Well, I’m completely willing to leave the dangerous chemicals out of the mix. =]

But for the rest, I think the state should be focusing on RESULTS, not PROCESS. I don’t think, the state should be passing laws specifying things how many books have to be in a schools library, or what accreditation a teacher requires to teach 1st grade or High School English. That’s telling people HOW to do the job. The state should focus on WHAT, specifically, WHAT do children need to know, at each grade level, to demonstrate minimum competency. They should test the students periodically, on these core subjects, say once a year or once a quarter, or however often as they do for homeschooling students. And put schools on notice, and shut them down if the kids aren’t making steady progress.

As for the rest of it, let each school decide if the kids would be better off with more books, or more teachers, or more computers, or whatever.

Yes, I agree, some schools would be substandard, and some teachers would be substandard. But, some schools and some teachers are substandard NOW.

1) public school funding is largely local. As such, it varies wildly from district to district. My district spends ~$10k per student per year. A neighboring district spends ~$25k per student per year.

2) My district is under the state’s thumb for repeatedly “failing” the state’s standardized tests while said neighboring district isn’t. What those tests don’t take into account for passing / failing schools are:
a) transient kids
b) kids that enter the district late and then are counted for that district’s total on the comprehensive tests the following year (ie: Philadelphia doesn’t educate the kids for K-10 and we’re supposed to get them caught up in 1 year and get hammered when they aren’t?)
c) immigrants that don’t speak English
d) the parents who either don’t care or can’t around enough to show that they care
e) Biggest Problem: wild variations in the talent / ability / studiousness of student populations year-over-year in the test scoring (it’s always this year vs last year and both of those vs a supposedly objective set-point)

3) Our economy increasingly rewards those who are capable of thinking abstractly. However, a large part of our population just isn’t ready for abstract thinking. AND, we still need people to do the vo-tech jobs. My HS is one of the few in the area that actually has both programs within it to prepare students for each “world”. Unfortunately, those that choose the vo-tech route have their economic options severely limited, while those who try for the college-route but can’t foot the bill end up in a deep hole. (make the vo-tech jobs economically viable or the college education more affordable or a combo of both, or my current students will be permanently in debt)

4) Private schools get to pick their students and can kick out kids for minor infractions. Public schools have to go through the ringer to get rid of major troublemakers. I’d love to see our local private schools educate our “average” student…

5) Exactly, Mr. Merkel. If a student isn’t homeschooled, he can’t be schooled. Unless parents take up the burden of being parents, not even the most persistent teacher can put the pieces together.

and 6) Thank you Mr. Merkel for writing this blog. I love reading it and have learned much.

The main failure of public schools is not their low achievement test scores because those are mostly a function of student ability. Rather their greatest failure is not providing sufficient vocational training and apprenticeships for the majority of students who don’t go to college and need practical jobs skills and a career.

Funding levels are adequate, but vocational opportunities are not.

Good question. Schools are different from daycare (at least, private schools are. Some public schools barely qualify as daycare.) There are overhead costs you ignored, mostly. It’s illegal to just grab a bunch of kids and “start teaching them.” You need to be accredited, or on the way to being accredited. There are a lot of regulations involved in this. A high school needs qualified teachers for a variety of subjects. Again, for a high school, to be accredited, you need a certain number of books, and a certain type of library system in place. There are laws that require subject like chemistry, and laws regulating the use of chemicals. (Feel free to say we should do away with either or both, but it’s not as simple as you made it out to be.)

For profit schools have no real motive to compete, since so much of education has no good metrics anyways. Cheating the system would be easier than teaching, and much more lucrative. There is nothing in place to prevent this, because there aren’t dollars chasing education yet – it’s a complex system, and you had better think long and hard before saying you can simply scrap it. There is significant difficulty in making a transition like this. And you can tell a decade of kids that you’re sorry they were screwed because you wanted to overhaul education and it was ruined in the mean time, but I wouldn’t want to.

I don’t know where you are coming up with 2x and 3x. That would put the average price of private schools at $20,000 to $30,000 /year/child.

As for how, well, if I were a school teacher, or interested in becoming a school teacher, I would be thrilled to get a salary and benefit package of $120,000/year. Add in $30,000 for textbooks, materials, and rent for a ‘one room school house’ (maybe one of those foreclosed houses sitting empty?). That would work out to $6,000 per pupil per year for 25 kids. I’m sure entrepreneurs would come up with much more profitable approaches than that, with computer learning, etc, instead of the labor intensive practices we currently use.

Or, sell every public school to the highest bidder on June 1st, with all the playground equipment, libraries, and desks, and then let the new owners hire teachers and get started.

Sure there would be some waste and fraud, but there are plenty of schools in the public school system that are terrible too. The difference is, with private enterprise, if your child is so unfortunate as to get into a bad school YOU CAN MOVE HIM TO A DIFFERENT SCHOOL, and try again. The bad schools would go out of business, after a while, for lack of customers, and be replaced by new schools. Chain schools would get started (Walmart-for-Kids? Harvard-in-a-Box? Why not?) Guaranteed there would be COMPETITION for all of those education dollars.

I don’t have any trouble believing the free market would fail here and there – for kids with serious problems, or in neighborhoods with serious problems. And I could see pouring some extra taxpayer money into those areas. But private DAY CARE works, why shouldn’t private SCHOOLS?

Public schools currently educate about 50 million students PK-12. Private schools have about 6 million. Most private schools run at capacity or even turn away large number of students. Please propose to us how you will transfer any large fraction of 50 million students into a system that currently holds 6 million without importing all the problems that currently afflict the public school system.

Private schools are a niche product. Many serve parochial, class or race interests that have nothing to do with higher-quality education. The ones that do offer a higher-quality education are often purposefully small and regularly over-subscribed. Also whenever you drop a lot of federal subsidy into an unregulated marketplace with limited existing capacity, fraud and waste follow (see for-profit higher education). On your plan, the benefits will accrue to those families who are savvy/talented/connected enough to secure their place. The rest will be left behind in a floundering, ever-worsening public education system.

If you were talking about a mature proposal like importing some of what works in private schools into the public school system, or supporting the further growth of successful private schools, I might listen. But throwing more advantages at people who already have them, which is what vouchers amount to, is no solution.