If you lived in Baltimore, would you send your kid to the local public school? Would you hand-wave the corruption and incompetence away because "public good, private bad"?

https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/city-student...

>People's commitment to ideologies seem to be stronger than any material evidence

Agreed

Then you don't live in or near school districts failing to educate their students for decades: Detroit, Baltimore, even parts of Seattle fail to graduate young people capable of reading and writing near grade level, let alone understand even algebra. Year-after-year they fail a new class.

And the solution would be to go to a tuition school, where the quality could be the same but grades higher because customer is king? No, it's not a solution, because there's no implicit causal relationship between tuition and quality - the Swedes just described their situation in the title. The real solution is to fix the failing school, whatever system it was.

Ah, thank you, I don't think anyone's tried to fix the failing schools before, so if they just get started on that this whole voucher thing is unnecessary.

I think a more honest analysis would not only look at other educational systems in other countries but use a unified metric, say, euclidean geometry or algebra comprehension, something that you can roll back the clock 60 years on and still get comparable data.

There's a multi armed bandit problem here of course but the law of large numbers should allow you to isolate what effect marketization has.

I'd be shocked if it was positive. Human motivation is sullied and distracted by profit so the actual goals become incidental. If the alignment is close, like in commodities, it's all good. If it's poorly related, such as in education, it seems to be a problem.

Privatization works poorly as a blunt magical instrument wielded on all problems

Sweden school system didn't particularly need to be fixed, especially if you compare it to peer European states.

The voucher stuff was introduced for ideological reasons, and failed like things rooted in ideology invariably do, no matter if the inspiration is Marx or Adam Smith.

these are in high-crime areas with very specific demographics. make of that what you will.

The commitment is pushed by those that materially benefit, so it shouldn't be a surprise.