There are those that say that our government should get out of the education business and let private enterprise take over completely because they would do a much better job. Are there countries out there that operate this way and if so, how are they faring? Could it work in this country in a way that benefits almost all of school age?
Yes, all schools should be private. And all parents should have jobs that provide wages sufficient to educate their children. And I should get a pony.
Back here in the real world it won’t work. The closest we could get is a voucher system, and unless we impose onerous requirements on the private schools we’d end up with a bunch of rich school owners and illiterate children.
Public Education is the foundation of the modern world.
Want to know how rich a country is or will be? Look at their education system.
And NO, the private sector does NOT always do a better job. The private sector is motivated by profit, which is not something I want mentioned in the same breath as basic education.
Like they did such a great job of it before the public school system was founded.
I don’t know of any countries that don’t have state schools.
I highly doubt it. Private schooling is prone to reinforcing inequalities of class and wealth. It is private schooling that should be completely abolished. When the rich and powerful have to send their kids to state schools, they’ll have incentive to improve them. And not this wussy half-equal system most places have nowadays, where schools differ in quality depending on where they are. Schools should be run by the central authority and scrupulously equalised across the board - one curriculum, one budget.
Private enterprise needn’t take over completely; vouchers are an excellent, successful idea that combines the competitive power of private industry with the equal access of public funding.
Why is that? Are parents incapable of noticing that their child isn’t learning to read and enrolling them elsewhere, or using a third-party or even a government rating system to see if the local private school is certified as competent?
This argument could be applied to anything the private sector does, and what we end up with isn’t rich businessmen and terrible products, but rather rich businessmen and excellent products.
Why not? Why should education with no competition be better than anything else that faces no competition?
If some people get a better education than others, the worst possible solution is to make good educations illegal or difficult to acquire. No one is helped by such a practice.
One proven way to improve an industry’s output is to expose it to competition.
Some parents are incapable of that now, even with resources you mention. I’m not saying it’s all that would happen, some of the private schools will be excellent. But I’m not seeing overall any way that this improves the current situation.
Would you like to compare the failure rate of schools to the failure rate of businesses? If a corporation buys up a business and liquidates it for a quick profit it is considered a successful move-not something I would want emulated in our schools.
Illiteracy exists, right now, amongst public school students and graduates. There’s much that needs improvement with the current situation. Of the various approaches that could be tried, there is measureable evidence that voucher programs are beneficial to students.
Certainly. First, what defines a school as failing?
What would be the equivalent in a private-school setting? Selling off the building?
As a follow-up: that Harvard study concluded:
The problem is bad schools. A good school, however we want to define that, is equally good whether it is public or private. The question is, what do you do about bad schools?
Since the topic is this particular thread is whether the government should get out of the “school” business entirely and leave it all to the private sector, I’d rather not get into the “vouchers will help make the schools, both public and private, better in the long run” side topic, if you don’t mind.
Ok, that’s understandable. As I don’t advocate for the government abandoning the field of education entirely, I’ll bow out for now.
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but the education system is awash in people lining their pockets (Profit!!)
Of course it is. Now imagine how much worse it would be if ALL education was ‘for profit’.
“Little Timmy never got to learn Math. We just couldn’t afford it. It was all we could do to pay for him to learn how to read and write.”
Can you imagine the research colleges and universities would have to do to find out which diplomas from the thousands of private schools are worth accepting?
There’s a major problem with private schools, which is this: the clients aren’t the ones footing the bill.
As I see it, the customers of a school are, in order:
- The students. They get the most direct benefit from the service.
- The society at large. An educated populace is essential to a functioning modern society, as anyone who’s played Sim City can tell you. We can’t afford to have a large uneducated underclass.
- The parents. They are only customers to the extent that they look out for their kids’ best interests–but in many cases, parents are unable or unwilling to do so.
Since kids are kids, we can’t have the primary client of the school choose the school. But society at large is the secondary client, and it makes sense to have them choose the school’s parameters. Bypassing the secondary client to go to the tertiary client makes no sense.
What happens is that parents who are involved, who prioritize their kids’ education, will be the ones who benefit most from voucher programs. Kids whose parents do the bare minimum to keep themselves out of jail on truancy charges will be the ones who suffer worse under a voucher program.
That said, I depart from a lot of public school teachers in several major ways, including my support of charter schools and private schools done right. As long as the charter schools are held accountable to society for results and are funded according to the services they offer (e.g., if they don’t offer transportation, they ought to lose not only transportation funding, but also some significant exceptional children funding, given the strong links between poverty, lack of transportation, and learning disabilities), I’m all about charter schools and their experimental approach.
The alternative to public schools and business run schools is schools run by nonprofit organizations (including churches).
The same amount they do now for the thousands of public and private schools their applicants attend?
Without tax breaks or minimum standards from the government, which has gotten completely out of the education business in my scenario?
Yup, then you get Jesus Riding Dinosaurs being taught as “science” to an unacceptably large chunk of the population (because that’s what their parents want and pay for), and we run screaming back into the Dark Ages.
Oh yeah, and without taxes, we don’t have childless people (like me) and businesses helping to pay for that education, so it really does become prohibitive for the parents. Poor people are not going to be able to afford it, and then we really do have a totally ignorant, uneducated and virtually unemployable underclass.