> Public education doesn’t have to mean public schools.

This is eloquently put. I’ve never heard it said that way. There is no reason to believe that an entity like the government, great for accumulating and distributing the money required for public education, is a good or efficient agent for administering said education.

We see this in many other fields. For instance, non-government researchers receive government grants for research. Similarly (for better or worse), the government gives money for agricultural subsidies; nobody proposes that the government ought to run the farm. It is intuitive to us that specialists in a given field may not work for the government; it is high time we applied the same logic to education.

Compare how much money US spends on average per student in public education verse other countries. How do students rank academically in US compared to other countries?

Consider this

If you look at the system without vouchers, there is no market mechanism to correct the situation everyone is complaining about.

There are no incentives. Each year, more and more money is dumped into the system.

If you introduce competition, then schools have to start fixing problems if they want to get the funding.

Yes. If it were the case that public schools were universally regarded as great, and everyone felt well served by them, it would be right to be skeptical of private interests coming in and trying to capture some of that money for themselves. But we have the exact opposite of that situation.

I would argue that finding a better solution to our education problems would be a bigger achievement for humanity than putting someone on Mars.

You need a decent school option within an acceptable travel distance. There are many who don't have a good choice like that.

New schools appear as soon as the money is available.

If there is money available the choices will appear. When it stops being about the building and government curriculum and starts becoming about satisfying parents desire to have their child educated, anybody can become a teacher or organize a school. If the teacher fails to deliver the parents will go elsewhere.

The free market for schools and teachers is created the moment Department of Education is eliminated and replaced with education vouchers for all.

Escape hatch to where?

Actually, public education has to mean public schools. Vouchers are a band-aid invented by right-wing nutjobs to allow religious schools to be funded by public money; they do this by taking money away from secular public schools. If public schools are broken, we need to fix the public schools, not break them further.

> If public schools are broken, we need to fix the public schools

Who defines what fixed is? How do you call success on those fixes? The process is a problem today and it's similar to politics.

I'll give two issues of issues in fixing things...

First example, if there is a problem leaders can come up with a policy/process/thing to deal with it. And call success at having that in place rather than seeing results. If the policy/process/thing doesn't work success has already been called. They aren't going to walk that back. There is a lot of this.

Second example, schools are being used for social change. And the topics of some of the social change are not agreed to in society. Who gets to decide what's right? Should schools be agents for this change? This is being fought in society right now. It's not really discussed or debated but more fought if you look at the tactics and behaviors.

How do you fix things in this form of environment?

I don't care if public funds go to religious schools. I want an educated populous. I could not care less if kids are also taught religion along with philosophy, math, history, physics, science and communication. Actually, I don't even care if schools teach the same subjects. Above a base of knowledge required to achieve a depth of knowledge I would not mind if schools received public funds to start specialization earlier in a child's life if they are capable. The key to this is parents getting to choose where the money goes.

There is a first amendment case to be made about withholding education funds from religious schools. By withholding funds from schools that are deemed to be "religious" the government is creating a preference for schools that are not on the list of religions but may be every bit as ideological. The government cannot prefer one ideology or religion over another. It is required to be agnostic.

I'm almost 50. I've watched this scam play out my entire life. We've gotta fix the public schools, they said, when I was in public school. They said it year after year, generation after generation. It's never happening.

We absolutely should allow vouchers to go to religious private schools and secular private schools alike. It's time to bleed the public schools dry and use their lots to build more housing.

It may surprise you to hear this, but intentionally destroying the public school system and hoping that the private sector will step in with a replacement is not a viable solution to public schooling. Private schools are not required to serve all students, either in a socioeconomic sense or a geographic one. Allowing public schools to fall into terminal disrepair does a massive disservice to those students who wouldn't be served appropriately by private schools.

Public schools as they exist today are already in a state of terminal disrepair and do a massive disservice to all their students. Note that the original article is about public schools banning the teaching of algebra for all students before high school because too many students fail it.

Parents complain about this and fight against it but are ignored. So what are we supposed to do? There are only so many school board meetings you can attend only to get eye rolls from officials.