What we see in the education debate is a consistent lack of care for the kids who get ahead (why'd they get ahead of my kids?) and a consistent care for the kids being left behind, and that produces a trend to regulation and centralization that extinguishes anything good. The same forces that take children away from highly dedicated parents and put them into underfunded districts take advanced course tracks and the creativity of teachers away from them when they get there.
This is an insightful way of framing things. It had not occurred to me to look at it this way. It describes my own issues with school growing up and my own interest in homeschooling — the chance to provide individualized instruction and to tap into play and creativity. Schools can provide a baseline but for bright, motivated students they can be like a straightjacket. It's interesting and I suppose logical that the arguments against homeschooling focus on the idea that the practice dangerously removes that baseline. (I don't find those arguments particularly convincing because I had troubled peers who I went to public school with, and the school system helped precisely none of them substantially improve their lives.)
On top of that there is an element of "liability control" where putting troubled kids in the same unsuccessful system as the other troubled kids makes the kids the problem, while putting them in a different unsuccessful system, which counts as an action in the non-utilitarian trolley problem ethics of our culture, and leads to some fraction of blame falling on the individual who tried to change the outcome.
