[naturalist.atheist]

Originally Posted by thedoc

The exclusivity is that even if you take your child out of public school and 'home school' them, the public school still gets their tax money. Private competition does not reduce the funding for public education so there is no pressure to improve. If the tax money followed the student, then it would not be exclusive. Private schools are paid for above and beyond the taxes.

I think your analysis is overly simplistic. Property taxes are a sunk cost. No matter what you do, you are not getting them back. But even so, even the poorest parents who do not want to send their kids to public education find a way. Now certainly it doesn't help public schools one bit that there is a week coupling between their funding and their performance. However one could also argue that like health insurance and military service, the broader the public participation you have the more likely you will have a good system. So one could argue that the public school systems are not exclusive enough, because if rich parents were forced to send their kids to public schools, those schools would get a whole lot better.

However I contend that the problem is more basic than that. It's not a matter of social and political theorists, as well as education theorists as a group knowing what to do to education and that the current entrenched system is fighting them (and there is certainly some of that). I would argue that the social, political and educational theorists are well prepared to educate students for the last century, but not for this century. They don't know what to do!

The world has changed a lot in the last forty years.