I don't have children at all, and I don't mind paying taxes to fund schools, because when I'm old I want the doctor who is younger than to have gotten a good education. I don't expect any vouchers just because I don't have kids consuming public education.

Vouchers always seemed to me like an obvious scheme to defund public schools and let them rot, thereby punishing kids who were unlucky enough to be born poor.

So it doesn't defund public schools, but it does break the public school monopoly and allows competition among schools - they can cater to the needs of the community and experiment.

The real issue is: Why are schools failing?

When I was growing up, the vast majority of kids were educated in public schools. They weren't perfect, but they worked at least decently for the large majority of students, and did so for decades. Across the entire region. And they did that as a monopoly system you seen to despise so much.

So we had a system that worked, was scalable, replicable, and maintainable. What happened?

I don't have all the answers there, but at least once thing is clear, there is now an over-emphasis on testing. We had a system that was designed to give citizens important life skills, and turned it into a system that tries to produce drones that can pass tests.

This is exactly the kind of thing we used to criticize Asian school systems about. And now we are trying to replicate their failings. WTF

That's the thing that frustrates me about this debate. People seem to think that educating children well it's such a difficult problem, that it requires constant innovation. That it requires the "power of the free market" to solve. No, it doesn't. We have known how to do it for a long time. It just requires political will.

And that brings us to another factor, one political party is actively anti-science and actively anti-education. This was definitely not the case 30 - 40 years ago. Back then, they were both pro-public education.

Nobody really has any effective way to evaluate them, or at least, nobody does so on a broad basis or consistently. Some of them can’t pass fizzbuzz. Some of them can churn out CRUD apps, but have no idea what they’re doing when it comes to anything else. Some of them are extremely dogmatic about design patterns and tooling and ignore anything they don’t like. Some of them are inattentive or poor listeners. Some of them assume it’s Problem X they’ve seen a million times, but it’s not. Some of them are assholes. Some of them are really sharp and really engaged, but get overly excited and reinvent the wheel or spend a lot of time doing stuff that’s completely unnecessary and maybe even harmful.

I don’t know how to evaluate doctors until I see them, I have no idea if better doctors cost more or less, I doubt there’s a strong correlation because nobody else can evaluate them either. They either help me or they don’t.

I think it absolutely is necessary that I should be able to have a history and see the same doctor, and that I should be able to see another doctor any time I want for the same condition for a second, third, or fourth opinion. I have seen this be absolutely necessary for myself and others with common conditions that were resolved after seeing a different doctor.

I assume this is still possible in most if not all public health care systems (I live in the US but local doctors and hospitals are all government run, an interesting aside), but I am not sure. I recently had a conversation with a Canadian friend who has debilitating autoimmune disease his specialist is doing basically nothing for and he made it seem like it wasn’t possible, but I didn’t want to press.