National Education Standards

I don't think that public education has consistently been a failure. It's had its ups and downs. It sort of went to hell with the onslaught of post-modernism, when all this faddish stuff caught on, first in California and then spread, local school district by local school district.

And while I didn't claim in my post that I should be the one to choose the standards, I'd gladly do so.

You need to learn how to read.
You need to learn how to write.
You need to learn the basics of science and math.
You need to learn American history, geography and world history... with an emphasis on historical reality, rather than revisionism and victimology.

And, yes, keep religion completely out... which is how this whole argument started in the first place.

By allowing a free-market system, you're also allowing the possibility of the sort of schools you find in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. There are people, very rich people, who will pay handsomely for these.

It's not as simple as parents and kids wanting to succeed. If all parents and kids wanted to succeed in life, there wouldn't be a problem with the public school system. Because as supposedly inadequate as public school systems are, thousands of kids graduate every year and go on to do just fine.

I'm not discounting school vouchers or competition between schools. But like it or not, a FREE (mostly) public school system IS one of the only programs that actually works at, you know, giving one equality of opportunity... which a totally privatized school system decidely would not.

I urge you to visit Joanne Jacobs or Number 2 Pencil for more information about how the schools are indeed failing students today. I hope you'll be as appalled at some of the stuff which passes for education as I am.

As to the possibility of Wahabbi style schools and such, yes they could exist under a truly free-market system, but I have to wonder whether the cost of not allowing such a school (and again, who decides what qualifies) exceeds the benefit?

It looks like the comments stripped the actual hrefs from the input. Joanne Jacobs site is http://www.joannejacobs.com and Kimberly's site is http://www.kimberlyswygert.com.

Thanks Allen.

I'm not sure why your links didn't get generated properly; let me look into it.

Looks like it was my own html hand coding error (perhaps missing the closing '"' on the href entry. In any event, a quick test just now showed that it does appear to be working as expected.

Joanne Jacobs
Number 2 Pencil

So, how do the poor kids get educated? If education is completely privatized, how would they be able to afford even decent education, assuming they could afford it at all?

Education should not be driven by profit. Our school system may not be working very well, but privatization isn't the best solution. It's not even a very good solution. Does that mean leaving it the way it is, is the best solution? Almost certainly not.

Poor kids would pay for school the same way they pay for college and university now: take out loans, get scholarships, get financial aid.

Primary and secondary education wouldn't be nearly as expensive as college education. There would likely be schools of a whole range of quality and price, so that everyone who wanted to could afford to go somewhere. Would rich kids have an advantage over poor kids? Yes. But that's how life works. Attempts to eliminate unfairness, while morally appealing, ultimately leads to ruinous economic collapse. Everywhere socialism is tried, it fails.

Why shouldn't education be driven by profit? Just because? Is profit evil? Everything is driven by profit (monetary or otherwise), and socialist systems just disguise that reality, warp the market, and leave everyone worse off.

My church isn't driven by profit.

Neither is my intro to psychology class. And it never will be so long as I'm in charge. Wherever profit has been the motive it has diminished the seriousness of the whole endeavor.

Profit is fine for nachoes and music videos. Nobody pays to listen to philosophy and theology. But try living without them.

They may not be driven by monetary profit.

"There would likely be schools of a whole range of quality and price, so that everyone who wanted to could afford to go somewhere."

This is true. Just as true as there is a whole range of type of food, so that everyone who wants food can afford food of some kind or another. However, the poor can only afford very cheap food, which is generally of a poor quality. The same would happen with schools, and the poor -- even most of those with the moral fiber to improve their position -- would remain poor, with little chance of improving their lot. And by "poor" I don't mean "the bottom X%, salary-wise, of society." If I did, then no matter how good living conditions were, there would always be "poor" people. I mean those whose living conditions do not meet basic standards, like consistent running hot water, electricity, educational opportunities, safety, etc.

"Attempts to eliminate unfairness, while morally appealing, ultimately leads to ruinous economic collapse."

