| Jackson50 said:
Are you unaware of what a subsidy is? I am not proposing we close down state run schools and tell parents to fend for themselves. The US spends approximately $9,000 per pupil on education every year. What consumer subsidized education would allow is the parents to use that $9,000 on a school of their choice. If you are poor and do not want your kid going to a run-down inner city school, take your kid and the money, and enroll in a private/independent school. In a land where freedom and liberty supposedly rain supreme, why do we force our parents and children to use their money at schools they do not wish to attend? If they decide a vocational school or an arts & sciences academy is the best option, should they not be allowed that choice? If they want to take their kid to a school that uses the methods of Montessori in lieu of the methods of Pestalozzi, should they not be allowed that choice?. Why should we expect public schools to improve? They face no competition. What is the impetus for improvement? There is none. If we allow parents to choose the school their child attends, it will force all schools to improve their quality. If not, no one will attend their schools and they go out of business.
So we should prohibit parents and children from choosing their education because of a few bad apples? That makes no sense. Implement school choice and the American education system will improve vastly. I, just like you, think education is a basic human right and that access should be universal. We differ, however, on whether or not we would allow freedom of choice.
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On top of this there is another thing people often miss ...
For a long time people have noticed that regardless of how much money is invested into education schools with the highest concentration of middle-class students tend to outperform schools with lower concentrations of these students. Being that even the poorer students generally perform (far) better the conclusion I have most often heard is that middle class parents generally put a far greater focus on education and are far more involved with their child's school.
Now I could be wrong, but I suspect that if parents were given the option to choose their children's school that there would be a greater focus on education from parents across the board; the parent who worked hard to get their child into a better school will (probably) not accept the same poor performance from their child, and those parents who end up stuck with a poorer school might see more of a reason to get involved in the school and fix its problems.
