Your support of public monopoly education is interesting to me, as your comments on this thread make you sound like a thoughtful, well-informed person. Presumably there are some aspects of public monopoly education you would like to change. Do you support seniority-based pay scales, strong unions, and teacher tenure?
There's a few education economists that have noted that if we could fire the worst 7% of teachers in the US and replace them with merely average teachers, then the US would have the best schools in the world (Eric Hanushek out of Stanford is one). This is a vital and cheap policy for us to carry out, but it is well-known that you can't get fired from government jobs. I can't imaging school systems being the first to change.
Do you think it is politically possible to reform the worst parts of the public monopoly school systems with its current structure? School boards in population-dense areas are often staffed exclusively with union representatives. What model of the world convinces you that these school bureaucracies will do what is right for the students?
I find the arguments for student educational choice to be compelling. In a place like Washington DC, I think it will be much more effective to simply pay for the students to attend good schools than to reform schools that have been horrible (and overfunded!) for decades.
There's a few education economists that have noted that if we could fire the worst 7% of teachers in the US and replace them with merely average teachers, then the US would have the best schools in the world (Eric Hanushek out of Stanford is one). This is a vital and cheap policy for us to carry out, but it is well-known that you can't get fired from government jobs. I can't imaging school systems being the first to change.
Do you think it is politically possible to reform the worst parts of the public monopoly school systems with its current structure? School boards in population-dense areas are often staffed exclusively with union representatives. What model of the world convinces you that these school bureaucracies will do what is right for the students?
I find the arguments for student educational choice to be compelling. In a place like Washington DC, I think it will be much more effective to simply pay for the students to attend good schools than to reform schools that have been horrible (and overfunded!) for decades.