Take a survey of public school board budgets if you want to see a waste taxpayer resources. There is already all the duplication of effort and wasteful initiatives you could ask for.

If we've learned one thing about education over the years it's that past a certain point more funding doesn't help. Improving educational outcomes requires at least 2 things that the article mentions:

1. Engaged parents.

2. Social Norms that normalize learning behaviours.

Parent's can control the first directly and the second indirectly by "choosing" a non public school option or moving to a district that has the proper norms.

Charter schools are one of a class of escape hatches that less advantaged parents can choose in order to impact the second factor for their child. I strongly believe that these escape hatches should exist for the Parents who can't easily move or choose a private option. Improving education outcomes for the children of those parents who do care requires giving them tools to support their children whether the environment itself does or does not.

It seems unfair to force those parents to fail just because their community is failing around them.

> If we've learned one thing about education over the years it's that past a certain point more funding doesn't help.

Have we learned this? I don't remember a single time in my life when teachers were generally considered fairly paid.

It is more a dollar spend on the parents is going to have a better outcome than a dollar spent on the teacher. I think Andrew Yang referenced this in his book.

Presumably the equilibrium state is that we will have fewer public schools and more charter schools, rather than a bunch of half-occupied public schools.

I'm sure my district is worse than yours, but here the public schools are a waste of taxpayer resources. They are corrupt, with more than a handful of superintendents being arrested for sweetheart contracts. They have extreme administrative bloat. They spend more per student than almost any other district in the world. And the outcomes are absolutely garbage. 25% of high schoolers are now in charters here, and honestly it's not for any reason other than the utter incompetence of the public school district. Why should we be giving more money to the system that parents have roundly rejected? At this point I'm forced to see the public schools as a waste of taxpayer resources that reduce funding for the more successful charter schools. We need competition to make schools better. The district was resting on its laurels since they were just counting on poor students showing up no matter how shitty the product was. The public can't accept that.

The solution is to fix public schools not fund charter schools. That’s a failing of the Goverment more then anything else.

Politicians have been claiming they're going to fix public schools for my entire adult life and haven't made an inch of progress in that time. We need to abandon the delusion that there's one weird trick (that doctors hate) to fix public schools and instead move to a different system.

if you think privatizing the school system is going to fix it, i suggest you look at other instances of privatization (prisons for instance, or utilities in many states and provincies) and see how that went.

Competition works. Your examples are government granted monopolies which are obviously terrible

Just means the rich kids get a much better education then the poor ones which is a country failing at education.

Not to mention in time you’ll just get charter school mega corps that don’t have too compete.

private prisons are not Goverment granted monopolies and that has gone horribly wrong.

> The solution is to fix public schools not fund charter schools.

Charter schools are a mechanism for opt-in flexibility within the public school system to enable identification of generalizable improvements; if there isn’t systematic evaluation and feedback into the broader system, that’s definitely an issue, but (unlike vouchers, which are low-accountability subsidies to nonpublic schools), that’s what charters are for.

I don't think schools should be privately run, it often brings a profit motive to schools and that bring with it all sorts of negative outcomes and corruption. You can see how poorly that goes with private prisons and american healthcare outcomes.

it also increases the divide between rich and poor (https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/do-charter-school...) all while taking resources away from the public system setting it up to fail more while also removing all incentives for politicians to fix it (their kids go to the private schools)

here is a video going into charter schools and showing a number of rather negative outcomes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_htSPGAY7I

Easier said than done. Most elections for the past 20 years have revolves around the schools and they’ve only gotten worse. I honestly see no way to solve the public schools other than having all the students leave and forcing them to reconsider everything they do

You fire all the admin and start from scratch with the teachers and kids.

Teachers want to teach and do a good jobs generally but are prevented from doing so by admin/policies that set them up to fail

I would be in favor of this but I think the politics is too complicated for it to actually happen. Charters have already shown practical success

charters in many cases have also been absolute disasters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_htSPGAY7I

What makes you think charter schools are less corrupt other than their lack of accountability?

I don’t. I think if schools are going to be corrupt we might as well have them compete.

Then why did you make it part of your argument?

Because the public schools being corrupt is a necessary part of “if the schools are corrupt they might as well compete”. The common argument against charters is corruption, but if the public schools are too then that doesn’t really matter to me.

Is competition in other industries bad and wasteful too, since it creates duplicate systems with duplicate costs too? Should we replace it with a single monopoly per industry?

We've already taken a wrong turn if we're treating education as an "industry" and not a public service.

> Charter schools create duplicate systems with duplicate costs, reduce funds available for traditional school students in sending schools, and are a waste of taxpayer resources.

I went to a private school. Obviously slightly different from the Charter system, but only in administration of funds (depending on the state). This statement is categorically untrue. The private school that I went to was not analogous in learning or structure to the public school system. Coaching for college admissions essentially took place since first grade and gradually ramped up. Additionally, the school taught to different learning styles instead of just one. Where these schools fail is socially because often kids are geographically spread farther apart. As a result I was alienated at times both at school and out of school depending on where I needed to put my time. When I transferred to public school I was bored out of my mind for years due to how far ahead I was from 8th grade. It took until around junior year before I began learning new-ish material.

To call them a "waste" of tax dollars ignores the fundamental problems with the public school system and why the separation occurs in the first place. Those fundamental problems are thorny issues though; you'll end up creating very different teaching methods, levels of classes, etc for a wider group of kids that will continue to grow as an area grows more dense. This was more sustainable at my private school because class sizes were smaller. I also don't think blaming teachers is really the right way to go here; most of them are underpaid and mistreated.

Yes and: Privatization greatly impairs transparency and accountability. Because private entities fall outside of public disclosure laws like FOIA. With depressingly predictable results.