When accountability to the customers (students/parents) is removed, and the ability to select from alternatives is removed (choosing between schools), you get what we have - a complete chronic mess. The only solution I can think of to solve the problem is to completely deregulate education.
Imagine - a large market open to innovation - education startups!
I don't think complete deregulation is a good idea. Problem is, the results of education don't show up for about 10 years. Capitalism gives you what you want now, not what you need 10 years down the road.
As a general rule, markets are good when they transmit information (like the relative scarcity of goods) and bad when they hide information (like the chance of default on subprime mortgages). I think it's far more likely that a free-market educational system will behave like the latter than the former, because it's much more difficult to ascertain the quality of an education than the quality of a laptop.
I do think more choice and accountability is necessary. I went to a public charter school, and it was the best decision I (well, my parents) ever made.
I think the big change there is bandwidth - browsers were SLOW 10 years ago. It wasn't possible to do much beyond the basics on a 64K dialup. (actually, wan't it even slower than that in 97?)
Imagine what would happen if all the local police and fire departments were deregulated overnight.
A basic level of education is something that needs to be provided free for all people. It's even in the UN Declaration of human rights. If we go to to a free market education system, every child will need some sort of grant that they can use to attend some school for free.
I would never argue to privatize the legal/law enforcement system - this is necessarily run by the state as there are obvious problems otherwise.
The options I have now: put my daughter in a "free" system that will destroy her future, or pay dramatically too much in a private school so that she has a chance. I've chosen option 2.
What the UN thinks is quite irrelevant as the current system is not only broken now, its been broken for decades and continues to get worse. School isn't "free" now, it is paid for by taxes. The problem is, there is no incentive for the public schools to get better, and they just won't. In a private system, all the "free" money taken out of the private economy in the form of taxation would be put back into private hands. Then parents could decide where to send their children, weighing the costs/benefits and choosing schools appropriately. There has been and will continue to be very large sums of charitable money to help educate - I believe Gates now has the largest charitable fund focused to a great degree on education.
The bottom line: privatizing education would be dramatically less expensive (think of the immense cost of the beauraucracy now in the education system) and more efficient, and more innovative. Why, you ask? Because the schools would be competing for students, and the bad schools would go out of business as they should. The good schools would get bigger and more plentiful. The cost of education would go down as new innovative ways are found to provide quality education. etc.
The alternative: dooming our children to mediocrity in the public system.
An alternative alternative: teaching children and parents not to rely solely on educators.
I went to that mediocre public school. No, realy, it was that lame. We were really a place for a lot of kids to get enough shop skills to end up at the local GM plant.
I slipped around the edges of it all, did stuff I wanted to do, and, frankly, succeeded.
My goal now is to teach my son to do the same. In the public school system.
If it were true that no value can be provided by good education - I would agree with you. But I've seen what good education can provide. Why should we spend so much tax money on a system that we then try to avoid?
Public education isn't for the children -- it's for the market.
A modest amount of public education protects against small scale market inefficiencies -- quacks selling poison, the illiterate being defrauded by their employers -- thus liberating a lot of spending power which is gobbled up by large scale, centralized market inefficiencies -- the myth of cancer treatment, the American college system, the legally sophisticated defrauding their employees.
There is no incentive for the really wealthy -- the people with the people's taxes, their work hours, their confidence -- to put money into education that would only make them harder to control.
Knowledge arises as a sort of after thought, and scholarship is a hobby; only in cases where the information asymmetry can be turned to advantage -- in religion, in technology, even in education itself -- does the scholar become a professional. Maybe the wise would be better off hiding their talent instead of making it available for institutional use?
A privatized educational system will fail the kids with bad parents even more than the current system. Even a bad high school education is a lot better than absolutely no education. With private education and no vouchers of any kind, a lot of kids just won't go to school which is terrible for us as a society.
I think it'd be great to privatize education but it still needs to be mandatory and free at a certain basic level.
I suspect evolution dealt with 'bad parents' long ago.
My parents certainly weren't bad. Not that they ever did much beyond enrolling and sending me off to public school, but still. If public school wasn't there, I'm sure they wouldn't have left me completely illiterate. In fact I'm sure, and my parents now agree, I would likely have been 'better' schooled if it wasn't for public schools' near complete monopoly on funding and mindshare when and where I grew up.
None of the parents of people I know were 'bad' either, including those of many who insist on using mythical 'bad parents' as excuses for public education. Furthermore, amongst those I have asked, none of them seem to have acquaintances with bad parents, and I have asked enough people, from enough different backgrounds, to be convinced this 'bad parents test' could be applied recursively through all six degrees of separation without turning up more than, at most, some exceedingly rare corner cases. Rare as in at least an order of magnitude below likely available private charity to deal with them.
This doesn't mean I think everyone's parents are equally ambitious on their children's behalf, or equally concerned with educating their child; just that in absence of public schools, almost no parent would completely neglect facilitating any kind of education for their children, whatsoever.
Your views are shaded by your socioeconomic class. The "bad parents" I refer to are the urban poor that depend on the government to survive and have more children than they can afford. The government is preventing natural selection here, but the alternative is to let our class of urban poor die off. Maybe it would work, but it's politically impossible.
> I suspect evolution dealt with 'bad parents' long ago.
The whole thing about evolution is that it never stops. However, evolution's definition of bad parents is brutally simple: those who have few descendants.
