As a libertarian, I agree, that’s pretty standard.
My personal views are a bit different though. I want schools to all be charter schools (so publicly funded, privately run), and require city transit to service the schools in the area (i.e. no more school buses). That way kids can pick their school based on the merits of the school, not whatever boundaries they happen to live in. Good schools would survive, bad schools would close.
Inner city public schools tend to suck, so those kids should have more options. That’s the main intuition here.
The metrics of good and bad will be gamed even worse than the neo-liberal’s “no child left behind” system does. Those with early adoption, or starting from a heightened pedestal, will use their advantage to kill competition. The bad schools would be shuttered, replacements will be scrapped as margins thinned, and you will end up with the same old bad areas simply being without options at all or, if forced, even worse ones than previous. Tensions with the public will be worse as pocketed politicians skirt doing anything about this. Suggestions like forcing the ones left to take everyone will just have everyone invested in this system pointing out that it would just be the public school system again. This will deepen the divide between haves and have-nots.
Require city transport to allow school kids? Well that runs contrary to the wishes of the libertarian billionaires who are in the process of privatizing all of that. Sure they may virtue signal at first and, seemingly, eagerly jump on the idea. The whole time they will be working on convincing everyone that this is just giving hand outs to the kids of lazy parents who can’t even pay a few dollars a day for their kid to get to school. Also, a bunch of cities already do this. Having a high school, and often college, student ID gets you on the bus at no cost at point of service. When these cities privatize their public transportation these types of services for students, seniors, small children, etc., free rides, and discounts, are immediately put on the chopping block.
Inner city schools often suck because of decades of efforts to disenfranchise the minority populations in them, especially the ones left over after white flight. The public school system at large sucks because there is a massively moneyed interest group who wants it to fail. So they can impose a system of chartered schools, and private schools, at the public expense, without needing to concede the resources they currently do to the demographics they don’t want to.
The only offered solutions offered will be loans to pay for primary education. Loans that will be backed by the government, with few limitations on the schools, like the system devised by investment firms in the 70s that became things like FAFSA, and further means of turning as much tax money over to private interests as possible. This has already happened in pocket instances, and continues to.
Fortunately, for now, these issues have slowed the adoption rate of such policies, and created strong resistance to it among the broader population. This is one of the reasons the GOP has gone so much harder on schools in the past few years. It allows for the billionaire set to divert that tax money to their pockets, and it also allows the fascists, and theocrats, they have allied themselves with to impose their dogma on everyone. They even say as much in the Project 2025 document.
The metrics of good and bad will be gamed even worse
I don’t follow. In my area, charter schools use the same metrics as public schools, they’re just expected to outperform in order to keep their charter. They’re also not allowed to discriminate, so admissions are based on a lottery system.
They have an unfair advantage because they don’t have to provide buses, which means only kids whose parents can take them end up going, and those parents tend to have more time to be involved in schools.
Require city transport to allow school kids?
It’s more than that, it should shift the burden of getting kids to school onto the city transit system. This would, at first, just put city transit in charge of public school bus routes, but those routes would be adjusted to overlap with other city lines . If we merely require buses to take kids for free, that’s only going to help for kids and schools already along bus routes (which is exactly 0 schools in my area out of 6 or so).
Having the city handle transit for school kids puts charter and public schools on the same footing since it removes the requirement for parents to take their kids to attend a different school.
This way, schools can specialize, such as IT, science, or fine arts. Public schools are usually jacks of all trades, masters of none. Allowing schools to specialize should improve outcomes since kids could move schools until they find one that works for them. They would all be held to the same metrics, they’d just differ on the extras they provide.
Inner city schools often suck because of decades of efforts
Right, and this would enable kids to leave those crappy schools and go to ones in more privileged areas. So those inner city schools would need to improve (i.e. specialize) or completely fail.
private schools
Private schools should never receive public funding. Full stop. If parents want to send their kids to a private school, they can pay for it and give up the public funding (which improves public and charter schools for everyone else). So I’m very much against voucher systems.
Charter schools should receive public funding because they’re providing the same service for the same price. But they need to be on equal footing with public schools.
The only offered solutions offered will be loans to pay for primary education. Loans that will be backed by the government
The government shouldn’t be in the business of loans. The issue with FAFSA loans are that they’re not dischargeable in bankruptcy, so there’s pretty much no risk to the lender. If risk is low, the lender will lend to people who really shouldn’t be taking out loans.