This statement implies that ANY attempt to eliminate unfairness will inevitably, and totally result in "ruinous economic collapse." This is, of course, false. Not every such attempt will lead to a systemic collapse. In general, overleveling the playing field will lead to collapse (or at least stagnation). Underleveling the playing field leads to oligopolies and monopolies -- a tiny upper class who hold the vast majority of wealth and power, and a huge subservient class who are oppressed.

"Everywhere socialism is tried, it fails."

Don't tell Norway:

"The Norwegian economy is a prosperous bastion of welfare capitalism, featuring a combination of free market activity and government intervention." - CIA World Factbook 2002

The obvious counter-argument is to redefine what you mean by "socialism." However, you haven't defined what you meant by "socialism" in the first place. Complete state socialism? Any attempt by government to interfere with a capitalist market? You should define what you mean, since your usage leaves so much to the imagination.

Also, perhaps you should specify what other forms of "profit" there are besides "monetary profit." What kind of profit do you gain from going to church? Seeing a movie? Hanging out with friends? Getting a good education?

Economists generally refer to "utility" to avoid the connotations that the word "profit" implies. Utility can be anything you value: love, peace, money, freedom, whatever.

I don't know much about Norway, but my cursory examination of the CIA Factbook indicates that most of its wealth comes from exploiting its natural oil reserves. That is not the indication of a healthy economy, regardless of per capita income. Norway doesn't have a virbrant, diversified economy, just as the Arab nations in the middle east do not. They're all surviving off of found money, by the pure chance that they happened to be sitting atop oil.

Yes, under a privatized education system poor students would get worse educations than rich students. But that's already the case, and there's no reason to think the disparity would grow if poor students were given more options.

It's obviously not the case that every tiny attempt to eliminate unfairness on its own will lead to disaster, but the accumulation of small things will. Not only that, each individual thing is less efficient than it would be in a free market system, and in the long run that hurts everyone more than short-term unfairness does. It's important to look at the long range effect of these policies, not merely the immediate.

This isn't original, but I don't remember where I read it. Anyway...

If we bought food the way we buy education, every community would have one food store that every one was forced to support through taxes. It would offer only the food that the food commissars thought was best for everyone. There would also be private food stores, that offered more and often higher quality choices; but few would be able to afford them because they were already paying taxes to support the government food store.

Even with our (mostly) private market in food, poor people still manage to eat. For one thing, the free-market has resulted in food becoming cheaper over time. Also, for the poorest, we provide "food vouchers" and let them choose food at the private food markets. That involves the public and the expenditure of tax dollars, but does so in ways that are much less damaging than an extensive system of government-run grocery stores would be.

If it works for something as basic and vital as food, why wouldn't it work for education?

Michael (and the gang)... Just want to say, lots of good back and forth here and I didn't duck out of the argument. Just had that whole blackout thing up here in New York and my neighborhood in Brooklyn was probably the last to get power. ... and now I just wanna watch tv and be stoopid for a bit.

Chip:

Uh, maybe because education and food are fundamentally different? :)

Michael:

Poor students *wouldn't* necessarily be given more options. More likely, they'd have as many options as they have now -- except the options they had would likely prey on their ignorance and lack of education, even more than happens in present school districts. If we suddenly have entirely privatized education, are there any standards for what a school constitutes? In your proposal, it sounds like there aren't -- since setting standards is socialist. So any crook who can scrounge up enough money could establish something called a "school," hire teachers who aren't qualified in any reasonable sense, and set about depriving the poor of their money without giving them much of anything in return.

(The argument that this is not much different than today's schools *is not valid*. A solution that changes nothing is not a solution.)

And since the entire point of education is to ensure that our children learn enough to become able to contribute effectively to the economy when they grow up, *it is in your interest to support their education.* The counter-argument is that people should be free to contribute their money to whichever schools they want, instead of being forced to by the government. The problem is that those who have extra money to contribute to education will contribute most of it to their own childrens' education. Those who don't have kids probably won't contribute much at all if they aren't forced to. Those who have kids and DON'T have money end up with exceedingly poor educational opportunities, and very little chance to improve them. Vouchers are one conceivable system, and despite various courts' acceptance of them as not violating Establishment, I'm not particularly in favor of my personal tax dollars going to support religious education.

