Personally I think this whole plan is just a nail in the coffin for public education. We live in a state where there is a lot of choice, but our district is spiraling downhill because they cannot "capture" the students who live here and enrollment keeps decreasing. Now they are closing school buildings and want to bus kids long distances to get to the half empty schools.
Capture? If parents don't want to send their children to the neighborhood public school, there is a reason. A business that cannot survive without a monopoly deserves to go out of business.
I see both sides of this discussion.
On the one hand, public education is essential to the well-being of a nation.
But between teachers with poor subject knowledge, NCLB, and a grab bag of other problems, the US seems intent on destroying its own education system (which threatens our future).
The unions and the system as a whole are largely entrenched in denial. People who mention that teachers lack subject knowledge are accused of "bashing" them. The textbooks are a joke (but they're profitable). The government threatens schools if scores don't keep improving, so test prep starts in September. High-stakes tests focus on trivial stuff. A huge part of the problem is that no one wants to correct hand-written answers. If we insist on using industrial testing methods and on punishing low scores, we shouldn't be surprised when the results show that the kids learned how to take tests instead of how to think.
And the public schools wonder why people opt out.
Two of my kids go to a private school. It's flexible and respects everyone's abilities. The kids read novels, not excerpts in textbooks. They write essays. They use good math books. Everything is corrected by hand in a thoughtful way. Test prep takes up a bit of time the week before the tests ("Okay, let's go over how you fill those forms out...remember to check your work...").
My eldest is in a public dual-enrollment program that's different and run by people who get it: again, novels and history books, not bad textbooks. Essays. No multiple choice in high school classes. Free college classes. It's also isolated from the public schools. Many parents and kids like it for just that reason. In that school, test prep means, "Remember to get here on time tomorrow for the test. Late arrivals not allowed."
I see Bostonian's point about businesses that can't survive without being monopolies. And while I also see that killing the public schools will damage this country, the schools and the governments are the ones to blame, not those of us who opt out.
