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Politics : Libertarian Discussion Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: All Mtn Ski who wrote (4375)	11/1/2000 2:36:15 PM
From: Heretic	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13056

Tom, You suggest we need public schools, yet you argue for letting free markets "work for education." Don't you think these are mutually exclusive views? Or are you suggesting free market public schools? <bg>

To: All Mtn Ski who wrote (4375)	11/1/2000 6:41:49 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 13056

Makes a lot of sense. In education, though, which I know something about, having been the son of teachers, a teacher and school administrator myself, the son in law of two teachers, the son in law of one school board members, and the husband of a teacher (whew!) is that if you privatize the education system you have to account for several problems. First is making doing the best you can to assure that the child whose parents really don't care suffers as little as possible for that. When some parents are very aggressive about pushing their childrens' needs, the students whose parents don't do anything to help their kids out are likely to suffer. I worry about a system where the government in effect penalizes kids for having lousy parents, where the only kids left in public schools are the ones whose parents don't care enough to get them into charter or public schools. Second is assuring fair access to government funded schools (whether public or charter) for all. I taught in private schools, my wife in public. We were able to cherry pick -- and did. And we could kick out students we didn't like, students who challenged the system, students who were rude, anti social, etc. And we did that, too. The public schools can't. If public dollars are used for private schools, these schools should be required to take everybody who wants to go there (up to capacity), and to find ways to deal with challenging students within the school. Otherwise, the public schools simply become the dumping ground of all the students the private or charter schools don't want, and that's not good for the students or for society. Third is the problem of developmentally challenged students. (Gad, that ed-speak has rubbed off on me!) They take a LOT of money to educate. (Whether we should or not is another question; I'm assuming if we publicly fund private education we still retain the commitment to give every child an equal chance to get an appropriate education.) How do you deal with this? One obvious answer is to send enough money with these students that the private schools WANT them. But that would cost the taxpayers a huge bundle. But if you simply give a $3,500 or something else voucher with every student, the private schools will reject the handicapped students, and they will join the undesirables and problem students as the core constituency of the public schools. And THEN watch the cost-per-student of the public schools go out of sight, when all the cheap-to-educate students are in the private schools and all the costly-to-educate students are left in the public schools. These aren't insoluble problems, necessarily, but they tend to be ignored by people who favor charter schools or vounchers or some of the system of public financing of private schools.

To: All Mtn Ski who wrote (4375)	11/2/2000 5:22:04 AM
From: Mama Bear	Respond to of 13056

I really do wonder where you people are getting the idea that public education would be disallowed under a Libertarian model. If a state wants to institute a public education system I'm not sure why that would be a problem. But the Federal gov't has no business and is not competant to administer such a system. The proof is in the pudding, as the products of the gov't schools are not exactly a model of functional literacy, much less competantly educated. "Let the free markets work for education, let parents decide where to send their kids" I'm all for that. How does having the gov't involved do anything but diminish those goals? Regards, Barb