Another issue is that the vaunted competition angle does not exist in the same way as it does for, say, consumer products. If I don't like brand A detergent, switching to brand B is not a huge deal. If I don't like school A, switching to school B is not especially feasible (it would be, in most cases, severely disruptive to the child's education). You can't try out several schools in succession the way you can try out several brands of detergent. So even if there was "competitive choice," that choice gets to be made maybe once or twice, and if you choose badly, sucks to be you... or your kids.

Well, you can't switch cars on a whim either, but competition works in the auto industry.

And yes, crooks try to prey on the stupid. That's not good with regard to education, or anything else, and I'm not saying that there shouldn't be any oversight. The main contribution by the government should be enforcing transparency, like the FTC and the SEC are supposed to do for businesses, and the FDA is supposed to do for food and drugs (although the FDA at least is a debacle).

It's true that education is good for everyone, and I'm not against the type of public university system that we have now. If primary and secondary education could be modeled after the UC, CSU, and community college system that California uses I'm sure it would be a vast improvement. Maybe not ideal, but it would sure be a lot better, and give us options for further refinement in the future.

With cars, you can be pretty well assured that no matter the details of the particular car, the end result via using car A over car B is going to be absolutely identical: you arrive at your destination, and the type of car you drove there no longer makes any difference. Additionally, a cheap car may not get you to your destination as comfortably or as quickly as a more expensive car, but then again we have laws limiting how fast you can get to your destination anyway, so a faster car is not particularly more useful.

Further, the cars I can buy is not a thousandth as tied to my geographical location as the schools I can choose to attend. With a few exceptions, any car I can buy in Los Angeles I could also buy in Kentucky, Chicago, Florida, New York, Alaska, and in some cases, even foreign countries. I am limited *only* by my budget. The number of school options I have would be far smaller. Not to mention that no two schools, even were they owned by the same company and run under the same policies and educational requirements, are not going to be anywhere near as functionally comparable as even the most vastly different consumer vehicles: e.g. a Mini Cooper and an H2 Hummer. Even if such capitalistic competition between schools WAS a good way to ensure good education (it's not), the competition would be at a far smaller level than it would be for any consumer goods.

Schools are not comparable enough to consumer goods for the idea that "Since capitalist competition works for consumer goods, why wouldn't it work for education?" to work.

I'm not positive what you mean by "modeled after the UC, CSU and community college system..." Do you mean that there would be the highest-level schools (UCs) for the best students, the CSUs for the midlevel students, and the CCs for the worst students? It's not a bad idea (if that is what you mean), but applying it to primary education is problematic. For one thing, whether you can get into a UC, CSU, or CC depends on how you did in your prior educational life -- high school. How do you usefully measure a toddler's academic abilities? How do you determine whether a four-year old should be in the advanced, medium, or lowest first-grade class? And doesn't dividing children up at that point start reinforcing their societal roles early on, without giving them a chance to show what they can do?

That, I believe, is the commonly-given justification for "uniform" primary and secondary education: trying to segregate children by ability so young is not nearly as reliable as doing so at a college level. Whether it's a valid justification is a is a slightly different debate; but my point stands, that a capitalist approach to education is not going to improve matters.

Obviously the market for cars is not the same as the market for education. Nevertheless, there are certainly other products that people consume that are geographically based. Plus, there's no reason to assume that you couldn't get the same education in every city; why couldn't "chain" schools (like McSchool or something) pop up and offer similar programs all around the country? Your assertion that schools will be so vastly different even when run by the same company seems spurious to me. After all, isn't that the goal of public education? Provide similar schools to everyone?

It's not really that hard to judge a child's intelligence, if you take the time to get to know them. However, that's irrelevent. in a free market system, schools could set their own criteria and accept whomever they want. It doesn't matter how it's done. It will automatically be efficient. If you disagree about that, then either you see some sort of inevitable market distortion (such as natural monopolies) or you don't buy into the fundamental tenets of capitalism.

