It Begins.

[Cecelia]

Maybe competition among the public schools might actually lead to some decent schools that actually give our kids a good education.  That would be nice for a change.

No.  Just no.  This is an incredibly dumb idea.

And here's why:  Yes, competition can improve quality of products.  But it also has one negative side effect that has little effect with most products:  Low Quality, Inferior products.

With most products, it doesn't matter.  Those who want better quality products will choose to pay more, and those who are fine with inferior products will pay less.  And it's all good.  Everyone wins.

But with Education, you have a serious problem.  The Quantity of High Quality Products will be limited, because schools can only accept so many students.  They'll reach their capacity much faster than most products do.  Not only can they only accept so many students, it's not going to be First come, First Serve.  It's going to be picking the best students, and certainly not the ones with disabilities.  That means that some students won't get their first choice of schools, or even their second or third.  With other products, you very rarely see this occur.

That creates a market for low quality education schools.  Things we already see at the college level with places like University of Phoenix -- which has a reputation so bad that employees tend to omit it from their job applications.  And employers vastly prefer people from traditional schools.   You also see with Charter Schools now, some of them close in the middle of the year--forcing them to put their kids in a new school.

Competition doesn't make everything better.  In the case of education, it would make it worse.  Teachers would have their feet held to the fire by parents, and blamed if their kids aren't doing well.  After all, if the parents are the customers (and in the case of education, they would be) the employer wants to keep the customer happy.  This means little room for innovation by teachers.  It takes classroom autonomy from teachers, and discourages the sharing of ideas (after all, why share your ideas with people who'll be trying to recruit students from your school to theirs?)  

And the more choice that's added, the more schools will open and fail.  Wasting valuable time of students so people will have the 'illusion of choice'.  Public Schools should be the focus of fixing the education system in our country.  Theyr'e the only schools required to take all and any students.  They're the only ones who can kick out students for only the worst of infractions.  I know that I personally would rather live in a society where the majority are educated, and not just the ones who aren't destined for 'skilled labor'

Education isn't an HDTV. It's not as simple as that by any means.