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>education One of the Libertarian propositions to public schooling is giving a check to all children to redeem at any private school that passes some bar set b

>education One of the Libertarian propositions to public schooling is giving a check to all children to redeem at any private school that passes some bar set by the government. I love this solution, since it removes the requirement for residency for admittance to quality education, and strongarms the schooling system to be more efficient and competitive in how they produce students (assuming that the primary reason to choose one over another is test scores). Primary efficiency would come from reducing the amount of faculty required to hire. >gas/oil/electricity I don't see how this is tied to the public sector directly, unless you're talking about the military and Pentagon specifically. >healthcare It's complicated, not going to flesh that out. In general, we have a fairly privatized health care sector compared to a lot of other countries. >law enforcement Mass shootings have a lot more to do with the overuse of social media and the underuse of meaningful in person relationships than it has to do with law enforcement.

eesmith 7y ago
While I hate the solution. There are many problems with it. 1) Why do parents have the sole privilege in deciding where the money goes? It's my tax dollars. In the current system, I can go to school board meetings and try to change policy, even if I don't have kids going to school right now. (Of the many possible scenarios, I might want to change things because I know my kids will be going to school in a few years, or based on experiences from having kids who just graduated.) 2) You write "some bar set by the government." Who sets that bar? Is it the local area, in which case how does it differ from a school board? Is it the entire state, in which case, how do local people affect what's going on in their school? Or are their multiple organizations which can be authorized to provide oversight, in which case, can't the private schools pick the one with the least oversight? We see that already with some charter school systems. 3) Since these are private schools, can they decide to not accept someone? If so, based on which criteria? Can a private school decide that it's too expensive to school someone with emotional problems (a "disruption"), and expel that student? Public schools are required to accept everyone, with a high bar for expulsion. What happens if private schools only accept the children which are cheapest and easiest to educate, leaving the more difficult children to the public school system? What happens if no private schools are willing to accept a student, and there no more public school system which is required to accept everyone? 4) You mention that it's "competitive in how they produce students". In many districts there is only one school. There may have been more schools before, but they merged in order to save costs, because it's cheaper to have one large building (and bus kids in) than many small building, each with its own staff. Surely having several private school systems has its own overhead. How do you know there there really enough economic savings in this competition to be able to overcome the economy-of-scale savings? Especially in districts where right now there is only one school? Plus, the large public high school I went to offered a wide selection of courses. There was enough interest in Latin, for example, to have a Latin teacher. Break the school population into three, and no one school will be able to afford a Latin teacher. Sure, one might, but then that school might not have a jazz band class. A student who wants both Latin and jazz is unlikely to get that if there are many small schools instead of one large one. This suggests there may be a natural monopoly, rather that competition, for many districts. 5) You assumed "that the primary reason to choose one over another is test scores". Test scores are highly correlated with family income. If we choose schools based on test scores, then we send students to schools in rich neighborhoods. Test scores are pretty worthless in the first place. Test prep is effective, but takes time away from all of the other topics (art, P.E., home economics, music, foreign language, shop) which are also important - if your goal is to produce educated citizens - but aren't tested. 6) Most good private schools are more expensive than good public schools. That check will end up subsidizing rich people to send their kids to expensive private schools. It won't poor people send their kids to good private schools. 7) How much of the school budget will be spent on marketing in the system you envision? In a public school system, there is very little marketing overhead.
- derrick_jensen 7y ago
  Remember, this is in comparison to public schools, which are regional gerrymandered monopolies. This system isn't perfect, but sets incentives in place to make it better. I grew up near some sketchy neighborhoods, and although I went to an average school, I know a lot of people who fared worse. I'm not going to write a response to everything you said, but the tl;dr falls into a few categories 1. Privatization does not mean deregulation. Imagine Obamacare style regulations to a private marketplace for schooling (price caps, cannot turn away certain sets of people, etc). 2. If we can't agree on some measure for effective education, then there's no way to improve this, since we have no bar to go by. Everything is empirical and mileage may vary from person to person. You can create a seperate class of high school education (will flesh out in next point). 3. Property values are strongly correlated with the quality of the public schools (since all states help pay for public school with property taxes[1], and you are locked into a public school depending on where you live). My main motivation for supporting this is to help poor people have access to the same quality education as everybody else, and maybe even allowing specialized tracks that bias towards vocational schooling that funnels into direct employment after school (universities can boast about employment post graduation, why not high schools?) 4. There is nuance with the specific numbers here, and if it is systemically impossible for reasonable competition, then this price will go up. [1]: http://www.ncsl.org/research/education/funding-approaches-the-property-tax-and-public-ed.aspx http://www.ncsl.org/research/education/funding-approaches-th...
  - eesmith 7y ago
    It's precisely because they are monopolies that they can be forced to accept a wide range of students. Otherwise there will be schools which pick the best/easily taught students, and leave the others behind. Those who fared worse in the current system may fare far worse in an all-private system. 1. In the current charter school system, privatization often does mean deregulation. So while I can imagine it, I assert that it's a dream. 2. If we pick wrong measures - and standardized tests are wrong measures - then we end up trying to improve the wrong thing. Eg, we end up with two weeks dedicated to test prep, instead of teaching; we end up dropping art, music, and foreign language classes in order to focus only on those topics which are tested. The regional gerrymandering is in part so that the local communities get to decide what the right measures are. Mileage absolutely varies from person to person .. people and communities vary too. It's not like we didn't have a decent sense of what a good education meant back in the 1970s, before high-stakes testing. 3. Again, how do private schools get to decide which students to accept? Can they make policies which end up rejecting most poor people? If the private school education costs $10,000 and the state's check is for $5,000 then poor students aren't going to afford it. While the parents of middle class students can, subsidized by the state. Which means poor people won't have access to the same quality education as everyone else.

