If the upper half leaves, even with
improved student-teacher ratios, some teachers are going to lose their jobs.
But if that happens, more jobs will be created in the alternate schools than are lost in the public schools. So the teachers don't lose. Who loses are the administrators, since no charter or private school will have remotely the same number of administrators as a public school does.
But I'm not sure of your math. If you take out the upper two thirds, and leave the lower one third, the odds are that that one third will be the students who require several times the amount of money per student to educate as the ones who have left the system. You don't suggest that all this money will be left behind -- after all, the people who make the rules are the ones whose kids will be leaving the public schools, and they will make sure enough money goes with them. So you're squeezing the public schools even more than they are now.
Second point: do we want to broaden the two-tier system to the extent that it is in, say, England? There, as I understand it, roughly half the students go to public (private) schools and the rest to grammar (public) schools. But they still have a very class centered society. Is that the best thing for our society to emulate? If so, fine. But if we want to strive for a more egalitarian society (where elitism is celebrated based on ability and not on birth or social class), we should not adopt an educational system which is contrary to that goal. |
