public schools?

[John Dibble]

I would imagine charitable organizations and individuals(such as the Catholic Church) would open a number of free or cheap private schools and create a number of scholarships(since much of the tax burden on public schools would be lifted, people would have more money to be charitable with). I would also imagine the number of tuition based private schools would increase drastically, and would compete with eachother, thus lowering prices. Many of these schools may also have lower costs for tuition for students of lower income families(I think some private schools do this), or local government would subsidize these schools to pay for such students.

[John Dibble]

Texasgurl isn't biased or anything...

The question was a serious one - what would happen IF(big if) public schools were abolished. So instead of bashing Bush how about you think of an answer?

[John Dibble]

GM,

I'm not saying charitable schools would pop up all over, just a few. I think more privately run, tuition based schools would occur, and would likely be subsidized for low income students at the least. Education is considered far more valuable than it was before public education was implemented, so I think enterprising capitalists would build private schools all over the place.

I also think we'd see an increase in community homeschooling.

[John Dibble]

On Catholic School - well, like it or not, it's better than not learning to read or write.

Now, I'd like to say what I said earlier is not my actual position on what to do about our school problems, I was merely answering the posed question - it was what I thought would happen if public schools were abolished.

My actual position on what to do about the schools is much more realistic, and doesn't abolish them. What I think needs to be done is to get the federal government and to a large degree the state governments out of the process. Leave the school system to local(county) government. With the federal government out of the system, we don't get ridiculous things like No Child Left Behind, and other nonsense. The schools in one area are not the same as others, so you can't apply the same standards and practices to them, and the federal government is too large scale to do this. The state government should only serve to give a little extra funding now and then, but should not provide as much as they do(individual states will determine what basis this funding is given). Now, this leaves more to the local governments. The local governments are better able to micromanage their assets, so they can be more efficient with the money. Also, since federal and state government have been taken out of the process for the most part, local school board officials can be held more accountable for bad school performance(they have nobody else to blame it on), so they will have a greater motivation to make the system work, otherwise they get voted out of their jobs. Vouchers and other such things could be handled by the local governments, and intercounty voucher systems could be negotiated as well.

[John Dibble]

On Catholic School - well, like it or not, it's better than not learning to read or write.

I have my doubts about that.

Ok, so you have doubts that lacking the basic abilities to get a decent job is superior to not going to Catholic School to attain said abilities. You live in a crazy world, bandit.

[John Dibble]

My actual position on what to do about the schools is much more realistic, and doesn't abolish them. What I think needs to be done is to get the federal government and to a large degree the state governments out of the process. Leave the school system to local(county) government. With the federal government out of the system, we don't get ridiculous things like No Child Left Behind, and other nonsense. The schools in one area are not the same as others, so you can't apply the same standards and practices to them, and the federal government is too large scale to do this. The state government should only serve to give a little extra funding now and then, but should not provide as much as they do(individual states will determine what basis this funding is given). Now, this leaves more to the local governments. The local governments are better able to micromanage their assets, so they can be more efficient with the money. Also, since federal and state government have been taken out of the process for the most part, local school board officials can be held more accountable for bad school performance(they have nobody else to blame it on), so they will have a greater motivation to make the system work, otherwise they get voted out of their jobs. Vouchers and other such things could be handled by the local governments, and intercounty voucher systems could be negotiated as well.

I like most of that except for vouchers and lessening of federal money.  If we provide more money, then the schools will have more choices, no?

Actually, most schools use very little federal money. In the county I went to school in, federal funding accounted for about 1% of total expense. I also find that many people think that if you throw money at something it will make it better, but this is a flawed concept. Give the worst teacher in the world the best equipment and books for the subject, and that teacher would do worse than the best teacher in the world using only chalk and a blackboard. Same goes for school boards - some just suck at using money the right way. It is my opinion that schools and school boards need to act like businesses and businessmen - trying to produce the best quality product(good students) at the lowest possible price.

On vouchers, I'm actually neutral - I don't think there's enough data on them to make a case one way or the other. I am merely saying if a school district wishes to implement them, they should be able to do so in a flexible manner that suits their needs.

[John Dibble]

I agree that the state should have a role. I see two functions, one is to provide an insurance of financial stability, so that if a region has too few resources to draw on a foundation-level of support is guaranteed. I think there is also a role for the state (and perhaps the nation) in providing minimal equivalency standards. This is necessary since families move and there needs to be a way to transfer students from one school to another and have some sense that grade levels mean roughly the same thing.

I agree with this, and was going to say something like it, but decided not to. To decide statewide standards, the school boards of all the counties in a state should get together every few years and determine the basic standards. This keeps the school boards accountable, because if someone else did it they could blame shamefully low standards on someone else. For VERY basic federal standards, the afformentioned gathering of schoolboards would elect representatives among themselves(perhaps the ones for the county that has been doing best by the state standards, to ensure quality) for a similar federal gathering. Once again, since this is composed of local officials, they are still kept accountable.

[John Dibble]

Government doesn't need to set standards. Private schools would provide them because consumers would demand them. There are many things that industries standardize on their own, everything from the size of screws to the protocols that underpin communication networks.

Your analogy fails because education is a service to improve the person, not a commodity like screws or networks. When a commodity fails to meet consumer needs it can be replaced. When a service that directly affects people fails, there is little recourse for those who were adversely impacted. It's why both education and health care elicit such strong debates.

Don't get me wrong. Human service systems in this country are in need of a fix, and you'll note that my views on the needs of the education system aren't far from a libertarian view (at least not far from Dibble's )

And what recourse do people have when government schools fail, pray tell? Bureaucrats are accountable for nothing, and the worst that can happen to politicians is to lose the next election. Businesses, on the other hand, can be sued, and their customers can go elsewhere.

Swarch - I make my position based on the fact that public schools aren't going away. I perfectly support more private schools, as they save the tax payers money and give people an alternative to a failed school system. My presented solution applies solely to public schools, and I think it cuts out a good deal of unaccountable bureacracy(completely on the federal, and mostly on the state level) and gives more accountability to the locally elected officials. Government does indeed screw up a lot, but I also realize that local government can do many things at least a little better than than state and federal government can. The standards we were talking about are for only bare basic standards for a curriculum - like saying you start teaching addition, subtraction, multiplication and division at grade 1, a perfectly reasonable standard that is easily met, not a standard that you must have an average score of X from your students on test Y. EDIT - I also think such standards need apply to very basic subjects, grammar school only really, as high schools can be much more flexible in their curriculum.