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You seem to be picturing "ACME Education" creating schools in the model of factories under some scary privatization scheme. In fact, the current "public" model

You seem to be picturing "ACME Education" creating schools in the model of factories under some scary privatization scheme. In fact, the current "public" model of centralized control, standardized curriculum, and cookie-cutter learning objectives is based on an antiquated understanding of human development, social systems, and motivation. In fact, by forcing a child to endure hours of boredom and conformity it prepares its inmates for a life of work in a factory. If market forces were allowed to act on K-12 education we'd see something quite unpredictable but very much unlike what you seem to be imagining... unless, that is, large companies obtained a monopoly on education in the same way that public schools have thusfar. Without a monopoly, we'd see innovations like Khan Academy all the time (let's face it, what Khan created is trivial and obvious and it's only remarkable b/c most teachers and curricula are so utterly bad). You are also overlooking the fact that humans have a natural hunger for knowledge, and any notion that there is a lack of demand for top quality k-12 education is an artifact of our current corrupt system.

jshen 15y ago
Private schools will lead to a marketing driven education system that preys on peoples ignorance. Here's a simple thought experiment. Look at all the education systems around the world, and ask if the ones with the best results are private or public.
- losvedir 15y ago
  > Here's a simple thought experiment. Look at all the education systems around the world, and ask if the ones with the best results are private or public. Are we allowed to include universities?
  - jshen 15y ago
    Hm, interesting question. I was thinking specifically of primary education, most people never go to a private college and it's a very different situation. For example, my wife is a teacher, and one of her biggest challenges is dealing with kids with severe behavior problems. They disrupt the entire class, but these kids still need an education. If you remove those kids from the class the rest of the kids benefit, but our goal as a nation isn't to only educate good kids. This seems to create a perverse incentive in a private system. Private schools will do everything they can to be selective about there students, because their ultimate goal isn't to educate the nation as a whole, and that seems like the wrong goal to me.
    - grandalf 15y ago
      Nobody is arguing that there shouldn't still be public funding of education. If I had a kid in special ed I'd want to send him/her to the best school possible for his/her unique challenges Right now the only option is public school unless you can afford massive private school tuition. With more private schools, smaller, more specialized schools would develop. Someone passionate about teaching special ed would have the chance to make such a profound difference in this setting compared to the public school status quo.
      - jshen 15y ago
        nope, parents would mostly fall for marketing and branding.
    - yummyfajitas 15y ago
      If a private school can provide a superior education to non-disruptive children, and public schools continue to provide the same education to disruptive children, isn't that a good thing?
      - jshen 15y ago
        If I could make a better product than apple wouldn't that be a good thing? Too bad I can't.
        yummyfajitas 15y ago
        Are you trying to claim that it is impossible to do a better job than public schools? If not, I simply don't understand your comment.
        jshen 15y ago
        It's not a question of whether it's possible, it's a question of whether it's probable. Here's my theory. We should privatize prisons. The competition between companies to build and manage prisons will lead to innovations in rehabilitation techniques, and innovations in efficiency of inmate management. We'll get a system that releases prisoners who don't end up back in prison and it will be cheaper than our current system all because of the magic of competition and the profit motive. Except we've tried this experiment, and the results are clear. The profit motive has lead to the prison industry lobbying government to get laws that send more people to prison, and to private prisons giving kickbacks to judges to send kinds to prison for first time minor offenses. The incentive created by privatization is to create more profit, not to create a better school or prison.
- grandalf 15y ago