eesmith 7y ago

While I hate the solution. There are many problems with it. 1) Why do parents have the sole privilege in deciding where the money goes? It's my tax dollars. In the current system, I can go to school board meetings and try to change policy, even if I don't have kids going to school right now. (Of the many possible scenarios, I might want to change things because I know my kids will be going to school in a few years, or based on experiences from having kids who just graduated.) 2) You write "some bar set by the government." Who sets that bar? Is it the local area, in which case how does it differ from a school board? Is it the entire state, in which case, how do local people affect what's going on in their school? Or are their multiple organizations which can be authorized to provide oversight, in which case, can't the private schools pick the one with the least oversight? We see that already with some charter school systems. 3) Since these are private schools, can they decide to not accept someone? If so, based on which criteria? Can a private school decide that it's too expensive to school someone with emotional problems (a "disruption"), and expel that student? Public schools are required to accept everyone, with a high bar for expulsion. What happens if private schools only accept the children which are cheapest and easiest to educate, leaving the more difficult children to the public school system? What happens if no private schools are willing to accept a student, and there no more public school system which is required to accept everyone? 4) You mention that it's "competitive in how they produce students". In many districts there is only one school. There may have been more schools before, but they merged in order to save costs, because it's cheaper to have one large building (and bus kids in) than many small building, each with its own staff. Surely having several private school systems has its own overhead. How do you know there there really enough economic savings in this competition to be able to overcome the economy-of-scale savings? Especially in districts where right now there is only one school? Plus, the large public high school I went to offered a wide selection of courses. There was enough interest in Latin, for example, to have a Latin teacher. Break the school population into three, and no one school will be able to afford a Latin teacher. Sure, one might, but then that school might not have a jazz band class. A student who wants both Latin and jazz is unlikely to get that if there are many small schools instead of one large one. This suggests there may be a natural monopoly, rather that competition, for many districts. 5) You assumed "that the primary reason to choose one over another is test scores". Test scores are highly correlated with family income. If we choose schools based on test scores, then we send students to schools in rich neighborhoods. Test scores are pretty worthless in the first place. Test prep is effective, but takes time away from all of the other topics (art, P.E., home economics, music, foreign language, shop) which are also important - if your goal is to produce educated citizens - but aren't tested. 6) Most good private schools are more expensive than good public schools. That check will end up subsidizing rich people to send their kids to expensive private schools. It won't poor people send their kids to good private schools. 7) How much of the school budget will be spent on marketing in the system you envision? In a public school system, there is very little marketing overhead.

derrick_jensen 7y ago
Remember, this is in comparison to public schools, which are regional gerrymandered monopolies. This system isn't perfect, but sets incentives in place to make it better. I grew up near some sketchy neighborhoods, and although I went to an average school, I know a lot of people who fared worse. I'm not going to write a response to everything you said, but the tl;dr falls into a few categories 1. Privatization does not mean deregulation. Imagine Obamacare style regulations to a private marketplace for schooling (price caps, cannot turn away certain sets of people, etc). 2. If we can't agree on some measure for effective education, then there's no way to improve this, since we have no bar to go by. Everything is empirical and mileage may vary from person to person. You can create a seperate class of high school education (will flesh out in next point). 3. Property values are strongly correlated with the quality of the public schools (since all states help pay for public school with property taxes[1], and you are locked into a public school depending on where you live). My main motivation for supporting this is to help poor people have access to the same quality education as everybody else, and maybe even allowing specialized tracks that bias towards vocational schooling that funnels into direct employment after school (universities can boast about employment post graduation, why not high schools?) 4. There is nuance with the specific numbers here, and if it is systemically impossible for reasonable competition, then this price will go up. [1]: http://www.ncsl.org/research/education/funding-approaches-the-property-tax-and-public-ed.aspx http://www.ncsl.org/research/education/funding-approaches-th...
- eesmith 7y ago
  It's precisely because they are monopolies that they can be forced to accept a wide range of students. Otherwise there will be schools which pick the best/easily taught students, and leave the others behind. Those who fared worse in the current system may fare far worse in an all-private system. 1. In the current charter school system, privatization often does mean deregulation. So while I can imagine it, I assert that it's a dream. 2. If we pick wrong measures - and standardized tests are wrong measures - then we end up trying to improve the wrong thing. Eg, we end up with two weeks dedicated to test prep, instead of teaching; we end up dropping art, music, and foreign language classes in order to focus only on those topics which are tested. The regional gerrymandering is in part so that the local communities get to decide what the right measures are. Mileage absolutely varies from person to person .. people and communities vary too. It's not like we didn't have a decent sense of what a good education meant back in the 1970s, before high-stakes testing. 3. Again, how do private schools get to decide which students to accept? Can they make policies which end up rejecting most poor people? If the private school education costs $10,000 and the state's check is for $5,000 then poor students aren't going to afford it. While the parents of middle class students can, subsidized by the state. Which means poor people won't have access to the same quality education as everyone else.