Here's my plan.
(1) Privatize education. (Bear with me for a second!!!)
(2) Set up an association, The American Teachers' Association (like the American Medical Association, also private, I believe?) that oversees teaching requirements and has a board exam, licensure, etc.--so that the standards for teachers and education services are equal. Over time (so as not hurt existing teachers) increase the standards/requirements for being a teacher, and the related pay. Experienced teachers could be grandfathered into the pay raises.
(3) Use government funds (that previously paid for all education for all children grades K-12) and create Educaid (like Medicaid) for families under a certain income threshold. Now, this assumes that any school will take Educaid--money is money, no matter if it comes from the government or private citizens. Just like doctors take Medicaid. (Or, they
should have to, but I'm not sure if that's currently the case).
Okay, go ahead, shoot holes in it.
Haha, here I go.
All you'd be doing here is adding layers of bureaucracy into the same system, making everything more expensive, and consequently eventually burdening middle class families, and consequently causing other economic problems in that wake. Sort of like what's happened with the public university system.
OK, here's where it starts. I'm going to use my area because I know the specific numbers. Each child in the public school system costs around $8000 per year. Property taxes for the average family are somewhere around $1500 per year. The reason the math works out is that most citizens spends 13 years in the public school system, but 50-60 some-odd years owning property or indirectly paying property taxes (e.g. through rent).
A child cannot afford to pay $8000 to go to school. So we put the burden on the parents, right? Let's say that the average family has two kids. Well, a middle class family can't afford $16,000 a year for both of their kids to get educated. The only people that can afford that already have their kids in private school. So basically you're talking about 90% of the population going under your version of Medicaid. They compete for the best schools. Who's going to get access? Probably, as in magnet schools in south Florida, it's going to be the middle class people who are well-connected with rich and powerful people. So this system wouldn't improve access, wouldn't improve quality, and would probably increase cost due to added bureaucracy.
Second, you'd have the government arbitrarily deciding who can "afford" this school fee and who cannot, and due to taxpayer pressure, it's always going to be people that can't really afford it but aren't starving to death, rather how FAFSA works now. So you're putting a whole lot of pressure on the middle.
Third, you have the social problem of putting greater burdens on the young and poor while easing burdens (along with granting additional entitlements, but let's not talk about that) on the old and rich. You had access to a public school system - why would you refuse to subsidize your grandchildren? Why do you deserve that, and not them? Why should they have to pay for what was free for you? And that's not entirely thinking about it the right way - you are still "working off" the debt to society of your own education, and trying to get out of paying for it, as is every single college-educated person that supports yanking state money out of higher ed.
Fourth, you will have an increasingly economically disenfranchised middle that chooses to have fewer children, because you are talking about increasing the economic burden of children. Shrinking populations are bad for economies for about a zillion reasons, but one of the easiest to understand is how a small young population cannot support a large elderly population. Think social security crisis and the world of shit we are in for when the boomers - who did not have enough kids to even replace themselves - retire.
Fifth, we haven't even started talking about paying teachers
more yet and consequently making school
more expensive.
Why do you think that privatizing education would make it better? The reason that private schools tend to be better is because they have better students and better teachers. The better teachers are attracted by the better working environments, even though the pay is less, because the students are better. The students come from families that prioritize education. They tend to have better discipline. Systemic and generational poverty is not an issue. In other words, it's easy to think about private education as better because they don't have those pesky government regulations or whatever, and looking at the supply side. But what about the demand side? Conservatives never seem to look at the demand side. What about the effects of going to school not just with better teachers, but with
smarter kids?
(And that's not to say that you have to grow up in a rich or middle income family to be smart, just that the collective advantage is much higher, and that has a large effect on the whole.)
I don't disagree. Not once have I said that the services provided aren't up to par. I'm actually very happy with my children's public education. Extremely, as a matter of fact.
But my children's teachers aren't happy with their livelihood. And I wouldn't be either, were I them.
Anyone want to address that?
I think that there are two social problems that are influencing increasing lack of real wages paid to and respect for teachers. I have no idea how to fix them.
One is special-snowflake-itis, or "entitlement syndrome" if you will. Parents these days aren't satisfied at the idea that their kids probably won't ever be CEO's or senators or neurosurgeons or whatever, hence the contempt for "just teachers." If the teachers were really that smart, they'd be running a company, not
teaching children.
The other is the dissolution of the social contract. People have lost their sense of generational interdependency. They may understand it within the limited context of their own families, but fail to make the logical transition to the macro. Hence people with kids in schools want to raise taxes for schools; but people who haven't had kids yet or may never, or whose kids are older than school age, contemptuously sneer.
That's how you get Rick Perry, who went to a public university and benefited from the government subsidization of said public university, saying that universities convey a private benefit. It's this attitude that I benefited, and now I'm done, I don't wanna pay for it anymore. It's selfishness combined with a lack of understanding. Like, there's this "If you
choose to have kids" line that I hear from people on both sides of the aisle. Uh, if people stop having kids, society and the economy will collapse in very short order. These people need more sci-fi in their lives.