Everywhere capitalism is tried, it works. Sometimes some government oversight is necessary to prevent natural monopolies, but that's about it. Everywhere socialism is tried, it fails. Just look around.

Geographically-based products tend to be natural monopolies in the first place -- water and power are the obvious examples. Education isn't quite as geographically-linked as utilities are, but it's certainly far more geographically linked than anything normally considered a "consumer good." That and the other reasons given above are part of why I think a pure free-market approach to primary/secondary education isn't really going to work (and, explicitly, why the car analogy doesn't work).

No, it's not hard to judge a child's intelligence, but the amount of time and effort it would take to usefully judge *every* child's intelligence to a degree necessary to assign them to a level of primary schooling would be prohibitive. And since children will have absolutely no academic rigor -- even the smartest ones -- we need some kind of grounding to determine what their potential is. (Nevermind the fact that primary and secondary education are sometimes seen as places where you learn how to interact socially, rather than places where you learn academics.)

If we were to adopt a UC/CSU/CC-style system, the primary school level might serve as the first step toward separation by academic skill, I suppose... but then that's more or less what we have now, except now it's done by the end of the secondary school level. I don't know if such a system could be downwardly applied to the primary school level, and even if it could, whether that would help with our educational problems.

By "It will automatically be efficient," what you're referring to is surface-level fiscal utility. The long-term social utility of such a system will, I believe, be worse than a properly implemented public education system.

You seem to believe that a capitalist approach (with minimal anti-monopoly government oversight) to *any and all* systems is always the best approach. I'm fairly certain that's not true; mass transit comes to mind (imagine multiple independent road systems that are unconnected and incompatible). Such capitalism is almost certainly a better *overall* economic system (in the large-scale sense) than socialism, but it doesn't always scale to every system of any kind, without question. If socialism always fails, in every system, inevitably, then why are major-league sports drafts socialist? The team that did the worst gets the first pick -- and then it goes around until everyone gets a chance. If it were capitalist, it wouldn't be like that. There wouldn't be salary caps, either. That sounds like a bit more regulation than you approve of.

So do I misunderstand what you mean by "Everywhere capitalism is tried, it works." and "Everywhere socialism is tried, it fails."?

WARNING: I'm coming in late on this... blame Matt. ;-) So the following is a very long response to The Entire Thread So Far.

First, some history.

Why do we have public education in the United States? It's part of the capitalist (yes, *capitalist*) Protestant tradition. The early Puritan Capitalists realized early on that in order to be productive, they needed a literate, numerate, articulate work force for even the most menial jobs. Thus was free public education, and eventually mandatory public education, born. In a later development, the protestants figured out they needed to teach their own children how to be leaders, so they founded private schools. Today those schools are the most-esteemed private schools... the ones that senators, CEOs, and so on send their children to.

So let's just start there: to privatize education would be anti-capitalist and anti-Protestant. Ok, so that's making a bit of a leap... but the point is made that the notions behind the US public educational system are anything but secularly socialistic.

Now, let's get to the specific arguments:

Michael: "Poor kids would pay for school the same way they pay for college and university now: take out loans, get scholarships, get financial aid."

What about all the poor kids who *don't* do any of those things? Because they can't forsee paying off the loan, or don't find out about the scholarships, or just plain don't have the time and energy (because, after all, there are a shocking number of high-school students working 20+ hours a week to help their families-- many of them were my neighbors and classmates) to track down the information and fill out the paperwork?

Poor kids don't go to college nearly as often as non-poor kids (even lower-middle-class kids). It's not because they're mostly stupid. It's because it's an incredible amount of work to pay for it if you don't have any resources. And because the system flat-out assumes they won't, and doesn't try to help them. In my Sociology of Education class, one of the studies presented was an analysis of college counselor meetings. Middle-class kid with low grades comes in: "You'll have to work hard to pull these grades up to get into any college." Poor kid with the same grades comes in: "You don't have high enough grades to get into any college." They say the same thing, but give a different message.

Start this system at kindergarten, see how fast everyone drops out.

Michael: "Would rich kids have an advantage over poor kids? Yes. But that's how life works."

