Separating school and state

[zelda12]

I agree totally with Thoros on this matter, if you split the schools you split the country and a country that fractured won't go on for very long before you have lynch mobs in the streets and riots sweeping the country.

[English assassin]

An educated citizenry is a vital public good, of course. But like most such goods, a competitive and responsive private sector could do a much better job of supplying it than the public sector can.

I think THAT statement might have needed to be proved rather than merely asserted?

Reasons the private sector market mechanism will not work well in education:

(1) The consumers are ill informed and ignorant. Their choices will be even worse than they usually are.
(2) Good providers are not in fact able to upscale their operations to respond to demand for their product. Conversely bad providers are unlikely to be forced out of the market
(3) Each consumer makes only one or two purchases, each of a period of years. Its not like buying insurance where repeated purchases each year keeps the provider on its toes.

Of course if the kansas attempt to have ignorance and stupidity taught at taxpayers expense were to succeed you would have to conclude that the state government was indeed too stupid to be allowed to have anything to do with education, but that is hardly a positive case for it.

[A.Saturnus]

As long as the taxpayer pays the school, he can decide what is taught. In addition, getting a decent education is a right for a child. There was once a school in California that switched entirely to a 'constructivist' education. So the students didn't learn facts anymore but were guided "to discover their own truths". Fortunately, since their education quickly was far behind students from other schools, the parents threatened to take their children out of the school and all went back to normal. But the problem is, what if the parents don't do that? Then you have children misseducated because their parents and teachers are idiots.

[Papewaio]

Have a system with Public (government) and Private (church/mosque/alternative) schools.

Let all schools get the same amount of government money per number of students. With a pool of extra money for government schools of the following sort:

+ Special Ed Schools (this should have some money from the health budget as well)
+ Academic fast stream schools.
+ Remote/Small schools.

If you want to have your child learn your Brand (TM) of Religion then have them go to secular school. A compromise in government schools is to have a Religious (Tolerance) class which teaches the main tenants of the faiths in the local community and abroad. This class would have teachings of Creationism/Christainty/Islam/Buddhism/Pagan etc. Parents have the choice of their children attending the class or not.