If the only loans available were dischargeable, private loans, banks would only give loans to people who have a high chance of repaying them, so people with good grades studying in-demand fields. Or perhaps companies would offer scholarships in exchange for a contract to work upon graduation. Also, since loans would be harder to get, schools would be more motivated to keep prices affordable since kids wouldn’t just be able to get a FAFSA loan to pay whatever ridiculous tuition they charge.
Either we should go for free higher education or remove federal loans entirely. I’m totally fine with federal grants, but anything coming from the government should be free of any obligation to repay. I’m convinced that federal student loans are largely at fault for drastically increasing higher education costs.
GOP
Well yeah, the GOP is full of complete nonsense here. They’re worse than the Democratic Party on education, even though I think Democrats also have poor policies.
What we need is higher paid teachers, and to reduce the barrier for students in bad schools to go to better schools.
They have to do better than public schools, with those gone they will be in competition between each other. There will no longer be a standing baseline school. In the few places that put their money where their mouth is, and moved to some sort of charter system, it didn’t take long for things to end up like the corporate world. First ones in, and the ones with the biggest money behind them, ended up being all that was left, with fewer schools, them not willing to take on more and more students, them pointing towards their vanishing “operations margins”. That if they lost these their discretion on payments of staff and services would be gone and they would just be public schools, with extra steps, again. Public schools were re-opened. This generally didn’t even take over 5 years.
Charter schools were not designed to take over public schools in the first place. They were created to pick-up the demographics that had more resources than those in poverty, but not quite enough to really afford private schools. Private school vouchers against taxes will always be a wedge in this debate. The same people who want the charter system want this. These people are often libertarians. I don’t care about no true scottsman ideas of what a libertarian is, the libertarian composition gets most of it’s money from these people, so this is what libertarian is. There is also the whole libertarianism was never meant to be a means of creating liberty but, instead, just completely handing over power to the new lords, industrialists, and this is why the early libertarians were so enamored with fascism. Not that fascism isn’t an issue with the modern libertarian party.
The government didn’t originally want the loan system we got. The extremely wealthy paid people until the bill read in such a fashion, and continued until schools could basically ask for whatever and get it. I mean, if the only thing keeping people out of Harvard and Princeton was their academic performance, well then it would no longer be the country club with classes anymore. The only way to ensure that “elite” schools could keep the poors out is to allow them to ask whatever they wanted. This makes a wave throughout the whole school system though, and is raises the prices at every level eventually. The only other way was socialized schooling, which you mentioned. This is not an option to the libertarian billionaires. So the compromise is to set up a system to extract as much tax money as possible. Also, most private loans has some form of government subsidy, even if hidden, and often preferably hidden, behind a byzantine system of bureaucracy. Corporations get to extract tax money and it’s difficult enough to find out how little risk they actually take on. This allows them to keep their government scapegoat.
I did underwriting for Sallie Mae for years. This was in the early 2000s and moving to a charter system was THE hot topic in the US school industry. We did a lot of research on this subject. It ultimately didn’t take over because it can’t. It either makes the short side of the stick just not exist anymore, or it becomes a public school via forced private entities. You either have public education, or you have the poor go without. This is not tenable in the long run. While it would be a huge dump of resources into the “upper middle” and create a bunch of gains initially, it is myopic. The loss of those resources at the bottom create a larger drag than the reassignment of those funds creates in gains. There were smaller cities that tried this. It was an unmitigated disaster. That is why the government, and the banks, haven’t budged since and it’s mostly people who have never done anything with the education system at large that keep it as a talking point, or some pet project at the local level with rich people and their government stooges. We need to get private industry out of the school loan system. So we can scrap school loans. Education just needs to be available to everyone. This includes vocational training and certification. This is what was actually wanted, but private money interests butted in and turned it into a method to extract tax money, the current loan system, like always. Then they turned the narrative around.
Your point about the school busses doesn’t really matter much. If the government has to pay for the transportation to these schools it will get in the way of private industry profiting off kids getting to school. So this will not be popular amongst the privatize everything set, unless they can turn it either into a segue into being that, or just extracting tax money.
I think we agree on the last point except, rather than burden better schools with more students, we come to the reality that bad schools are bad because the areas are poor. This mean they have more mental health issues, have more physical health issues, and just all-around have more issues because being poor is more expensive per capita than having wealth. So we need to put more money per capita in. This actually gets brought up often, but then the poor, poor, white suburbanites cry about how it’s unfair, even though their schools generally receive more resources even in places where local income doesn’t affect school budget (ie TX). So “inner city” and rural schools stay falling apart.
