I am against school choice. There is a number of flaws with the theory.
First off, you have to ask why the school is “bad”. Is it the teachers? The amount of funding? Or the students? (If the kids come from a place where education is frowned on, they will not have a good shot no matter where they go).
Second, once a private school starts taking State money, it is no longer a private school. The State will start dictating on how that school will operate, and you may end up as bad as the old public schools.
Third, don’t hold up Charter schools as an example. They are VERY selective on who gets in, stays in, and the requirements of the teachers. If you take that away, the performance will fall.
When, then, would you propose as an alternative to the Leftist-dominated public school system?
Said by a true statist?
I choose not to send my children to public school - so take that.
Parents should pay for their own children's school. Making the old lady down the street fund it is immoral. If you created the child, then man up and care for them.
One problem is their size. Nobody, let alone 25-30 staffers can supervise 2000+ 15-18 years olds.
No high school should have more than 500-600 kids. The only reason to pool that big is for the building of special projects like football stadiums. Sports would be just as competitive without the mega schools.
Admittedly, the students going to the good schools will “self select”,
and the kids whose parents don’t givadamn will be stuck in a bad school.
But, really, is that bad? The alternative is to keep the kids of parents who care trapped with the kids of parents who don’t.
It is rarely EVER the funding. You can jam money down a kid’s throat, it will not improve learning (don’t get me started on discipline).
Some are very selective. Others are lottery. Both generally outperform standard public schools.
You must be a statist. Thank you for having your kids brainwashed by Marxists.
Charter schools, especially in big cities, seem to have performed significantly better than traditional public schools, and some black parents are very aware that their children might be better off there. So all that Tom Sowell is saying is that Republicans running for office who defend charter schools staunchly against far left 'Rat opposition might likely find some critical black votes swinging toward them, enough to make the difference in close elections. As far as that goes, Sowell makes sense.
Public schools that have a critical mass of kids who are not interested in learning will hold back even those students that want to learn and those teachers that want to teach. Everyone is too busy catering to the lowest common denominator to actually educate anyone. Charters and private schools offer the only way out for most kids - so why is school choice a bad thing? School choice is sort of like voter ID - it’s so common sensical that it seems foolish to oppose it.