You must go barefoot. Don't your toes get cold in the winter?

Interesting admission in the middle of the article:

"At the same time, the idea that students should be free to leave failing public schools is bumping up against the simple reality that there are not enough seats in good schools to go around."

jd:

Voucherize every education dollar in America and there'll be plenty.

Harry:

I wear sneakers all winter--it's supposed to be cold.

The fundamental problem is that private schools can select their students while the public schools are stuck with the common herd, including the crack babies, psychopaths, sociopaths, mental defectives, homeless kids, maladjusted kids etc. In no sense can it be argued that there is a 'free competition' between public and private schools.

If you put 400 lbs of weight on Michael Jordan and no extra weight on me, I could probably beat him in a standing high jump contest, however, that would not be 'free competition.'

Yes, that's the point: why put 400 lbs on Michael Jordan just to drag him down to your level?

If we removed all the defective kids from the regular public schools and put the violent and disruptive ones in reform schools or youth prisons and the mentally defective ones in special schools geared for their needs, would the regular public schools really be such a morass? Of course this would require getting tough with some whiny parents, but that in itself would be a good thing.

Bart:

So why not nationalize all industries if the government can do such a good job in education?

OJ,

That's a good question. The NYC public school system of the first half of the 20th century worked brilliantly, and had the kind of special measures I referred to. How many Nobel Laureates did that system produce? How responsible is it for the affluence of the NYC Metro area? If you ask the armies of people who went through it and went from being non-English speaking immigrants to being professionals at the utmost levels of American society, they give it a lot of credit.

The French have what is considered one of the great K-12 systems in the world, and it is totally centralized. It doesn't matter whether you live in Paris, or Alsace or Martinique, you get the same curriculum with the same texts and national testing. The Brits who have a similar system do an abysmal job, worse than in the US.

Government can do education well here. It just chooses not to, because it is too politicized here. In any educational system, some kids will flunk out and if you live in dread of offending someone's self-esteem or of hearing from angry parents, you will engage in all the horribles our system has. If Calc 1 is taught properly(the right level of intensity, the appropriate amount of material) to a group of students who have an average Math SAT of 600, about 1/3 will fail the course. That is a statistical fact. However, it is an unpleasant one for people like politicians whose job is to make everyone happy.

The ability to do education well doesn't mean you can do other things well. How many brilliant and successful businessmen seem to be total idiots when it comes to the seemingly simple matter of running a pro football team?

Bart:

80 years ago teaching was the best job many could have and there were no unions.

The French think their health system is the best too.

OJ,

As a cousin of several French doctors, I must tell you that France has fabulous primary care. Doctors still make housecalls. However, for serious stuff America is light years ahead.

A French physician can still make a nice living, much better than his counterpart in the British NHS. One of my cousins makes it his business to take his wife to dinner in every Michelin 3-star restaurant in France every year. And French medical care is less plagued with rationing, like in Canada, and bogus malpractice actions, like in John Edwards' America.

House calls isn't healthcare.

Bart;

You're engaging in utopianism. Yes, it's theoretically possible for government to run the schools well. The political reality in the USA, however, is that it won't happen. Realism requires that we look at solutions that will work in pratice, not might work in theory.

As for cherry picking kids, that's just not the case. Private schools do better even with the same mix of kids. What privates schools really do is cherry pick the parents.

>Yes, that's the point: why put 400 lbs on
>Michael Jordan just to drag him down to your
>level?

I think there was a Kurt Vonnegut SF satire on that exact subject. Don't remember the title, but it involved a "Handicapper General" and "INSIST ON YOUR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO BE EQUAL!"

Ken:

http://www.brothersjudd.com/blog/archives/002517.html

I've never, ever seen a private school with 'the same mix of students.'

Cherrypicking parents is a good way to put it.

There's a reason why Japanese-American and Filipino-American students in the same classes here have widely different outcomes.

I was amused to pick up my paper this morning to be treated to a feature article about a program to cure Houston's disastrous high school dropout rate.

That would be where Rod Paige was so successful.

No Child Left Behind is a fraud

Why would you replicate a disastrous mix if you're trying to fix a broken system?

Because it isn't broken? Because the whole thing is a fraud?

Good one.

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