<p>Schools performing sub-par in academics will bankrupt and disappear.</p>
<p>Social Darwinism: therefore schools will evolve for the better on average.</p>
<p>People without children will not have to pay for public institutions from which they will never benefit. </p>
<p>Many incompetent teachers can be fired at will, instead of going through a long circuitous legal route. Similar fate for teachers receiving a lot of complaints from parents. </p>
<p>Schools will not have to comply with ridiculous federal measures such as blocking access to google image or yahoo image in order to get funds. </p>
<p>Parents paying for private schools will have a say in the administration of schools. Principals may have to be more discreet and responsible for the well being of the school. Money will not go to unpopular constructions or investments.</p>
<p>Government will simply provide scholarships for students too poor to afford private schools. If parents have money but refuse to pay, they will be arrested.</p>
<p>I disagree with him. But some of his arguments are pretty strong. What do you think?</p>
<p>“People without children will not have to pay for public institutions from which they will never benefit.”</p>
<p>i will tackle this one…that is false…without an educated population, we will all suffer…and everyone benefits with an education, and learned work force</p>
<p>We have seen other countries start doing better because of education</p>
<p>With education, there will be less people on welfare, less crime, fewer runaways, less gang actitivy, etc</p>
<p>It is like saying, well i don’t have a car, so why should I pay for roads…well, gee, does that even make sense?</p>
<p>Abd this idea:
“Schools will not have to comply with ridiculous federal measures such as blocking access to google image or yahoo image in order to get funds.”</p>
<p>Most likely, MORE informatio will be blocked</p>
<p>Idealistic, but I don’t think it would actually help. </p>
<p>The only private schools who would set up in poor areas would be those who would meet only the bare minimum federal standards (let’s hope there would be federal standards!), knowing that almost all their students would be on government scholarship. As a consequence, they would provide a bare-minimum education.</p>
<p>The government might provide scholarships in general, but they would probably be capped at a certain amount (the gov’t wouldn’t pay five times as much for a poor child to go to Snooty Private Prep than Bare-Bones Academy, would they?). Therefore, poor parents would not have the option to choose more expensive (and consequently better) schools. The gap between rich and poor schools would only deepen.</p>
<p>This model would only be successful in a nation with very few (if any) poor people.</p>
<p>There are certainly arguments to be made for introducing competition into education. Caroline Hoxby (at Harvard) has done some research on this topic, looking at competition BETWEEN public schools, with some interesting results. </p>
<p>With that start, I’ll make a few observations:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>part of the “problem” with public ed is its political nature and political governance. Private schools can avoid this, but do we then lose the “public will?”</p></li>
<li><p>A private school that can be selective, avoiding problem students, for example, and can kick out the troublsome ones, has a big advantage over public schools.</p></li>
<li><p>a lot of ed research has basically shown that it is very hard to say what a “better” school is. By that I mean it has been hard to find school governance approaches, policies, teaching approaches and so forth that lead to a superior result, with equivalent students. Conversely, it is VERY easy to identify probable poor performing students just based on socio-economic and geographic factors.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>You want to get guillotined, too? If you’re going to quote Marie Antoinette, you may as well go all the way…</p>
<p>This sounds like typical fascist conservative tripe to me. Social Darwinism has long been discredited as an irrational and dangerous idea. What is the point of laws, anyway? Why don’t we just get rid of all laws and government and just have people running around and killing one another in the street until only the strong are left? It worked for medieval Iceland. Worked quite well for them, actually…</p>
<p>There are how many school-aged children in America? 20 million, 30 million? And the government, which is already 9 trillion dollars in debt and counting with Operation Iraqi Forced Freedom showing no signs of abating, is going to cover 20 to 30 thousand dollars each for the 95% of students whose families can’t afford the prep school bill? Good one. What will really happen is the way education worked in Europe in the 19th century, when your friend’s Social Darwinism reigned supreme, which is that the two or three most brilliant kids in a town or county or whatever who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford an education would have the government pay for their schooling and the countless kids who got shut out would go on milking cows for the rest of their lives. That of course was in the days of a peasant economy. Maybe we should go back to that as an economic system? None of these things are new. Conservatives just treat them like they are. They have all been tried and condemned as counterproductive to true equality many times. Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.</p>
