I think what a lot of people are missing about school alternatives is that, while public school has a lot of failings (I had a pretty miserable religious and pu

I think what a lot of people are missing about school alternatives is that, while public school has a lot of failings (I had a pretty miserable religious and public school experience myself), it's pretty clear that none of the proposed alternatives work at scale. Charter schools aren't equipped for 1/4 of their kids to be totally impoverished. Micro schools aren't equipped for kids with wheelchairs, or the 20% of kids who learn reading in a totally weird way, etc. Selection benefits these organizations tremendously (i.e. you can say "there's no ramp into my house, I'm sorry your kid in a wheelchair can't attend), but that clearly doesn't scale and worse, it leaves out all kinds of kids. It also deprives the attending kids of diversity. It probably also dooms kids whose parents think benefit from this system to a substandard education. There's a quote in TFA from the proprietor of a micro school that's something like "[a child] wants to learn about the US and the constitution; who am I to tell her she has to learn about ancient Egypt?" Well don't ask me, ask Library for Kids [0] (TL;DR their phonetic alphabet prompted Greece to make their own, and the works written in Greek are the basis for western civilization). The Netherlands established childrens' right to an education, which means that no matter what their parents think or believe, children will be educated in a way largely determined by professionals, but also subject to the democratic process. Why is this important? Because there are a lot of nuts parents out there who want their kids to learn pretty weird stuff, and in the aggregate that weirds society literally for generations, and at the individual can abuse kids in truly horrible ways (think about young girls born into cults). I get that public school is lord of the flies and fails lots of kids, but this stuff isn't the answer. Education is massive and hard. We're not gonna fix it by subsidizing amateurs. [0]: https://libraryforkids.com/why-do-we-care-about-ancient-egypt/ https://libraryforkids.com/why-do-we-care-about-ancient-egyp...