Quote:So you believe the only way to cut cost in education is to cut teachers salaries? That's ignore the colossal waste spent on things like standardized testing, extra circular activities, administrative cost, and so on. The reality is all the problems you cite exist today, poor schools are under funded and rich schools are over funded. The difference is I'd give parents a choice instead of demanding they be tied to poor schools because they live in poor neighborhoods. The poor schools (which who are we kidding do just enough to get by, I went to them all my life) wouldn't be competitive and would close. Leaving a demand for better schools in poor neighborhoods. Just like grocery markets still exist in poor neighborhoods so would schools, except now they have the initiative to improve and create innovation to stay in business.
There is today and under any system will always be good schools and bad schools. I prefer a system where parents and teachers can choose which to participate in. Let the bad ones close, why should we support them on the states dollar?
Again, most of a school's budget goes to paying staff. Trust me, teachers who do extra curricular activities do not get paid a whole lot more.
Giving school choice does not accomplish what you seem to think it will accomplish. How do you judge the quality of a school? By the number of attendees? By if your kid passes or not (at which point, why would you ever fail a student?) You have a lot of parents who really don't care about their kids getting a good education. If everyone cared, then
maybe such a system would work. The problem is, parents aren't really customers, and neither are kids. Looking at them as customers doesn't really work. Because customers want to keep their costs down. They'll choose bad schools, which will end up keeping bad schools in business. They'll also base choice on personal and political beliefs, so that their kids wind up with the same beliefs. Which ends up hurting good schools.
We should be improving bad schools, not getting rid of them altogether.
First and Foremost we should be funding our schools better. When's the last time the pentagon had to have a bake sale to pay for their private jet? Or when has a politician needed to bake cookies to get funding for a project? Attract good teachers to the profession with incentives, and have teachers licenses renew every 5 years (like they do here in virginia) through programs that have teachers taking additional classes to keep up with the curriculum (like they do here in Virginia)
A lot of places don't even require all teachers to
have teaching licenses. Which means that they don't know how to adapt to a students needs. You need to draw more people into the field of teaching, and more people with actual teaching licenses.
Simply put, school choice doesn't solve these problems. There's no easy way to do it. It's one of the reasons I quit voting Libertarian when the Green Party candidate was on the ballot. Education is incredibly important, but it's also one thing that almost nobody wants to really fund. Getting raises for teachers is like pulling teeth. I should know, because they were trying to deny raises to teachers here when they hadn't had a Cost of Living Adjustment in 5 years (and as a result, unsurprisingly, many teachers have left the area).
School choice sounds nice in theory. But sadly it doesn't work because there is an unlimited demand for education. It keeps getting bigger and bigger.
If people are to get out of poverty, you have to remove cost as an obstacle toward advancement. Yes, literacy is a problem. I had a problem reading when I was in 1st grade. We had a special ed teacher come in and she taught me to read. Imagine those poor schools getting teachers who can do that, and work with the students who are having the most trouble. The problem is, they're told they don't need them. Imagine if the Pentagon was told they didn't need a private jet. I bet you they'd get it before the poor schools get a specialized literature teacher.
