The main conservative complaint is that without competition for your tax money, public schools are at best a democraticly controlled monopoly with captive consumers. Middle grounds like keeping public schools but let them compete with private ones, using vouchers, for whatever reason reaches this contrived argument of certain interests being scared that a parent may decide another school is a better pick for their child's voucher. If public schools are best parents will be happy to select them, so why not find out?

"public schools are at best a democraticly controlled monopoly with captive consumers"

Public schools are not companies with a monopoly, nor do they have consumers, these are very loaded terms. Do you speak of all infrastructure in this way? Do you say the police have consumers? Or the firefighters a monopoly on putting out fires? Roads a monopoly on letting cars drive over them?

This world view that everything relates to money first and foremost, lives on markets, only improves by competition, should justify its existence in some measurable wealth producing way is very dangerous in my opinion, because not everything can work this way.

Public service has to be unprofitable in many cases, its first mission is to bring a service to the population, not to compete with the private sector. I once visited Maripasoula, a <10k pop town in the middle of the Amazon only accessible by river or small (10-20 passenger) propeller plane. I was fascinated to see it has: a post office (that doubles as a bank), a modern high school with dorms, firefighters and a police station. No private sector actor is going to provide any such service to this population in these conditions. These services do not improve by competition, because there can be none, yet they exist and work well. Crazy, that.

Where there is a mix of private and public, the private sector only services where (be it ___location or target population wise) it is most profitable and leaves the rest to the public sector to fend with. That does not in itself indicate it functions better, only that it only goes for the lowest hanging fruit by essence of why it exists: to maximize profit. The private sector is not in the business of making its life complicated, the end goal of any company is to provide the least possible for the highest price possible.

In the case of schooling, private schools' only merit is being inaccessible to the poorer populations, hence giving kids a network that sits higher on the social ladder. Generalize this and you find that it no longer brings anything worthwhile to the table, except for those with arbitrary educational constraints such as religious ones. Not that this "benefit" is particularly defensible to begin with.

>Public schools are not companies with a monopoly, nor do they have consumers, these are very loaded terms. Do you speak of all infrastructure in this way? Do you say the police have consumers? Or the firefighters a monopoly on putting out fires? Roads a monopoly on letting cars drive over them?

I am not a conservative. The monopoly and consumer term is applied correctly whether you find it loaded or not. The police have a monopoly on legal initiated violence yes, although for instance many towns have had private fire trash etc that fulfilled needs well. I did not call them companies, I think this is a straw man attack. On roads, miles around me the roads are publicly accessible private easements, you cannot even get to my town on a tax funded road.

You also presuppose competing schools must be for profit which is absolutely false. In many cases they are non profit.

>This world view that everything relates to money first and foremost, lives on markets, only improves by competition, should justify its existence in some measurable wealth producing way is very dangerous in my opinion, because not everything can work this way.

No need, I'm only claiming the voucher system, which isn't even my ideal system (again I am not a conservative), lets parents make a choice without first and foremost having to chase the almighty dollar as the conventional public system forces them to do before sending their kid to another school. It's not just competition but diversity of options giving the poor options where before only the rich had them .

I insist that "monopoly" is not the correct term. There is a much more precise term (with fewer associations): exclusivity. Saying "the heart has a monopoly on pumping blood" is understandable, but a better sentence would be "blood is pumped in the body by the heart only". Why use words that come from certain fields to describe things outside those fields? This introduces spurious (or intentional) meaning behind the things being said: "a school is a parasite because it takes resources from the community to exist", how do you like that sentence? It's a valid and true sentence, but I think you'll be uneasy to say that. There are parasites that benefit their host, nothing wrong with what I said, it's technically correct! I swear, I have nothing against schools, it's just a word!

Terms such as "monopoly" = exclusivity or "consumers" = users come with certain associations similar to "parasite" = dependent. I didn't say sentences using those terms are not understandable, I said they are loaded, and I stand by that.

I agree with this so much. Imo a lot of the far right's argument is based on reducing "waste" Which they promptly redefine as "profit" and now everything is fixed.

A sibling comment nailed most of it, but a few other thoughts:

- There are some students with disabilities that are extremely expensive to serve. Private schools don’t want them. Small public schools don’t want them.

If you take the pool of education dollars, divide by the number of students, and issue vouchers for that amount, you’ll get private schools siphoning off the highest margin kids, and public schools in a death spiral. That may feel more “fair” to you as a parent of a low-needs kid, but we live in a society, not a Mad Max-style dystopia.

