Obviously charter schools and private schools want to do a better job of educating. If capitalism is free from paying for public education, then how would socialism pay and economically calculate their wages?
Charter schools and private schools use artificial advantages like autonomy and selective enrollment to batter down the defenses and depleted resources of public education. The ultimate goal is to free capitalism from the “burden” of paying for a public education system based on the principles that society bears a responsibility to educate every child and must respect the rights of teachers who do this challenging work.
Summary of points of the article:
Tenured teachers could be fired
Loss of bargaining power via Union
Teachers have to be “rehired” after charter
Teachers must work unpaid “extra” hours, ex. yard duty, after school programs
What are your thoughts?
The problem with charter schools is that they’re still funded via taxes.
What’s wrong with the following system? The State imposes no taxes for schools, and parents purchase whatever school they want.
Even if I send my child to a private school, I still pay for the public schools via taxes.
Even with school vouchers, the amount of taxes collected by the State is still greater than the amount paid by voucher. Only a school that meets the government’s standards qualifies for the voucher.
Charter schools are still public schools, albeit somewhat decentralized.
The best way to go around privatizing schools is to, well, privatize them. The only intermediate stage between public and private schools would be state-funded vouchers, but just privatizing would be better.
Private schools are better precisely because they can hire and fire teachers. In many public schools, teachers are simply subpar and there is no incentive for them to actually teach or even know the subject they’re supposed to be teaching. I mean, anyone who has gone to public school knows the kind of shit they teach you and how badly they teach it to you. Private schools create incentives for teachers getting better and they also allow parents the choice of schools that their child will most benefit from. For example, children with mental disabilities shouldn’t go to the same school as normal children: they are better off at a school that specializes in teaching the disabled.
Likewise, you wouldn’t have this huge problem we have today of students not even going to school. If you are simply not “capable” enough for school, maybe you should go for an apprenticeship or some kind of on the job training. In a free market, where there’d be an absence of child labor and minimum wage laws, people would be able to not go to school all together yet still pick up the skills to be a productive member of society.
fsk and kaju. Thanks for the insights. I share the similar sentiments. It was difficult for me to counter the article, because, as you have stated, they are not truly private schools.
Aren’t Charter schools and vouchers a step in the right direction, or does it just perpetuate the problem of education? Obviously it would be better to have 100% private schools.
Charter schools are negligible progress, but not true progress. Once you start with “The government takes money from me and gives it to other people”, you’re down the path of slavery. The government will only give vouchers to schools that meet their standards.
Charter schools are no more about the privatization of education than Lockheed Martin is about the privatization of security. It’s just a way to shift around who benefits from political privilege.
But the important point to make about the article referenced is something else. From the article:
It should push to soften tenure rules so that bad teachers are easier to fire and good teachers are easier to reward, and insist that students’ needs, not teachers’ seniority, guide job assignments.”
This argument is based on myths about public school teachers: students are suffering because teachers just don’t work hard enough and union seniority rules only protect “bad teachers” and hurt students.
This is no myth about public school teachers. Their salaries are determined by two things, and two things only: 1) their educational degrees, and 2) how long they’ve been teaching. That’s it. The main function of the teachers’ union is to prevent teacher compensation from being determined by teaching ability as judged by the students and parents themselves. This is the one thing the union will do anything and everything to prevent. And yes, it is extremely difficult to fire a teacher.
Also, the claim that charter schools will cherry-pick their students where the public schools can’t is a canard. Public school teachers most absolutely do cherry-pick their students, only its based on location. The good teachers get the good schools in the good neighborhoods, and the bad teachers get the bad schools in the bad neighborhoods, and there’s nothing the parents and students in the bad neighborhoods can do about it.
Government schools were never about insuring that children had an opportunity to receive a good education. Government schools started in the United States when the Protestants started getting really worried about the fact that all the Catholic immigrants then flowing into the country were receiving their education in Catholic schools. Government schools are always only about controlling what it is other people’s children are taught. This is something you won’t learn in a government school of course.
I don’t know how public education works in America – however, there are several issues with the age of service as the measure for contests and promotions here – but you could try to turn those points around, pointing out that the good teacher will be rewarded by such a system where parents are free to choose. Loss of bargain power by unions is gain of bargain power by parents. I don’t understand the re-hiring point or why would teachers have to work beyound their contractual obligations – it would be like any other job.
I was listening to an interview/article about the sorry state of public schools in the D.C. area or maybe Baltimore.
The whole interview with the district superintendent could have been a case study of the problems of central planning, she came in a year or so ago and ‘studied’ the situation for a while before deciding on which schools to close and which ‘under performing’ employees to fire. Apparently she had very limited input from the actual people who were involved in the day to day task of brainwashing the children in the district but based her decisions solely on the standardized test results.
Her solution to the problem of the district soon having a minority enrollment as the charter schools were a very popular option to a whole lot of parents; throw a fresh coat of paint on the schools and hire an outside management firm to run the worst performing schools that didn’t get closed down. Never mind the charter schools were a lot less expensive per child than the public schools.
Oh, and also to put two deadly rival neighborhood kids into the same high school and hope for the best.
Didn’t address the principal’s claim that the middle school was consistently sending him illiterate kids and there was no way possible to get them up to speed to pass the tests or his concerns about the neighborhood kids being more likely to kill each other than get along in the new ‘integrated’ high school.
That’s an interesting point about charter schools. Certain corporations are given monopoly/oligopoly rights to run the charter/voucher school. If I want to try and start a charter school, I can’t because I don’t have the right connections. Viewed in this context, the charter/voucher system is a form of corporate welfare.
This reminds me, over here, teachers aren’t even scored. Recently the minister of education tried to change the promotion system – currently teachers get a pay raise automatically every 2 years or so of service – for one where only the teachers of well performed classes, or classes whose performance got better, would get the pay raise. The teacher’s unions went ballistic over this. They went to tv saying how deplorable it is for teachers, managed to get together some half a million protesters in the capital (that’s a very good number for the size of this country), did strikes, and were successful into getting rid of the all thing. From time to time, you have a situtation of a parent expressing their disatisfaction resorting to intimidation and even violence. There’s not a snow ball in hell of a chance school vouchers would ever be implemented in this country – and you’d be hospitalized for the suggestion of privatizing the schools.
The best way to privatize education is to just privatize it. I use to be all for charter schools but have now realized that they are not a step in the right direction but more a horizontal movement. Both public schools and charter schools are funded by the State and controlled by the State (though charter schools have fewer controls) so they are both bad ideas.
As for the idea of educating all children that’s just stupid. Not all kids respond to traditional educational methods. Some people are better suited for trade schools or other vocational schools. I reject the idea that all kids need an education. I think all kids need a basic education (reading, writing, basic math and science) but not all kids actually need to go through high school and on to college. The ones that want to stop at middle school, go to a trade school or an apprentice program ought to be allowed to do so. Now they can enter the workforce at an earlier age and get a good jump on life and earning a good living doing so. Those more disposed towards “book learnin’” could pursue that if we had a truly free market education system. I would have LOVED to stop going to school before I got into high school, learned a trade, and be making good money right now. As it is I’m having to do that at 26 after years of failing at everything I’ve tried to do. Hell, I could have been on the job for 12 years by now and close to retirement by the time I was 45! How life would have been different for me!
