fraction of the cost, right? Even if we assume that cost savings is due to being able to select which students they take, and in a fully privatized system we'd have to account for managing "problem students", I simply don't see a valid argument to suggest that it would cost us more per student under a privatized system then we spend today on our public schools.
I'd love to hear some kind of support for that statement because it flies in the face of every statistic I've seen or heard about. There's a reason government contracts work out to private enterprise. It's because when properly incented, private enterprise can consistently put out a better product at a lower price then a purely government process can.
Quote:
There would some students who would only go to a certain school to play sports. Or private schools would give out free rides for those who are going to play sports, which is illegal. A school did that in my area and for 4 years they are disqualified for all championship titles.
Which would be a problem if an only if the parents did not have a choice as to which school their children could attend and/or the government was directly responsible for the quality of the education being recieved.
I think you're not getting the scope of the change I'm advocating. I'm saying that the government should simply provide funds for education via vouchers, but not be involved
in any way in determining what students learn. If the parents of a child want to send that child to a "sports focused" school, that's their choice. With the voucher comes a disclaimer that it's 100% their fault if they choose their school poorly. The government holds no responsibilty for the quality of the education the parents choose for their child.
By the same token, if parents want to send their kid to an art school, they can. If they want to send their kid to a science school. They can. The parents get to decide what sort of education their child will recieve. I'm betting most will want a "standard" education, so most schools will try to meet that. The point is that when you marry money/demand and competition, private industry will rise to fill the demand. What parents are demanding is a good education for their children. Right now, most are pretty much stuck with the public school nearest them. Period. They can ask for changes. They can demand changes. But odds are, they aren't going to get it because they aren't the ones holding the purse strings. The federal government is.
Privatize the end of the process, and the schools will have a vested interest in satisfying the demands of parents. If the parents don't like something, the school will change it. You've got the best of both worlds. Education that everyone can afford, and the power of the funding in the hands of those most directly invested, involved, and knowledable about the specific needs/desires of each student.
Yeah. Some people will choose poorly. But at least those parents who *don't* choose poorly are allowed to make a good choice for their children. Right now, they are forced to accept the "lowest common denominator" solution that government hands them. You may make a poor choice as a parent, but at least it's *your* choice and your mistake to make and your child that's affected. As opposed to a poor choice made by politicians that affects the same children and from which there is no escape. That's our current system, and it's incredibly bad.
It's not a perfect solution, I'll admit. There's certainly a number of issues that would have to be ironed out. However, I think the first thing we really need to move away from is the idea that the government should be determining by fiat from on high the exact curriculum that students should be learning. Government standards are wrong as often as they are right, and ultimately (as is pointed out in this thread) often result in "teaching to the test", which doesn't serve any purpose. We've institutionalized the standardization to a point where it's totally removed from the original purpose of education: To educate.
Edited, Thu Feb 2 20:32:41 2006 by gbaji