That's an incentive alignment problem. It is the responsibility of management (state and district admin) to ensure that what is best for the teacher's career is also what is best for student education.
Who's responsibility is it to ensure that what is best for the management (state and district admin) is also what is best for student education?
I'm not too familiar with the details of management here, but is it even possible for public schools (and other government operations) to have proper incentives given voters don't care about results? I suppose "school-choice", which happens to be vehemently opposed by Democrats, would be the only way.
Parents who have money and care enough already pick the schools by simply buying a house in a slightly different place. Cupertino used to be the hot place for tiger parents in the bay area to go but I'm not sure if it still is. The issue is that then the rest of the schools get even worse which eventually results in bad social issues in 20 years. The kids from those schools grow up and everyone has to deal with them.
"School-choice" is great for optimizing local maximums at the expense of just about everyone else. Public education should focus on the lowest common denominators to maximize education per tax dollar. It's not the smart people with lack of opportunity that drag down society, it's the massive amount of undereducated adults that become dangerously suceptable to manipulation.
Not clear what your argument against school choice is.
Not sure what you mean by “optimizing local maximums at the expense of everything else”. It almost sounds like an argument but there’s no substance.
You claim that public education should focus on the lowest common denominator so we can avoid an underclass susceptible to manipulation. That’s both a weak justification to purposely damage public education and condescension shown by elites when poor people don’t vote the way “they should”.
If you want to maximize education per tax dollar then you need to separate out the smart kids into their own schools. Benefits of education are not evenly distributed. It is heavily weighted towards the right tail.
Pretending that the outcome for everyone should be college and a degree is part of the problem - admitting that outcomes may be different allows you to create different paths adjusted for abilities (think trade school instead of high school, etc). Forcing everyone into the same mold results in a broken mold.
That may be true—the system may be better served by raising the floor on education. But voters are individuals, and the most passionate are likely the type of people who prioritize maximizing their own (smart) kids’ opportunities over raising the floor for everyone.
School vouchers aren't really about aligning incentives. They're a backdoor to having the public fund the religious schools comprising a large majority of private schools.