I have two low-needs/high-performing kids. Vouchers would definitely benefit my family. Public school frustrates me to no end. But I want to make it better, not retreat to an enclave and let the plebeians eat each other.

- Schools in many ways look like a “natural monopoly”. Duplicating facilities (playgrounds, cafeterias, gyms, etc.) is economically inefficient. Ditto for specialty instructors (art/music/PE). You don’t want 10 schools competing for 300 kids, just like you don’t want 10 electric companies competing for 3000 homes. The goal is to craft policies that avoid as many of the downsides of monopolies as possible. I wish I saw the opposition to public schools digging in on the reasons they’re performing poorly. I do think there are viable reforms if the political will materializes.

You don't want competition. The only competition a school can have is by proxy measurements, and then you are deep into that age old problem that what you measure will decide the outcome.

Just like paying programmers for each bug they fix, which will drive the production of bugs to fix, paying schools for grading children will earn you a lot of highly graded children.

What we need is a respect for the profession. Treat good teachers with a lot of social respect, pay them well so they don't need to think about anything else, and give them a lot of opportunity to educate children as best they see fit. Just like we do with the best doctors.

Nah, it is not. It really is not true that this would be the only main complaint. They also complain about content they dont like existing, about public schools existing on principle, about made up gender issues and so on and so forth.

Conservatives do want to privatize them tho, mostly so that selected few can get richer.

Exactly. Education has a long long way to improve, but the alternative to mediocre public schooling is better public schooling, not homeschool which is even worse than a mediocre school.

We have the data. Homeschooling outcomes are better. This isn't up in the air, we know the answer.

I would love to see "the data" you're alluding to because everything I've read points to the opposite.

Yeah as someone who was homeschooled, I don’t know that I would ever attempt it myself. I’m simply not qualified to teach a whole lot beyond the most bare of basics, except in the narrow band representing my experience and interests. To act otherwise would constitute an embarrassing level of hubris on my part.

There’s a lot of good in modern schooling. It’s not perfect, but throwing out the baby with the bathwater as is so frequently proposed is not the solution here.

Pretty much any teacher will tell you it's because parents aren't involved and treat school like daycare. When Mom and dad come home and veg out on their phones and TV after work, the kids learn that as well. The ones that succeed have parents that are involved with their schooling which is less and less likely these days. Teachers are quitting left and right because of it.

Of course they would say that.

Blaming the parents and kids is just a scapegoat.

But yes, the kids that succeed are the ones that the parents are involved, because the teachers are useless.

The quality of teachers has gone way down, especially since federal student loans.

Anyone can become a teacher, it's a default path, and it shows.

You're part of the problem and know nothing of the shift that these teachers have seen over the last 30 years.

I've experienced terrible teachers (especially math teachers) and had to teach myself.

I've seen good schools crumble due to terrible policies and teachers.

You're enabling the problem by apologizing for these poor performing teachers.

Literally all of 8th grade was learning how to count to 10 in other languages and some stupid cross-stitching art. In Math!!!

Luckily I learned through programming on my own time, but once you're behind from one shitty math teacher, it's hard to catch up.

Lol kids are in school 30+ hours a week. When you look at the basic curricula they have to learn it is 99% on the school if it cannot be taught in that time frame, even if the kid is going home to a 4 hour shift in the slave labor camps and only ghouls for parents.

There are many reasonable criticisms of modern public schooling, but the claim that's it's completely broken (and needs burnt to the ground, as many conservatives will claim) is hyperbole and unhelpful to making actual productive change.

And the notion that private schooling (in general) is better is hard to believe. When we looked at private schools for our son, test scores and college admittance were only marginally higher and much of the gap was simple selection bias (private schools are not legally required to take all students, so don't deal with disabled, disadvantaged, or otherwise non-exceptional students). The only time private was substantially better was hyper-elite, hyper-expensive schools (Sidwell Friends, DC vs Paul VI, Fairfax vs the publics in FCPS).

I did checked them. And while it is not perfect, it is not a massive horrible disaster conservatives like to make it. It is just not unfixably broken as it is called. Compared to Europe, it does fine, being above average or around there depending on the test.

Also, America do tend to be country of extremes, so it has some very good public schools and some bad ones. Bad ones being in poor place. And it just so happen that the countries doing better tend to have less poverty and less issues related to it.