  Your argument is essentially "marketing is bad". Which is a shadow argument for "capitalism is bad". Take an ad for the Macbook Air. It shows a stylish person happily using the Air to do something fun. Now consider an ad for a private school that shows a child happily benefitting from something he/she learned at the school being advertised. Maybe the ad shows a graduate getting accepted into a prestigious college or even YC. Ads are often aspirational and emotional, and do not necessarily contain false information. Sure, paying tuition at a school won't get you into a prestigious school and owning a MB Air won't make you happy. But an ad communicating the virtues of a great product is a good thing if it informs consumers of the product. Let's face it, no matter how you view ads, if you think ads are bad then the only solution is for the government to start its own version of 'consumer reports' and to publish a simple list of products ranked according to attributes. Hardly a remotely practical or plausible solution.
  - jshen 15y ago
    I don't think it's a binary choice. I think capitalism is great for most things, and bad at some things. Education happens to be one of those things. If I buy a $30 bottle of pills that are supposed to make me lose weight, well I lost $30 and I learned my lesson. If I send my kid to a fucked up school it might take years for me to realize it was fucked up, and the stakes are much higher. A bit of back story. I'm the only person in my immediate family to finish high school, and I was raised by my grandmother who is not educated at all. She would have been completely unequipped to make a good decision about such things. Yet here I am, a successful software engineer, due in large part to a good public education. I can't see how I would have been better served by a private system.
    - grandalf 15y ago
      Fair enough, but many US colleges and universities are private and are the best in the world. I think your worry about someone starting a school that is actually a sham are very much out of proportion. In today's public schools, many kids can't read or do basic math, so it's hard to imagine something worse. Also, the monopoly system is the only reason parents can't easily switch their kid to a different school. If this were an option, parents would be much more critical. Most parents today just settle for whatever is publicly available b/c it's "free" to them and they'd have to move to a different district to put their kid in a different school.
- hugh3 15y ago
  Here's a simple thought experiment. Look at all the education systems around the world, and ask if the ones with the best results are private or public. That's not a simple thought experiment, it's a massive data-collecting exercise. I'm not sure if there are any countries with wholly-private education systems, are there? Still, there are many countries (the UK and Australia spring to mind) where private schools play a larger role than they do in the US. And your fears appear to be unfounded, as the private schools in these countries range from "truly excellent" to "quite reasonably okay". Parents and students choosing a school aren't nearly as misled by glossy brochures as you might think -- the newspapers are filled with detailed comparisons of average marks in statewide tests, success in getting into universities, and so forth. Now I didn't go to a private school, I went to an academically selective public school in Australia, but there was always the sense that we were in competition with the private schools... their mere presence drives the public schools to try to do better as well. The main criticism that I could make of the private schools where I was (apart from snobbery and often-silly uniforms) is that they had a tendency to spoon-feed education to their students in the interests of maximizing their university entrance marks... the result being that students often floundered somewhat when they actually got to university and were expected to learn in a more self-directed way. But faced with a choice between that and a chaotic American public school where the primary goal appears to be stopping the students from shooting each other, I'll take the spoon feeding and straw hats any day.
  - 18pfsmt 15y ago
    But faced with a choice between that and a chaotic American public school where the primary goal appears to be stopping the students from shooting each other, I'll take the spoon feeding and straw hats any day. Given the fact that the US is a country of over 300 million people, and you have heard only a few stories of shootings, I find this comment extremely hyperbolic. I went to private and public schools in 3 different states. The public schools I attended were extremely safe, but the private schools provided more structure and discipline (that someone like me was helped by when just a clueless kid). EDIT: Also note that my best friend went to the well-accredited, local public school, and was valedictorian (eventually graduated from Emory Law). I went to a non-profit, private school where my roommate was on a full-ride, and went on to go full-ride to Carnegie Mellon. I blew off college and became a ski bumb/river-guide/waiter for six years.
- jordanb 15y ago
  There's an excellent PBS Frontline episode about private colleges in the US who spend more money on advertising than education: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/
absconditus 15y ago
Private schools are already widely available.
DanielRibeiro 15y ago
This ACME education and its origins is very well discussed on this famous RSA video "Changing Education Paradigms ": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