Which begs the question, "Is that how life *should* work?" Europe hasn't met with ruinous economic collapse; in fact, they're doing pretty well.... in spite of the fact that in pretty much every EU country (and possibly every single one; I only know first-hand about a few) your education is fully paid for *through your Bachelor's degree*. Finland does quite well, even though you can get as much money on "welfare" as you can if you're going to college. For some reason, most people still work, and make amazing cellphones and antivirus software. But there aren't people starving on the streets.

As Voltaire said: "Poor people have access to the courts the way Christians in Ancient Rome had access to the lions." Shall we make our educational system the same way? Shall we accept this state of being where some people, simply by being born with a smaller pocketbook, shall perpetually be at a disadvantage?

Michael: "Everything is driven by profit (monetary or otherwise), and socialist systems just disguise that reality, warp the market, and leave everyone worse off."

"Utility" is a better word than profit, as you mentioned later. But it seems you don't see the enormous utility that free public education has for our society. Without it, we don't have a qualified work force, and our economic system collapses. Remember all those H1-B Visas that our government was giving out like candy a couple years ago? Just think, if we had a really good educational system, it wouldn't have taken more than 12 months to start cranking out minimally qualified sysops and coders. Certainly no more time than it did to import huge numbers of them. And wow, would we have kept a bundle of money in our economy.

Michael: "There would likely be schools of a whole range of quality and price, so that everyone who wanted to could afford to go somewhere."

"Likely" is a good word there. But still inaccurate. After all, there wouldn't be any money in giving poor kids a decent education, just like there's not any money in opening supermarkets in South L.A. -- which is why there aren't any. The only way to make money off of them would be something like the fly-by-night proprietary schools that exist now, which basically are there to take poor adults' Pell grants and send them out the door with a worthless piece of paper.

So then you have the situation where the government has to subsidize education through grants and incentives. Maybe, like our farmers, they could pay people enough money that it would be worthwhile for them to stay in business teaching poor kids. Actually, our government would probably get ripped off less and save money if it just operated the schools. Wait a minute... that sounds familiar.

Michael: "I don't know much about Norway, but my cursory examination of the CIA Factbook indicates that most of its wealth comes from exploiting its natural oil reserves. That is not the indication of a healthy economy, regardless of per capita income. Norway doesn't have a virbrant, diversified economy, just as the Arab nations in the middle east do not. They're all surviving off of found money, by the pure chance that they happened to be sitting atop oil."

Shall we discuss the reasons why North America was colonized by Europe? We're all living the legacy of "found money". Oil, gold, sugar, furs... all sorts of things that were plentiful here and in great demand elsewhere. That's how we became so enormously successful... we got lucky.

Chip: "Even with our (mostly) private market in food, poor people still manage to eat. For one thing, the free-market has resulted in food becoming cheaper over time."

So cheap, in fact, that the only way we can prevent a massive food shortage is to pay farmers for letting fields lie fallow. Between that and the slightly higher market prices that result from the lowered production, farming can be profitable... barely.

Chip: "Also, for the poorest, we provide "food vouchers" and let them choose food at the private food markets. That involves the public and the expenditure of tax dollars, but does so in ways that are much less damaging than an extensive system of government-run grocery stores would be."

Why is an extensive system of government-run grocery stores so damaging? This seems like an unsupported assumption. Besides, rather than supporting the consumption end, as I just pointed out, we support the production end.

And then there's food stamps, and our whole welfare system. When a family gets food stamps, what do they cover? 3 squares a day? The RDA of vitamins and minerals? 2,000 calories? Nope. The program is based on what's called the "emergency temporary diet." This is how much food it takes to stay alive and reasonably coherent, and it's not something that the FDA thinks you should live on for years on end. It's also based on the cheapest prices possible for these foods, including all kinds of bulk buys and bargain-hunting. You try going to Costco without a car and see how well you do. A mother with two kids in tow (because we have no childcare system) is not carrying a 50-pound bag of rice home on the bus.

