Like, if the voucher system has bad results, then its bad (at least in the present context). If charter schools don’t turn out well, then they don’t and they shouldn’t get funding.
But I’m still pretty disturbed by the way that many left-wing people seem to treat any attempt to provide alternatives to conventional public schools as some kind of aggression against the continued existence of an education system.
(There’s meanwhile an attitude among some generally red-tribe right wingers that ~~(neo)Liberal Elites~~ send their children to expensive elite-gifted private schools where they don’t have to deal with how horrible the public schools are – and “horrible” often means “ill-managed”, not just “ill-funded”. Meanwhile, there is no fundamental reason why mass private schooling could not be a thing.)
“Left wing” aka Dems for purposes of this discussion, are, I’m pretty sure, thoroughly purchased by the teachers unions, which warps the market significantly.
Yes, that is totally it, and not all the fiasco that’s happened with for-profit higher education or the fact that turning any government program into a grant is the first step of starving it to death, or any one of a dozen of other reasons.
So what you’re saying is, if I were technocratic dictator and enacted a voucher policy, it would be fine, since it would not actually be the first step towards killing public education.
Just kidding, I’d radically restructure the whole system in such a way that the bulk of marginal political will for vouchers would coincidentally evaporate.
I went to a high school that was created before the fall of the Iron Curtain to turn gifted children of trusted citizens into scientists and engineers.
The schizophrenic stance of progressive governments to create more comprehensive schools while simultaneously claiming education is the future must be grating. Nobody really believes that we need any bakers, butchers, farmers, plumbers, carpenters, or locksmiths.
I guess that’s why people IRL dismiss any and all of my thoughts on education policy.
Who wants to be any of those things when they don’t pay enough money (or else are tough to get into) and housing prices are rising out of control due to bad policy backed by bad politics?
Who wants to go to a comprehensive school that pays lip service to the idea that intelligentsia and working class go there together, but actually there are no working class jobs and you’re fucked if you don’t get a university degree?
Why even bother with all this inclusion? Why have comprehensive schools at all in this environment?
Does America have comprehensive schools in that sense? From what I’ve seen, talking about how the school includes blue collar elements is the lip service, and those programs are being cut.
But then, I come from a background where my formative high school years were in a school district that educated professionals moved to to raise their kids in a good school district.
