Reuters article about Louisiana's school privatization

[MikeyinBrooklyn]

Antongast, why hasn't anyone thought of that before!? Brilliant! Seriously, there are many non-public schools, maybe even most, that are non-profit [[certainly religious schools). And I have NO PROBLEM with someone making off of kids learning to read and write if the alternative is spending X amount of money to have the current results. New Jersey required poor public schools to spend the same amount of money per pupil as the affluent suburban districts do, at state taxpayers expense. Now, public schools in Jersey City and Newark and Trenton are performing worse at $20,000 per pupil than they did at $7500. Besides, the Louisiana plan does not abolish public schools, it merely allows the parents to choose where they go. If you had a neighborhood hospital where most of the patients die, no one would hold it against you if you choose to get your health care elsewhere. No one thinks you should just wait for the hospital to improve. Kids lives are at stake NOW. Their parents should be able to send them to a different school if the current one isn't working. I DO NOT CARE ABOUT THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM. We don't have "outcomes" in Detroit, we have kids. And they need a shot a real education.

[antongast]

Antongast, why hasn't anyone thought of that before!? Brilliant!

Plenty of people have thought of it, but implementing it is somewhat inconvenient. For one thing, actually educating the bulk of inner-city minority kids would be problematic, because they'd start asking all sorts of awkward questions about the existing power structure, and they'd be much harder to credibly ignore and dismiss than they are currently. For another, lots of other private contractors are making zillions of dollars incarcerating those kids once they get out of school, so we have to keep that gravy train running. And then we can't be seen actually investing in public institutions, because that's communism. It's a tightrope, man.