The state’s interest is what Jules Ferry described, ” to cast the nation’s youth in the same mould and to stamp them, like the coinage, with the image of the republic.”

I am not sure what your point is. I have little doubt the teachers’ unions, the state education department, the superintendent’s office, the administrators at your local school and (above all) teacher training faculties have ‘interests’. The question is whether elected officials and the public provide them with a conduit to put their agendas into effects. You do not need public agencies in order to provide education; you likely need nothing resembling contemporary schools of education to train teachers (see Thos. Sowell on this point).

Dave Dutcher:

Again, if you are concerned about quality control, make use of mandatory regents’ examinations to establish the performance metrics of each school. The ideal measure would be one of year-to-year improvement controlling for the psychometric profile of the school in question. Publish the results and close the 1-2% at the very bottom each year.

Joe Carter:

You hired Joshua Gonnerman as an intern, didn’t you?

Horace Mann: “We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.”

John Dewey : “The teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true Kingdom of God.”

But the state does have an interest in education.

Jules ferry, the creator of the modern French education system, imitated in much of Europe and elsewhere, was simply more candid than most, when he insisted that its object was to cast the nation’s youth in the same mould and to stamp them, like the coinage, with the image of the republic.

The problem is that you are assuming privatization will always be a net benefit. I’m worried that we will instead see the rise of fraudulent or poor-quality schools solely to suck down voucher money. Think the equivalents of Rent-A-Center, check cashing stores, credit cards that charge 25%+ APR or those online distance schools that charge ridiculous fees for substandard vocational or liberal arts education.

I think people have too much faith in the market restraining its predatory impulses towards the working class. Yes, it works fine for the top, but in many ways it could get even worse for those on the bottom.

It is doubtful that educational services incorporate economies of scale which would make advisable any sort of national organization. The only reason to have federal aid is that per capita production and income in some states is a good deal lower than national means, which in turn injures their tax base, which in turn injures their ability to maintain quality public works and pay competitive salaries to their civil servants. That problem can be addressed through general revenue sharing. Cut a check to Mississippi; no need to second guess local preferences about how to allocate revenues across expenditures.

([(b - p)/t] x L) / c

b = total district expenditure
p = expenditures on physical plant
t = sum of property taxes collected by the district

L = household’s school tax liability
c = # of children between 5 and 18 in the household.

You would receive a rebate of this value for each child you withdraw.

Please not that parents with children in school are cross-subsidized by the rest of the households in the community. The cross-subsidy would still be directed to the district schools and parents who withdraw their children would still be contributing to the fixed costs of running the district school. They would just be compensated (and receive some relief) for reducing the variable costs of running those schools.

You make use of UPS, or DHL, or FedEx and you realize that the demand for these sorts of services is no longer so constrained that there is any need for a public agency to assure universal (much less general or pervasive) service. The U.S. Postal Service is a failing institution.

Which brings us to local schools. Other than a few natural monopolies, it is difficult to locate a sphere of endeavour where monopolistic provision to captive markets compares favorably in cost and quality to what competing private enterprises can offer. Defenders of public schools (e.g. Diane Ravitch) do not put together a coherent argument as to why this general feature of social life should not be manifest in the sphere of education. We have public schools because it is in the pecuniary interest of their employees to remain public employees and because various stakeholders wish to engage in asinine social engineering projects on the public dime.

As long as the provisioning of primary and secondary education is not so poorly structured that we develop rapid inflation driven by public subsidy (which is what has happened in higher education and happened for a time in medical services) and as long as there are transparent and public metrics of performance for schools, we will be better off with private education financed by vouchers.

Dave Dutcher, educational services are something that can be readily produced and purchased on the open market. They are not ‘public goods’ in the sense that highways or the military are – goods and services which are produced only with the aid of an apparatus of coercion.

That being the case, the provision of primary and secondary schooling is a form of welfare or common provision just as surely as public medical insurance or cash transfers. It has been public policy for 170 years or more to provide a baseline of educational services for youths under 12, a policy gradually extended to cover youths between the ages of 12 and 18. As it was extended, attendance was made formally mandatory, so the policy was transformed to attempt a baseline of consumption as well as provision of these services.

This was done so for a complex of civic, social, and economic reasons. The thing is, the mode of service delivery reflected the mindsets and technologies of the time and have persisted in the absence of public dissatisfaction sufficient to trump general inertia the vested interests in the current structure. It does not need to be this way.

In 1918, public agency was a method of delivering medical services (through municipal hospitals and state sanitoriums), long-term care (through state asylum), and ameliorating general indigence (through…