<p>And what about the kids that private schools don’t want? The reasons prep schools are prep schools is because they reject applicants just like colleges, sometimes more than half, to ensure small class sizes and the best students. So how are private schools going to deal with the influx of applications this move would cause? Just reject more and more kids, a la the college application process. This is what is shocking and saddening about today’s conservatives. They want to take all of the progress we have made since the end of the 18th century and flush it down the toilet. Free, universal public education has been a right in this country since the anti-Masonic party in the 1820/30s. It’s bad enough we are the only developed country without universal healthcare, now we’re going to go backwards in time in education, too? Of course this would be good for conservatives. The whole point would be to swell the ranks of the underclass. Take that 75%+ (“conservative” estimate) of people who can’t find decent work because they suddenly can’t afford to get educated and have them mow your lawn and pump your gas. It’s beautiful!</p>
<p>The point is that if current tax spending isn’t helping the people it purports to help, maybe it’s time to send the money to a new organization that can do a better job. </p>
<p>The most salient European example is the Netherlands. The best American scholar on this aspect of comparative education research is Charles L. Glenn. Read and learn.</p>
<p>The idea of private education is working right now–look at the homeschool movement. Probably 2% of the US’s school population is homeschooled, with very high test scores and NO cost to the tax payer. ALL education used to be private or church affiliated and the US had the highest literacy rate ever attained.</p>
<p>“Probably 2% of the US’s school population is homeschooled, with very high test scores and NO cost to the tax payer.”</p>
<p>That is true. However, how do you expect a child of a single mother working 60 hours a week to be homeschooled? What if the parents themselves have little or no education? Homeschooling is only appropriate in certain situations and with certain children. Public education is a major safety net for poor and working-class families.</p>
<p>And also homeschooling in America is generally done to help indoctrinate kids into becoming fundamentalist Christians, because that is the majority of people who advocate homeschooling and who actually go through with homeschooling their kids, and this is what is currently ruining America.</p>
<p>darn, there goes my iceland argument, here is an interesting read from your favorite site, Xanatos, about education, which would relate to the topic of private education: </p>
<p>concerning the article, the fear of a broadening class-gap, and the idea that poorer schools offer no real education:</p>
<p>in europe (germany) there are 3 types of highschool (which start at 5th grade) a tradeschool (realschule) prep-schools (gymnasium) and regular highschool (hochschule) - I actually think that this is a better system, because it allows people who are actually interested in college to attend, and gives people who want to enter the workforce immediately some actual training.</p>
<p>of course, germany also has excellent public transportation so that students in any neighborhood can attend any school they want, and a more socialist form of government such that people can actually live off of minimum wage…</p>
<p>X says: And also homeschooling in America is generally done to help indoctrinate kids into becoming fundamentalist Christians, because that is the majority of people who advocate homeschooling…</p>
<p>If you were to check current statistics, you would find that religious instruction is no longer the top reason to homeschool. Do a quick Google search on hsing and you will see as many secular sites as religious. Our valley has more secular hsers than religious ones. </p>
<p>Working moms hsing? Actually, I personally know of several. Easy? Not hardly. Worth it? Yes.</p>
<p>Competition in an education system would be a good thing. Look at the US’s higher education system. Don’t like what one college offers–the student goes elsewhere. The charter schools are alive and well in my state–the parents run them. If their children are not being educated, they move them.</p>
<p>Faulty thinking. When we have a well-educated society, EVERYONE benefits whether they have any kids or not. As a society we have a choice between paying for good schools now or paying for a lot of prisons later.</p>
<p>I saw a Milton Friedman interview a few years ago. Privatizing our schools was his number one thing that he felt should be done in the area of public policy.</p>