public schools?

[muon2]

<snip>
I agree that the state should have a role. I see two functions, one is to provide an insurance of financial stability, so that if a region has too few resources to draw on a foundation-level of support is guaranteed. I think there is also a role for the state (and perhaps the nation) in providing minimal equivalency standards. This is necessary since families move and there needs to be a way to transfer students from one school to another and have some sense that grade levels mean roughly the same thing.

Government doesn't need to set standards. Private schools would provide them because consumers would demand them. There are many things that industries standardize on their own, everything from the size of screws to the protocols that underpin communication networks.

Your analogy fails because education is a service to improve the person, not a commodity like screws or networks. When a commodity fails to meet consumer needs it can be replaced. When a service that directly affects people fails, there is little recourse for those who were adversely impacted. It's why both education and health care elicit such strong debates.

Don't get me wrong. Human service systems in this country are in need of a fix, and you'll note that my views on the needs of the education system aren't far from a libertarian view (at least not far from Dibble's )

[swarch]

<snip>
I agree that the state should have a role. I see two functions, one is to provide an insurance of financial stability, so that if a region has too few resources to draw on a foundation-level of support is guaranteed. I think there is also a role for the state (and perhaps the nation) in providing minimal equivalency standards. This is necessary since families move and there needs to be a way to transfer students from one school to another and have some sense that grade levels mean roughly the same thing.

Government doesn't need to set standards. Private schools would provide them because consumers would demand them. There are many things that industries standardize on their own, everything from the size of screws to the protocols that underpin communication networks.

So nice to know I'm a commodity to be bought and sold.

Who said anything about slavery? Anyway, why should education be different than any other service provided in the marketplace? Monopolies suck. It's an institutional problem, regardless of whether the institution is private or public. Many people seem to believe that, by turning something over to government, it will be run magnificently. But it invariably gets worse. There is a whole discipline, known as public choice theory, that studies the reasons for this, and some of its pioneers have received the Nobel Prize in Economics.

[swarch]

Government doesn't need to set standards. Private schools would provide them because consumers would demand them. There are many things that industries standardize on their own, everything from the size of screws to the protocols that underpin communication networks.

Your analogy fails because education is a service to improve the person, not a commodity like screws or networks. When a commodity fails to meet consumer needs it can be replaced. When a service that directly affects people fails, there is little recourse for those who were adversely impacted. It's why both education and health care elicit such strong debates.

Don't get me wrong. Human service systems in this country are in need of a fix, and you'll note that my views on the needs of the education system aren't far from a libertarian view (at least not far from Dibble's )

And what recourse do people have when government schools fail, pray tell? Bureaucrats are accountable for nothing, and the worst that can happen to politicians is to lose the next election. Businesses, on the other hand, can be sued, and their customers can go elsewhere.

[Giant Saguaro]

They wouldn't; no one would. They'd all just slum around or play video games. Which is what they want to do anyway, save a select few, so then they'd really have an excuse.

Hey, I'm all for cutting taxes and getting rid of as much property tax as possible and so forth, but we can't do away with public schools and public education, no matter how desperately it needs to be fixed.

[John Dibble]

Government doesn't need to set standards. Private schools would provide them because consumers would demand them. There are many things that industries standardize on their own, everything from the size of screws to the protocols that underpin communication networks.

Your analogy fails because education is a service to improve the person, not a commodity like screws or networks. When a commodity fails to meet consumer needs it can be replaced. When a service that directly affects people fails, there is little recourse for those who were adversely impacted. It's why both education and health care elicit such strong debates.

Don't get me wrong. Human service systems in this country are in need of a fix, and you'll note that my views on the needs of the education system aren't far from a libertarian view (at least not far from Dibble's )

And what recourse do people have when government schools fail, pray tell? Bureaucrats are accountable for nothing, and the worst that can happen to politicians is to lose the next election. Businesses, on the other hand, can be sued, and their customers can go elsewhere.

Swarch - I make my position based on the fact that public schools aren't going away. I perfectly support more private schools, as they save the tax payers money and give people an alternative to a failed school system. My presented solution applies solely to public schools, and I think it cuts out a good deal of unaccountable bureacracy(completely on the federal, and mostly on the state level) and gives more accountability to the locally elected officials. Government does indeed screw up a lot, but I also realize that local government can do many things at least a little better than than state and federal government can. The standards we were talking about are for only bare basic standards for a curriculum - like saying you start teaching addition, subtraction, multiplication and division at grade 1, a perfectly reasonable standard that is easily met, not a standard that you must have an average score of X from your students on test Y. EDIT - I also think such standards need apply to very basic subjects, grammar school only really, as high schools can be much more flexible in their curriculum.

[??????????]

The problem with teachers is the unions make it impossible to fire them. It is so expensive for the state to fire a teacher the school systems don't even bother. For example here in Florida it costs 160,000 dollars to fire a teacher. If the teacher challenges the termination the cost goes up to 350,000 dollars. Schools don't have that kind of money to throw away. So they stick with bad teachers and in some states it can go over a million dollars.