It's not clear to me that competition for students does make the whole system better.
You end up with a phenomenon where some schools get used as dumping grounds for the kids that the other schools don't want to deal with or whose parents don't care or don't know any better. I witnessed this when I had a part-time teaching job in the Boston Public Schools. I spent a year at Jeremiah Burke High School, which has the reputation as one of the worst in the state. A huge proportion of kids there either did not speak much English (Cape Verdean Creole was very common), or had severe learning or behavioral issues.
The problems that exist in public education are incredibly complex, and it's not clear to me that any simple, ideologically-tinged solution is going to solve them.
> The problems that exist in public education are incredibly complex, and it's not clear to me that any simple, ideologically-tinged solution is going to solve them.
This is exactly why I want competition. A few experts sitting around a conference table for a year are not going to just deduce the solution, just like the best VCs invest in many companies instead of just picking only the Facebooks. These problems are far too complicated for a centrally architected solution. In the end the best solution might be one that most people never even imagined.
You end up with a phenomenon where some schools get used as dumping grounds for the kids that the other schools don't want to deal with or whose parents don't care or don't know any better. I witnessed this when I had a part-time teaching job in the Boston Public Schools. I spent a year at Jeremiah Burke High School, which has the reputation as one of the worst in the state. A huge proportion of kids there either did not speak much English (Cape Verdean Creole was very common), or had severe learning or behavioral issues.
The problems that exist in public education are incredibly complex, and it's not clear to me that any simple, ideologically-tinged solution is going to solve them.