Charter schools are a trojan horse to let the private sector bleed the last few drops of blood out of our sabotaged, decrepit, starved public K-12 system.
Segregation is bad. Rich kids, middle class kids, and poor kids in an area should have to go to the same public schools in the areas they live in, under force of law. The quality would improve so fast your head would spin. The owners don’t want education to improve for anyone but their kids though. Peasants capable of critical thought are explicitly against their interests.
Instead the rich kids are segregated to private schools to learn not to empathize with their future livestock.
The middle class kids and a handful of tokens are segregated to charter schools, likely to be indoctrinated with “conservative (racist, classist, and sociopathic) principles” at places like challenger schools.
And the poor kids and kids with busy laboring parents are segregated to the ruins of our public K-12 we starved to death. And surprise surprise most of the non-white kids go here. Everything old is new again.
To expand on this, “school choice” is sold to several different audiences:
The well-intentioned parents who say “I can pull my kids out of a ‘failed’ public school” which only serves to remove anyone who might provide accountability or volunteer support for said schools, creating a death spiral. Fixing this would require some way to make parents understand the common-good aspect. You might be trying to help your own little Timmy today, but at the expense of everyone, inclluding Little Timmy in 2055 when the skilled-worker economy has tanked in his hometown.
The whackjob brigades, who will gravitate to whichever school gets the closest to teaching the Bible as literal fact while still qualifying for as a non-private school that thus getting the costs covered by the state. In most cases, we don’t want these parents anywhere near decision making processes.
Narrow use cases where there’s a viable argument for a different school program. Some charter schools positioned themselves as “last chance” programs, offering things like customized schedules for kids forced to choose between high school and work, or online-only programs before Covid made it a big deal. A sufficiently resourced public school system should have similar ability to offer options, but if you have a lot of small districts, maybe they need some ability to form cooperatives to fill these gaps.
I never quote understood the patchwork of school systems in the US-- one town might say “all the schools under one district, covering 80,000 students” and the next town has five different districts for elementary only, then others for high schools, and none of them have market-making buying power for anything from textbooks to teachers.
Charter schools are a trojan horse to let the private sector bleed the last few drops of blood out of our sabotaged, decrepit, starved public K-12 system.
Segregation is bad. Rich kids, middle class kids, and poor kids in an area should have to go to the same public schools in the areas they live in, under force of law. The quality would improve so fast your head would spin. The owners don’t want education to improve for anyone but their kids though. Peasants capable of critical thought are explicitly against their interests.
Instead the rich kids are segregated to private schools to learn not to empathize with their future livestock.
The middle class kids and a handful of tokens are segregated to charter schools, likely to be indoctrinated with “conservative (racist, classist, and sociopathic) principles” at places like challenger schools.
And the poor kids and kids with busy laboring parents are segregated to the ruins of our public K-12 we starved to death. And surprise surprise most of the non-white kids go here. Everything old is new again.
How is this a society again?
That’s easy. It’s a society, just in collapse.
Collapses don’t occur overnight, they happen slowly and painfully through methods you’ve described above.
To expand on this, “school choice” is sold to several different audiences:
The well-intentioned parents who say “I can pull my kids out of a ‘failed’ public school” which only serves to remove anyone who might provide accountability or volunteer support for said schools, creating a death spiral. Fixing this would require some way to make parents understand the common-good aspect. You might be trying to help your own little Timmy today, but at the expense of everyone, inclluding Little Timmy in 2055 when the skilled-worker economy has tanked in his hometown.
The whackjob brigades, who will gravitate to whichever school gets the closest to teaching the Bible as literal fact while still qualifying for as a non-private school that thus getting the costs covered by the state. In most cases, we don’t want these parents anywhere near decision making processes.
Narrow use cases where there’s a viable argument for a different school program. Some charter schools positioned themselves as “last chance” programs, offering things like customized schedules for kids forced to choose between high school and work, or online-only programs before Covid made it a big deal. A sufficiently resourced public school system should have similar ability to offer options, but if you have a lot of small districts, maybe they need some ability to form cooperatives to fill these gaps.
I never quote understood the patchwork of school systems in the US-- one town might say “all the schools under one district, covering 80,000 students” and the next town has five different districts for elementary only, then others for high schools, and none of them have market-making buying power for anything from textbooks to teachers.