:mad: Education is not “an industry” and kids sure as fucking hell aren’t “outputs”. And what happens to the human equivalents of the buggy whip makers?
Yes, it is, and yes, they are, whether the industry is nationalized or not.
Who would that be, bad teachers?
Bad teachers, undereducated teachers, teachers who mean well but are behind the latest teaching methods, poor (not bad) schools who can’t afford the latest books or the best (and hence most expensive) teachers, and most importantly, the children who were taught by them.
In my ideal scenario, teachers are like soldiers - they’re employed by the state, they all draw from the same pay scale, and they damn well teach at whatever school the state posts them to.
Which compares more favorably-countries with state run schools, or countries without state run schools?
Have you found a country with no state run schools yet?
What? No. Education is an industry, and educated children are its output, not the children themselves.
When competition exists, they’d either improve and compete or exit the industry.
When competition does not exist, they are free to do a terrible job, with no consequences or incentive to improve.
People respond to incentives. You have neatly removed any incentive to try hard, improve themselves, or frankly do anything more than the statutory minimum for the teachers in your scheme.
Why don’t we have two police departments and two fire departments to compete with each other then.
What’s the incentive for the Police and Fire Fighters to do a good job absent competition?
This is a morally abhorrent way of looking at education.
What makes you think government is incapable of providing incentives or consequences?
And note I’m not saying all teachers, everywhere and at every level, make the same. I said one pay scale, just like the military or the civil service.
Do soldiers get by doing only the bare minimum, without trying hard, and never improving themselves?
Why don’t we?
How do we know they are doing a good job? What’s the comparison? I’m sure the Big Three automakers thought they were making great cars, and would have truthfully said that they were working as hard as they could and innovating as well as anyone could. Then, imports started coming in, and we (and they) learned that they were not, in fact, making the best cars they could, they were barely making cars that were good enough for consumers’ low expectations.
The realistic, utilitarian view is morally abhorrant?
They may be capable, but all your posts so far have been contrary to the idea.
What determines their pay, then?
Waiting on the above question.
How about 1990s Afghanistan, with 650 schools in the entire country?
Also, I’m having trouble finding cites, but about 10 years ago I listened to a Thomas Friedman audiobook in which he talked about the Saudi educational system. IIRC, the system was largely run privately through Wahabbi organizations, and he suggested that the private schooling system held a decent part of the blame for the rise of terrorism, as it granted unsupervised access to children to anyone willing to front the cash for schools.
You guys do realize you could have all private schools without it being the liberatrian nightmare many of you fear, right? Just because something is private doesn’t automatically mean ‘unregulated’ and it doesn’t automatically mean ‘to only those who can afford it’ either. You could have a private school system where the federal government (or even the states) set the criteria and enforce the regulations and standards, where the private corporations contracted by the government to run the schools have incentive based criteria they have to meet, and where the poor can send their kids to school in much the same way the poor get food and other government assistance.
Should we do all that? No idea…what we have clearly isn’t working very efficiently in the US, despite the fact that the government has a lock on the majority of pre-college education in the US. I’m unsure if privatization is the silver bullet answer to all our problems, but privatization doesn’t mean what people in these sorts of threads always assume it means. We have privatized corporations and companies that contract to the government all the time. Most of our defense industry is private, contracting goods and services to the government. Many training programs are private, training personnel for the government and under government scrutiny and regulation. The government isn’t really all that good at doing some things…and so, they contract it out while keeping oversight. The school system (as well as police, fire and rescue, etc) COULD be similarly contracted out without it being the libertarian horror many seem to be assuming it would be.
Treating human beings like product is morally abhorrent, yes.
It’s “utilitarian” to recycle our dead for their protein, you don’t see us doing that, either.
Where have I said anything about how government might or might not motivate people? All I said was that government would see to it that there’s equal distribution of resources to all parts of society, not just the wealthy bits.
Seniority and tested competence, the same way it works in the military.
And…?
Except that the OP is about the government getting totally out of the school biz and putting it all in the hands of the private sector.
Why? There isn’t ANYTHING that the government is totally out of. Why the excluded middle? Did you just want to attack a libertarian strawman that is complete fantasy and has zero chance of ever happening? To what point? Simply so you can say ‘well, we may have a crappy education system, but at least it’s better than this fantasy libertarian strawman system!’.
Ok, have at it then.
Seriously? Do you think having multiple police departments and multiple fire departments is a good idea? All paid by the state, or would you pay for your police and fire services on a COD basis? The competition you speak of is competition for dollars right? So you would have to move the payment right down to the consumer right? I personally prefer to know that if my house catches fire I won’t have to write a check to the fire fighters that come to put it out. You may feel differently, I don’t know. Also do we pay the police per arrest? Per ticket? How would this work?
What? I never brought up libertarianism. Did you happen to read the OP?
‘There are those’…hm, wonder who they might be. 
Yeah, I read all 2 lines of the OP. Was challenging, but I managed to slog through it. So, why were you wanting an excluded middle strawman for an OP again?
Your words, not mine. Service industries are service industries, and education is a service.
I bet it isn’t, actually, considering how cheaply protein can be produced.
Everything you’ve written has been about uniformity, so forgive me if I assumed too much.
There is no way to equalize the educability of millions of students from wildly different backgrounds, family structures, incomes, and cultures. Even if you dictate the budgets and curriculums shared by Wealthy Suburbville and Poor Innercitytown, the latter’s performance will be measurably lower due to factors well beyond your control as an educational system. It’s not simply a matter of spending.
How do you test their competence? A military serviceman can be graded on fitness, knowledge, and carrying out missions. A teacher’s competence is demonstrated though a highly variable third party: the students. How do you isolate the teacher’s ability from the educability of the students?
As a thought experiment, yes. In practice, you could achieve similar competitive effects without the redundancy through contracting.
The state.
Indirectly, yes.
No.
That wouldn’t change.
No, no, and see above.
Because this thread has a particular topic addressing whether government should get out of the school biz, and could private schools do a better job. Nobody is stopping you from starting a new thread if you wish to talk about something different.