Why is the left opposed to school choice?

[Mister Mets]

A major aspect of school choice is that it gives parents the resources to go to schools outside the traditional public education system. So Teachers Unions will lose control and teachers would lose some benefits in the long run.

[Mister Mets]

Why does the left not favor scholarships or vouchers? Why are they insistent on keeping kids in public schools that are failing? They don't want private or charter schools to exist, despite them doing better than public schools. If they care about the poor so much, they should want poorer kids who generally go to worse off schools to go to better ones, increasing their chance of not being poor in the future.

If I had to guess, I would say its because they're (and by they I mean left wing organizations and big money) a puppet for labor and teacher's unions.

What evidence do you have that public schools are 'failing', relative to charter schools or private schools? The methods that have been invented to test how well schools and students are doing in school always seem to find that schools are 'failing' and students are falling behind precisely because that's what they were designed to do. Pretending otherwise is naive. We have no way of accurately comparing education statistics when the U.S. school system is not comparable between tiered systems like in Germany (and most studies erroneously compare the average American student with students in elite German Gymnasiums or the highest ranked students in Shanghai), and attempts to do so are disingenuous on the very face of it, because you're not using comparable tests. Beyond that, how does one even begin to quantify knowledge?

There's also literally zero evidence that charter schools perform better than public schools. Private schools may perform better in certain cases, but this comes in part from the fact that these schools are well funded by the parents who have the money to send their children to these schools in the first place. Nothing is more of a determinant of how well schools 'perform' than the access these schools have to adequate educational materials, teaching staff, learning facilities, and, most important of all, the socioeconomic background of the students in question. The children of the employing class have no problem paying attention in school on account of say, hunger. You can't say that about kids who grow up in working class towns or ghettos where a lot of them don't get enough to eat, especially when you take into account that half of all U.S. public school students live in poverty.

Education is not going to solve poverty. Poverty is the result of a lack of money, not the result of the lack of an education. There are plenty of PhDs working at McDonald's these days, or, even those who have managed to land a job aren't being paid all that much. Just using that example alone, in academia, the proportion of adjuncts to tenure track professors is heavily weighed in the former direction, which means a lot more workers without benefits, without a retirement plan, without job security, and with low wages. This is purely anecdotal, but I have a friend who works as an adjunct and only makes about $30,000/year. So much for education being a path out of poverty! The United States has plenty of people with college degrees who either can't use them for want of job openings or because they've been certified with skills that are obsolete or unneeded.

The fact of the matter is that the Left favors high quality public schooling for everyone because most people can't afford public schooling and even if they could, there's something inherently unfair about making people pay for the privilege of being educated. This is a debate that we had in the early 1800s and won because most people agree with the left that the circumstances in which a child is born and brought up in should not deny them the most rudimentary abilities of citizenship, i.e. reading, writing, etc.

School choice would ultimately result in private schools jacking up tuition (after all, they've got the voucher, which essentially subsidizes a good portion of their total income, so why wouldn't they try to make even more? They are a capitalist enterprise, after all!) and would result in even more racial segregation, combined with, of course, religious quackery being inserted into the day to day education of students. I for one am not willing to sacrifice millions of people to daily sermons from pedophile priests on piety or snake oil salesmen teaching whatever 'science' benefits the bottom line of the company who owns the schools.

The assertion that the left (which, I assume in reality you're talking about liberals here) is under the thumb of the teachers' unions is cute. The Democratic Party is full of full-time union-haters like Chicago's Rahm Emanuel, who forced the Chicago Teachers' Union into a strike three years ago and has shut down schools across Chicago and appointed his cronies to the Chicago Board of Education. In Philadelphia last year, the city government cancelled its contract with the teachers union and forced a strike, and in Seattle just recently, the Democratic Party controlled local government picked a fight with teachers. Barack Obama, the head honcho of this entire operation, has put in motion the stealth privatization of education via Race to the Top and the Common Core system, and he's backed to the hilt of course by right-wingers Arne Duncan and former DC public school superintended Michelle Rhee. DC, of course, with its entirely Democratic Party run municipal government, was a trailblazer in the effort to destroy teachers' unions and public education.

Andrew Cuomo wants to destroy the 'public school monopoly', and Hillary Clinton has likewise been a big-time backer of so-called 'reform' efforts. Perhaps the actual left is tied to the teachers' unions, but the liberal left, of which you and other right-wingers refer to when you ask these kinds of questions, is certainly not in the pocket of the teachers' unions.

You should do some research before you come in brandishing wild, nonsensical arguments about how much the 'left' doesn't care about poor kids because it doesn't want to subject them to PepsiCola Elementary School or the Church of the Holy Pedophile Middle School.

For all the talk of these politicians forcing teachers unions strikes, if the results were better, there wouldn't be a need to change policies.

While some tuition rates would increase with vouchers, it's a fallacy to assume all costs will increase to the same degree. If parents can suddenly spend a voucher for tuition to any school of their choice, there will be incentives for institutions to provide them with alternatives.

As for the argument that private schools are better because the parents have more resources, that's not going to change. Private schools are not going to get banned. The main discussion here is about helping parents who don't have the money to offer their children the alternative of private school.

[Mister Mets]

Because we want all children to succeed not just the privileged children of the rich. But I wouldn't expect a spoiled suburban white kid to understand any of this.

The spoiled suburban white kids benefit from the status quo.

School choice should in theory help parents who couldn't otherwise afford the alternatives.