markw wrote:
I know I could do better if I spent the tax dollars the government
extorts from me for public schools on private schools. :)
You could? Wow! I'm impressed. You should write a study on this
showing your methodology. I'm sure that many parents and politicians
would be interested in your procedures.
Oh, whoops, gee, you don't have any concrete data to back that up. Oh,
and by the way, when you compare private schools in aggregate against
public schools in aggregate, the private schools actually come out worse
in that comparison.
Surprising, actually, given the number of really expensive private
schools that should be skewing those numbers.
Anyone who thinks the government can spend their money more wisely than
they can is a fool.
Really? So you can actually find and judge the qualifications of the
individual teachers your children would be learning from?
I'm impressed. You should write a book.
I can't readily judge the quality of a teacher or school without
spending a whopping amount of time doing it.
Sure, I can weed out the morons. But, even if I exclude areas in which
I am far from competent to judge (music, art, foreign languages), I
would be hard pressed to pick the winners in anything approaching an
amount of effort I am able to spend.
Maybe you were going to rely on marketing and word of mouth? Gee, how
well does that work out for picking out a doctor or a lawyer. Pretty
inconsistently, last I checked.
Or, perhaps, you were going to rely on standardized test scores. NCLB
has done a nice job of debunking whether or not *that* procedure is
going to work.
And, this doesn't even take into account for what happens when your kid
doesn't make the cut for the good schools because he falls below the
profitable point on the demand curve. Everybody assumes that their
child can get into a decent private school because it works that way now
because the public schools take on the burden of everyone else.
We've already seen this scenario. Everybody made this mistake with
healthcare. They thought HMO's were really freindly, cool, nifty, etc.
because they skimmed off the profitable and left the unprofitable in the
old indemnity plans. Well, once the indemnity plans all collapsed,
suddenly HMO's weren't so friendly, cool, nifty, etc. anymore. Oops.
-a
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