Then, to get the base amount of a monthly welfare check, they take that amount they've discovered for buying food and multiply it times three. Because, after all, the average family spends 1/3 of their budget on food. So we're assuming they'll get the "emergency temporary" equivalent in housing, clothes, transportation, and health care too I guess.

When my mother was teaching in Los Angeles Unified's Adult Division, at one point she started getting boxes of Clif bars and taking them to class. She made up a story about how a friend of hers gives them to her for free because he drives a truck for them or something. So the students could go and grab one of these high-calorie high-nutrient bars if they wanted one. Grades went up. You can't learn very well with low blood sugar, and a lot of these people were basically starving. And those were the ones with the wherewithal to actually go try to get a high-school diploma at night.

Michael: "Well, you can't switch cars on a whim either, but competition works in the auto industry."

If competition works so well in the auto industry, then why are our auto manufacturers always asking for higher tariffs, bailouts, and whatnot? And why is it that there's only one car company (Honda) that consistently exceeds standards for fuel efficiency and emissions, while all the others do the bare minimum to comply with government standards? If competition "worked" in the auto industry, then we'd all be driving 100-mpg SUVs with almost no emissions. Without government requirements, our autos would all *still* be belching smoke as a matter of course (except for the Hondas). That doesn't sound functional to me. It sounds more like government regulation is all that's preventing the auto industry from "competing" us right out of the gene pool.

Michael: "It's true that education is good for everyone, and I'm not against the type of public university system that we have now. If primary and secondary education could be modeled after the UC, CSU, and community college system that California uses I'm sure it would be a vast improvement. Maybe not ideal, but it would sure be a lot better, and give us options for further refinement in the future."

Minorities and the poor (and there's a whole lot of overlap between those groups) are vastly underrepresented in the school systems you named. You would like *all* our education to be like that, hm?

Besides... None of those are privatized. The State of California or the County of whatever runs each and every one. The State still pays 75% of the UC's budget, with a large chunk of student-paid funds coming from out-of-state tuition. They also fund the school with product licensing, sports, private contributions, grants, and so on. And they're completely non-profit. If you like that system, then what's better about it than the current k-12 system? Simply that not everyone gets to go? Or just that it has some small price on it? And if so, why is that better?

Michael: "Obviously the market for cars is not the same as the market for education. Nevertheless, there are certainly other products that people consume that are geographically based. Plus, there's no reason to assume that you couldn't get the same education in every city; why couldn't "chain" schools (like McSchool or something) pop up and offer similar programs all around the country? Your assertion that schools will be so vastly different even when run by the same company seems spurious to me. After all, isn't that the goal of public education? Provide similar schools to everyone?"

First of all, imagine you're a parent. Now, imagine feeding your child on nothing but McDonald's food. Hey, it was your analogy, not mine.

A program that can be run cheaply enough to be profitable in any location and also be cheap enough for everyone to afford will necessarily be very, very cheaply made. Think about where you can cut costs in education:

- Labor. Higher student/teacher ratio means fewer labor dollars spent per student. It also means less one-on-one interaction, less supervision overall, shorter assignments that the teacher spends less time grading, and so on.

- Materials. Textbooks, which are generally produced by private corporations for a profit, are ridiculously expensive. Even at that, they're often biased, incomplete, and inaccurate. The best teachers use more than one book on a single subject because no one book tells you what you need to learn. To save money, you can either have fewer books per student, or perhaps do away with texts altogether and the teacher can produce all the learning material. That same teacher who has 30 9-year-olds to deal with every day. Now go on to other things: remember those racks of scissors, with the "lefty" ones that had green handles hanging lonely in the corner? Too expensive. Glue? We'll make paste, if it's a special occasion. Classroom decoration? Eh, probably distracting anyway... does it *really* help them learn the alphabet if it's posted in front of them every day?

- Location. Currently, our government-run public schools have some pretty careful rules about where they can go. Is it safe to walk there? Is it safe to *be* there? Are there businesses around that might not be what you want your kid next door to? Is there grass to play on? Or even enough asphalt? Is the building adequately heated and cooled? You can sure save a lot of money by buying a closed-down K-mart and putting up partitions to make "classrooms." And if it's in a low-rent area, next door to a liquor store, you'll save even more.

