Comment by brightball
Comment by brightball 5 days ago
This seems to reflect a lot of what I hear about as well. Everything is too entrenched from a decision making standpoint for any one person to make a difference in reforms.
A free market fixes anything where people have the ability to "vote with their wallet" and simply stop paying for services which aren't meeting expectations when they find another that does. Things like employer sponsored health insurance are insulated from you choosing a different option for yourself and we get the situation that we currently have because of it.
Education is the same way but the only ways to vote with your wallet are...
1. Buy a house zoned for the school that you want.
2. Pay for private school.
3. Home school.
4. In some areas, school choice where you can choose from another of the available public options may be viable too.
The only long term solution here that has potential to fix things legislatively is a true school voucher program that would let you take the tax money assigned for your kids education and put it into whatever option you believed was actually best for their education.
This _should_ lead to a start-up like small business ecosystem with lots of small Montessori style schools especially for younger kids. Most likely a "neighborhood schools" model would pop up and parents would end up walking their kids to school again, even in suburban areas.
Most likely you would still see bigger options for high school still as teenagers crave more socialization. Sports would likely revolve more around communities than individual schools too.
You'd of course see some specialties. Schools advertising why they were the best option for your kids and then having to prove it in order to keep them. Yes, there would definitely be religious schools as there already are now.
My guess is that a lot of the current home school co-ops that are popular in my area would simply become suddenly funded because the parents involved as pretty happy with the model. I had a lot of biases against home schooling until I saw how these co-ops work and it's really effective. Basically just like a normal school small school with parents teaching different lessons on different days. Each parent's commitment is a half day a week to teach and they still do school plays, etc.
Voucher programs are just going to flood the "education market" with substandard schools teaching things like humans walked with dinosaurs a few thousand years ago before the great flood. They're going to extract profits from our tax dollars to give us a worse quality service.
We'll see a lot of new schools open up, spend a few years collecting profits, then get shut down for substandard quality after effectively failing to teach kids for those few years. Meanwhile the public schools which can't be choosy will end up with fewer resources and have worse outcomes for the kids who have parents who can't afford private transportation to the few nicer, choosier voucher schools.