Also we need to stop using “inner city” as the whipping boy. This is a racist dog whistle. Rural USA is poor, it is soaked in drugs, violence, bad schools, few opportunities, pregnant teens, etc. It’s just easier to keep this on the down low when it’s mostly white, and it’s rather isolated. They “benefit” from not being paraded around like minority demographics, and because it’s easier for the local government to ignore a LOT of the problems there. So it never goes on record. Everyone here knows you don’t just go wandering around rural Appalachia, but everyone also claims it’s so safe. Documentaries routinely come out putting a spotlight on how a lot of rural USA looks like “developing” nations and has drugs and crime everywhere. They then gasp, then go right back to “rural = better life” but might be boring.
The goal here is an education experience where kids and parents are in control (with kids getting more control the older they get), not districts. Some kids do better with more structure, some do better with less, and I don’t think the public school system can really provide that diversity.
I want a school system where you can get a good job with a high school education, and to get there, high schools need to provide a diverse set of marketable skills, from STEM to trades. I’ve heard good things about the German school system, so maybe the public school system can provide that, idk.
And maybe that’s where those areas you mentioned failed, they probably treated charter schools as the end goal and not a tool.
feel free to skip (discussion about libertarianism)
libertarian
Feel free to skip this section, I’m merely trying to give context to how I use the term libertarian.
There’s at least three things people think of when it comes to libertarians:
hardcore fiscal conservatives, i.e. Tea Party Republicans
the Libertarian Party, and whatever caucus currently has control (right now, that’s the Mises caucus)
ideological libertarians, who base their views in the Non-Aggression Principle
There’s more than that as well that may fit (e.g. anarcho-capitalists like Javier Milei in Argentina), but that’s getting into the weeds.
I think you’re referring to first group, and I generally refer to the last, and I think of it more as a direction than a destination (as Penn Jillette puts it, “solve problems with more freedom, not less”).
And then you mention “libertarians” and “fascism” in the same breath, so you and I must have a very different understanding of libertarianism. American libertarianism has its roots in the classical liberalism of the founding fathers (especially Jefferson), and really got going opposing FDR’s coopting of the term “liberal” to mean “progressive.” Before FDR, libertarians would’ve been called “liberals,” in favor of small government.
Fascism is completely opposite to my understanding of libertarianism. At no point would I ever consider the needs of the state (not society, the state) to trump the liberty of the individual, yet that’s precisely what fascism is all about.
That’s about as far a I’ll go in the “no true Scotsman” discussion, which is neither productive nor interesting. I just wanted to clarify what I mean to give context when I use the term.
Also we need to stop using “inner city” as the whipping boy
I use it because it’s low hanging fruit. An urban area already generally has a functioning transit system, so moving people from the poor part of town to a wealthier area wouldn’t be a big ask in terms of new resources.
Rural areas have a different set of problems. They don’t have the population to support competition, so those schools should probably remain government run, at least until there’s decent transportation to more densely populated areas.
Whatever system we end up with, it’s going to need to look different in urban vs rural areas.
So we can scrap school loans
I don’t think that should be the goal here. Maybe it makes sense ultimately, but the true goal should be to make K-12 education sufficient for most people (it currently is not), and for higher education to be available for those who truly want/need it. Many kids won’t finish high school, much less take advantage of free college.
The reason we got stuck with federal student loans is because the government made such a big push to get kids to go to college. A lot of kids couldn’t afford it, hence the direct student loan was born. So many kids get degrees because they’re told they need to go to college and find out later that many degrees just aren’t worth anything in the market.
Free education misses this point entirely imo. The core problem isn’t that students are getting into debt (that’s a symptom), it’s that they’re getting unmarketable degrees or simply drop out. Eliminating school costs fixes the debt problem, but it doesn’t solve the worthless degree problem.
We need to deemphasize college and make our K-12 schools as good as they can be. I think competition is the way forward, and there are a lot of ways that can be structured.
The reason private schools, and charter schools, perform better than public schools is that there are more teachers per students, and they have more resources to keep their curriculum up-to-date. Having more teachers per student is what allows for flexibility. When a teacher has 40+ students per class they can’t balance any special considerations for anyone. When a teacher has 12 students they can learn how each of their students learns and make accommodations for it. This also allows for greater consideration of input from places like parents. Though you need to be very careful with this. There are a lot of parents out there that believe they know better than everyone and will force everyone to comply if they can. See Moms for Liberty. This is achievable, many countries accomplish this. In fact, for countries in a similar range of per capita wealth, this is largely a US problem.
