But Freddie's approach actually makes total sense as an attempt to force people to have skin in the game. The society is largely controlled by the rich and affluent. As long as they can escape to charter schools, catholic schools, or hire private tutors, they will do that instead of using their wealth and affluence to fix public schools, so those being horrible will remain solely poor people's problem. If we close all alternatives then it becomes everyone's problem and everyone has to solve it.
I don't think forcing rich kids to go to public schools will make public schools better. It might make the public schools in their district better in some ways (it won't change the amount of money available since that's determined by property taxes), but I don't think it'll get any better in the way Scott envisions it. The people who own making decisions about public schools: teachers, politicians, parents, administrators, do not feel the pain of being in school. The children do. In that sense, no one has skin in the game. The pain of how shitty or worthless certain parts of public schooling were is a distant memory to those in control.
Now I don't think the correct solution is "let the kids decide", but forcing everyone to participate in something known to be awful in the hope that it'll get better somehow, when all the competing interests don't feel any of the pain, seems wishful.
I don't think parents feel the pain of public schools anywhere close to how much children do. When smart kids are being bored out of their minds, isolated kids feel as if there's nothing left to live for, or kids with ambitious parents are being ground down chasing 5.0 GPAs and the most college friendly extracurricular programs, the parents hardly feel any of that pain.
You still haven't made it clear how forcing rich families into public schools will make them better. Rich people's property taxes are already going to their district's schools. What would rich kids in public schools do? More helicopter parents bothering teachers into giving their kids straight A's? Affluent coded extracurricular programs?
I still don't think there's any strong evidence that all we're missing is rich families being forced into public education to make schools great again. Their children will still be in rich upper class neighborhoods which means rich upper class school districts. Or are you suggesting we bus rich kids to inner city schools?
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