Wacky Wednesday--School Choice Is Bad

Note: Before reading the following arguments, please understand that they are not what I believe. On Wednesdays, I deliberately argue for wrong ideas, challenging my listeners to call and defend the obvious right answer, which is usually far harder than one would expect. This is a summary of what Wacky Andrew will be arguing, not a representation of what real Andrew believes.

~Other countries have passed America despite not having a free market approach to education.

~Parents don’t always know best.

~Catholics don’t have church choice, and this seems to work just fine for them.

~Competition only saps the best participants to alternative schools, thereby harming the other students and the overall appearance (numbers) of the public school.

~Fragmentation of education undermines the purpose of having a common education for all people.

~Common culture comes from a common educational experience.

~More choice puts you under greater pressure to decide rather than just working to make the thing you’re stuck with better.

~Marriage is a covenant, which, after you make it you have no subsequent choices and this is the key to a good, committed marriage. What you’re proposing is more of a cohabitation arrangement with a school, which reduces your incentive to make it work and increases your incentive to just flee for a new and more seductive lover.

~There simply aren’t enough seats in alternative schools to satisfy the number of students.

~If competition is always a good thing, why don’t we have two or more militaries competing with each other?

~What will happen to the poorest, least-mobile students from the most dysfunctional families if the best students, teachers, and funding flee the public system for one they can’t get into?

~We used to have one of the best school systems in the world, despite it being almost entirely government-delivered, public schools.

~Other than blind faith in the free market, what evidence do you have that introducing the profit motive to schooling will do more to make education good instead of just making the effective selling of education more lucrative?

~How able is the average parent at telling the difference between good and bad education?

~When people choose for themselves, they choose American Idol and Jerry Springer. Shows like The West Wing get cancelled.

~Are you going to force private schools to admit troubled kids?

~If competition is always so good and accountability even better, maybe parents should have to compete for the right to keep their children?

Links:
Scholarly Literature on School Choice (Cato Institute)
China’s winning schools? (NYT)
The myth of competition (Humanist)