The reason the high school diploma only really good for the low end of the pay grade jobs isn’t because of schools. It is because employers want a whole bunch of barriers to entry. They also want to shift the burden of training. The reasons for this are numerous. From being able to get over qualified people because everyone wants a masters and 10 years experience for an entry level tech job, to using it as yet another reason they just can’t find anyone from this country to do the job, and that’s why they need foreigners who need a corporate sponsor in order to keep their visa. Nothing creates compliance with an employer like your life being destroyed if you lose the job. See also employer tied healthcare. The reason vocational courses were removed was largely due to demand from parents, though the efficacy of them is debatable. However a lot of places still have whole vocational curricula. Several days a week kids go to a secondary school that teachers various trade courses. This is common in the mid-atlantic and northeast. The problem is that the larger portion of employers want certificates from secondary education sources. A lot of big names in vocational industries actually used to be paid by those schools to do so. See EDMC schools. I mean, I am pretty sure it is still happening, but I haven’t been in the school industry in a long time. This allows employers to offload more of it’s expenses on training and creates a predatory industry the process. So a win-win from a capitalist perspective.
The point about treating charter schools as an end goal isn’t really meaningful. They replaced public schools with the promise they would out perform them. They were allowed a lot of freedom in how they operated. That was kinda the point. The problem was that they fell into needing to compete with each other because anyone could potentially go to any of them. None of them wanted to be the one where they kids that didn’t perform as well ended up. In fact once that happened they then had to start fighting with the public about why they got tax money when they were the worst performer. I mean, having to pay for under performing schools is why they moved to this. This quickly turned into them eating each other. This ended up with fewer total schools than when there was only public schools, while they were also fighting to not be forced to do much more than they were because that undermines the idea behind them.
This is the “on paper” definition of libertarianism in the US. The reality is that groups like The Silver Legion were the early adopters of the label, and they were fascism supporters. The zealots also took a liking to it, not because they wanted people to have personal freedoms, but because the arguments for states having more individual power, and less federal oversight over individuals in the form of taxes, was a scheme to weaken the secular government enough to force their theocratic initiatives on people. The corporate lords like the idea for similar reason, but instead of religion, it’s just having them be the government. These are where most of the money behind the US libertarian comes from. Even now you can watch libertarian groups, and the libertarian party, align themselves with the fascists. Just look at August Invictus as a starting point for this rabbit hole. This is why I mentioned the no true scottsman thing. All these people go “No. Of course I am not a fascist/theocrat/oligarch. I told you, I am a Libertarian! That is fundamentally opposed to that. I just want the individual liberty to live life as I see fit.” Then other libertarians point to the same contradiction in definition to explain how the libertarians here are not like that, and if they are they aren’t real libertarians. Which doesn’t matter because their movement was hijacked before they were born.
The reason we got stuck with federal loans is because in order to get more people into college the government was pondering giving out the money to do so. This caused a lot of interference on the part of private interests, not to mention public cries of socialism, and the result was that loans with virtually no barrier would be what happens instead. As time went on there was a concerted, long term, effort to make the situation today where schools can basically ask for anything and get it.
While I agree we need more vocational training, just making primary education focused on getting a job will be worse for society as a whole. We need broad, academic, education. We need to bring things back to focusing on critical thinking skills. This, more than pretty much anything else, has been under attack for decades. Primary school needs to teach people how to learn and how assess information. Moving towards primary school teaching people how to work a job, rather than the companies that profit from that labor, is just another way to kill critical thinking. In the contemporary age, where we are inundated with information like never before, this is more important than ever. We need more vocational secondary schooling. We also need to push for college as well. It is certain that university level education raises the long term earning power of those who take it. Having a college degree increases the average lifetime earning by about 1.5 million dollars, its about 600k for vocational certification. There is a distortion of perception around this because vocational certification has a larger up-front return than college degrees.
The idea that it is not debt, but instead useless degrees, that is the problem, is propaganda. You have bought into a lie here. STEM degree enrollment has been increasing by leaps and bounds, it is at an all time high. Meanwhile all other degrees, except Law and MBA, have been crashing. They are at historic lows and there is currently no end to the decline in sight. So the “valuable” degrees that get jobs are vastly more popular than those who do not. It is to the point where most other academic departments are on the precipice of extinction. Worst part is? In the long run the average individual with a “useless” degree will make more over their life time than anyone without a college degree. Even when controlled for familial wealth.