jshen 15y ago

Private schools will lead to a marketing driven education system that preys on peoples ignorance. Here's a simple thought experiment. Look at all the education systems around the world, and ask if the ones with the best results are private or public.

losvedir 15y ago
> Here's a simple thought experiment. Look at all the education systems around the world, and ask if the ones with the best results are private or public. Are we allowed to include universities?
- jshen 15y ago
  Hm, interesting question. I was thinking specifically of primary education, most people never go to a private college and it's a very different situation. For example, my wife is a teacher, and one of her biggest challenges is dealing with kids with severe behavior problems. They disrupt the entire class, but these kids still need an education. If you remove those kids from the class the rest of the kids benefit, but our goal as a nation isn't to only educate good kids. This seems to create a perverse incentive in a private system. Private schools will do everything they can to be selective about there students, because their ultimate goal isn't to educate the nation as a whole, and that seems like the wrong goal to me.
  - grandalf 15y ago
    Nobody is arguing that there shouldn't still be public funding of education. If I had a kid in special ed I'd want to send him/her to the best school possible for his/her unique challenges Right now the only option is public school unless you can afford massive private school tuition. With more private schools, smaller, more specialized schools would develop. Someone passionate about teaching special ed would have the chance to make such a profound difference in this setting compared to the public school status quo.
    - jshen 15y ago
      nope, parents would mostly fall for marketing and branding.
  - yummyfajitas 15y ago
    If a private school can provide a superior education to non-disruptive children, and public schools continue to provide the same education to disruptive children, isn't that a good thing?
    - jshen 15y ago
      If I could make a better product than apple wouldn't that be a good thing? Too bad I can't.
      - yummyfajitas 15y ago
        Are you trying to claim that it is impossible to do a better job than public schools? If not, I simply don't understand your comment.
        jshen 15y ago
        It's not a question of whether it's possible, it's a question of whether it's probable. Here's my theory. We should privatize prisons. The competition between companies to build and manage prisons will lead to innovations in rehabilitation techniques, and innovations in efficiency of inmate management. We'll get a system that releases prisoners who don't end up back in prison and it will be cheaper than our current system all because of the magic of competition and the profit motive. Except we've tried this experiment, and the results are clear. The profit motive has lead to the prison industry lobbying government to get laws that send more people to prison, and to private prisons giving kickbacks to judges to send kinds to prison for first time minor offenses. The incentive created by privatization is to create more profit, not to create a better school or prison.
grandalf 15y ago
Your argument is essentially "marketing is bad". Which is a shadow argument for "capitalism is bad". Take an ad for the Macbook Air. It shows a stylish person happily using the Air to do something fun. Now consider an ad for a private school that shows a child happily benefitting from something he/she learned at the school being advertised. Maybe the ad shows a graduate getting accepted into a prestigious college or even YC. Ads are often aspirational and emotional, and do not necessarily contain false information. Sure, paying tuition at a school won't get you into a prestigious school and owning a MB Air won't make you happy. But an ad communicating the virtues of a great product is a good thing if it informs consumers of the product. Let's face it, no matter how you view ads, if you think ads are bad then the only solution is for the government to start its own version of 'consumer reports' and to publish a simple list of products ranked according to attributes. Hardly a remotely practical or plausible solution.
- jshen 15y ago
  I don't think it's a binary choice. I think capitalism is great for most things, and bad at some things. Education happens to be one of those things. If I buy a $30 bottle of pills that are supposed to make me lose weight, well I lost $30 and I learned my lesson. If I send my kid to a fucked up school it might take years for me to realize it was fucked up, and the stakes are much higher. A bit of back story. I'm the only person in my immediate family to finish high school, and I was raised by my grandmother who is not educated at all. She would have been completely unequipped to make a good decision about such things. Yet here I am, a successful software engineer, due in large part to a good public education. I can't see how I would have been better served by a private system.
  - grandalf 15y ago
    Fair enough, but many US colleges and universities are private and are the best in the world. I think your worry about someone starting a school that is actually a sham are very much out of proportion. In today's public schools, many kids can't read or do basic math, so it's hard to imagine something worse. Also, the monopoly system is the only reason parents can't easily switch their kid to a different school. If this were an option, parents would be much more critical. Most parents today just settle for whatever is publicly available b/c it's "free" to them and they'd have to move to a different district to put their kid in a different school.
hugh3 15y ago
Here's a simple thought experiment. Look at all the education systems around the world, and ask if the ones with the best results are private or public. That's not a simple thought experiment, it's a massive data-collecting exercise. I'm not sure if there are any countries with wholly-private education systems, are there? Still, there are many countries (the UK and Australia spring to mind) where private schools play a larger role than they do in the US. And your fears appear to be unfounded, as the private schools in these countries range from "truly excellent" to "quite reasonably okay". Parents and students choosing a school aren't nearly as misled by glossy brochures as you might think -- the newspapers are filled with detailed comparisons of average marks in statewide tests, success in getting into universities, and so forth. Now I didn't go to a private school, I went to an academically selective public school in Australia, but there was always the sense that we were in competition with the private schools... their mere presence drives the public schools to try to do better as well. The main criticism that I could make of the private schools where I was (apart from snobbery and often-silly uniforms) is that they had a tendency to spoon-feed education to their students in the interests of maximizing their university entrance marks... the result being that students often floundered somewhat when they actually got to university and were expected to learn in a more self-directed way. But faced with a choice between that and a chaotic American public school where the primary goal appears to be stopping the students from shooting each other, I'll take the spoon feeding and straw hats any day.
- 18pfsmt 15y ago
  But faced with a choice between that and a chaotic American public school where the primary goal appears to be stopping the students from shooting each other, I'll take the spoon feeding and straw hats any day. Given the fact that the US is a country of over 300 million people, and you have heard only a few stories of shootings, I find this comment extremely hyperbolic. I went to private and public schools in 3 different states. The public schools I attended were extremely safe, but the private schools provided more structure and discipline (that someone like me was helped by when just a clueless kid). EDIT: Also note that my best friend went to the well-accredited, local public school, and was valedictorian (eventually graduated from Emory Law). I went to a non-profit, private school where my roommate was on a full-ride, and went on to go full-ride to Carnegie Mellon. I blew off college and became a ski bumb/river-guide/waiter for six years.
jordanb 15y ago
There's an excellent PBS Frontline episode about private colleges in the US who spend more money on advertising than education: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/

absconditus 15y ago

Private schools are already widely available.

DanielRibeiro 15y ago

This ACME education and its origins is very well discussed on this famous RSA video "Changing Education Paradigms ": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U