Once you start saying that you can provide an "education" at a price that people with no money can afford, there's really nowhere to stop. Sure, you'll say, "but, government oversight would prevent these things from happening!" But then, what happens? Government says "you need this, this, and this." School proprietor says "But, if I do that, it will cost me $$$$amount, and then I'll have to raise prices!" Now what does the government do? Subsidize the school? Subsidize the students? And, if they're paying for it *anyway*, and it's not profitable *anyway*, why is it better for a private company to get money from it than to have the goverment just run it?

In the end, I suppose it depends on what you're willing to accept. If you're willing to accept a society with a perpetual underclass of illiterates and unemployables, privatizing education might be a great idea. If you're not even willing to accept the degree of socio-economic segregation that we have *today*, though, you tend to think it's a pretty bad idea.

Hm, missed this one:

Michael: "in a free market system, schools could set their own criteria and accept whomever they want. It doesn't matter how it's done. It will automatically be efficient. If you disagree about that, then either you see some sort of inevitable market distortion (such as natural monopolies) or you don't buy into the fundamental tenets of capitalism."

Or, you might just think that every child, regardless of apparent potential, should get an education for some reason other than basic economic efficiency. If schools have the ability to "set their own criteria" and "accept whomever they want," what happens to the kids that nobody wants? Is it all right to just let them sit at home until they reach the entry age for a life of crime?

Do you honestly believe that, in a free-market educational system, there will always be a place for every child?

I can't respond to all that, but I appreciate the time you took to write it and the thought that went into it.

As you point out, there are a lot of details that would need to be taken care of. However, it's plainly obvious to me that our current system of government-run public education is a horrendous waste of time and money, and doesn't really prepare children for their future as adults. Most of the high school students I know think school is a joke; those that learn and succeed would do so without any school at all, and those that goof around would goof around without any school at all.

Lots of poor people leave their kids better off than they themselves were, and their grandkids better still. I've heard such success attributed to hard work, opportunities, luck, genius... but never to public education. Our system is floundering, and for all the potential pitfalls of privatization, it couldn't possibly turn out worse than it already is.

Whenever there's a movement to privatize anything there are doomsayers who warn that the sky is going to fall. And yet, they're always wrong. Even with an industry as difficult to make competitive as power generation, our current (ha) problems are the result of over-regulation and price-ceilings, not deregulation. Sure, privatizing education won't be easy and will need to be tweaked, but despite the seriousness of all your objections you don't have history or economics on your side.

Free markets work. Government oversight can add value in limited circumstances, but government management is always a losing proposition. Governments are inefficient and corrupt, bureaucrats are lazy and inept and more concerned with maintaining their power than with serving the public, and money is wasted hand over fist.

Private education wouldn't immediately lead to the equal results that social programs are so fond of, but over time competition and market forces would leave everyone better off -- rich and poor alike.

Your whole electricity example is silly, because if the price-caps had been lifted the energy companies wouldn't have sold off their generating capacity. Go read more about it. Those 700% increases in cost were artificial, not natural, and they wouldn't have occurred without the absurd "deregulation". You don't need multiple carrier lines to have competition, you just need minor government regulation to enforce the lease of line usage.

I don't know what you count as literacy, but I can guarantee you that a great many high school graduates are not truly literate.

There's no tragedy of the commons unless there are "commons". That's the problem. The government ends up picking economic winners because it controls the commons. That's why the government should divest itself of much of its property and function.

Yeah many countries have public education, and America's primary and secondary schools are among the worst. Despite the fact that many of our universities are "public" in a sense, they aren't public in the same way that our lower education is. I'm astounded that you don't recognize the difference between UCLA's involvement with the government and Venice High School's.

There's no basis for assuming that free-market education will work? Please. Free markets work in every other industry; just because they're counter-intuitive to some doesn't mean they shouldn't be tried for education, as well. Unfortnately, education is a very emotionally charged issue (apparently), and largely directed by soccer moms.

I'm pretty much done arguing about this.