Competition will not fix schooling. There is already a huge amount of competition in the school industry, you just don’t see it much if you aren’t involved, except maybe for universities. Even public schools are in heated competition. I can’t tell you how hard so many schools work to be recognized as the best public school in their region/state/the US. Making it more so will just make it look like the corporate world, a race towards just a few controlling everything. Much like the corporate world it’s not because they are the best for the people they serve either. That happens already with charter, and private schools, even with the public schools there. If you look at the number of non public schools in a region over time, one with a long established population, or as their growth cools, you actually see a decline in their number, or number per capita, even as the capacity to go to them increases. They get to a point where there is one of a number of types of schools (catholic, jewish, performing arts, the one that offers a radically different environment to very high performers, the fine arts one, the secular very expensive non coed ones, etc.) to a given geographic area. You see those grow as the others fade away.
The research on smaller class sizes seems mixed, so I don’t think class size is the main factor here (assuming it’s within reason; national average is 19). I think our charter school (about the same class size as our state average) self-selects families where at least one parent is invested in education. You have to apply for the lottery, coordinate dropoff and pickup, kids need uniforms, and the school expects parents to volunteer 40 hours over the course of the school year. That’s a lot of hoops to jump through when you could otherwise just have the kid take the bus. So kids are likely getting better support at home vs public schools.
Perhaps smaller class sizes matters more in poorer areas (i.e. teachers are providing the support instead of parents). What seems to be important is teacher quality, and what that means varies by child. So matching children with the right teacher/teaching method may prove more impactful than just reducing class sizes.
Sir Ken Robinson argues that giving kids a say in what they learn dramatically improves outcomes because people learn faster when they’re interested/excited about a topic. To do that, teachers need more control over their curriculum, and to do that, they need their leadership on board.
They also want to shift the burden of training
Schools teach principles, businesses teach application of those principles to their particular domain. Businesses expect you to show up with a solid foundation, and they’ll train you in their particular processes.
And that’s where high school specialization comes in. I’d like to see kids have the option between college prep and a vocation in their last two years. College prep would get them college credit for courses or even an Associates Degree, whereas a vocation would teach them a skill to make something like $20+ instead of $10-12 per hour straight out of high school. The vocation track wouldn’t prevent them from going to college, so kids could work a vocation while attending college to minimize or eliminate student loans.
The goal should be to provide a range of options so most (ideally all) kids have better options than what they’d otherwise get with a regular highschool diploma. But to make room for that, K-12 education needs to be more efficient, and you get that by getting kids interested in school, and how that happens is different for each child. Hence the need for different approaches.
The Silver Legion
Huh, I’d never heard of them, and a quick search shows no correlation with libertarianism. Every source (and I browsed several) just calls them fascist, pro-Hitler, anti-Semitic, etc, but never “libertarian” or anything similar.
The only similarity I see is opposition to FDR, but they attacked him for very different reasons. They were a relatively small org, though I guess big enough to be mentioned in It Can’t Happen Here.
August Invictus
This seems like a failure of the Florida Libertarian Party, not an actual symptom of rot in libertarian ideology. Fringe groups attract weirdos, especially if that group is so supportive of free speech. He lost the nomination by a landslide and switched to the Republican Party, so that tells me the nomination process at least is working in this case.
That said, the national Libertarian Party in the US is moving right, and I think that’s troubling for the reasons you’ve outlined. If we use the political compass as a reference, here’s where I place things:
Invictus - top right corner
Javier Milei - bottom right corner
Libertarian Party - center of bottom right quadrant, moving right with the Mises caucus
Dems and Reps - top right quadrant
me - bottom center
Public prescription seems to put libertarians hugging the right edge top to bottom, and that seems consistent with what you’ve said. But libertarianism is a big tent, covering the entire bottom half of the chart. So my definition here is anyone who fits in the bottom half, which excludes people like Invictus and includes socialists like Noam Chomsky.
The reason we got stuck with federal loans is because in order to get more people into college
And that’s the problem, the goal was misplaced. The goal should be to get people into better jobs, not get people more education. More education generally leads to better jobs, but here are lots of ways to achieve that end goal.
It’s kind of like the idea behind EV subsidies: we want less dependence on oil, EVs don’t depend on oil, so we subsidize EVs. But there are tons of alternatives, such as investing in mass transit, hydrogen fuel cells, or cycling infrastructure. The solution shouldn’t be to pick a winner and pump money into it (in this case, college), but to design a system that benefits all favorable alternatives at the expense of the thing we want to discourage. For energy, this probably means carbon taxes (discourage fossil fuels), and for energy it means changing the focus of K-12 from “college or bust” to different paths depending on interest.
We need broad, academic, education.
Sure, and that’s what K-10 should be about (or even K-8), and we should expect more from it.
I think the pace of education is way too slow and that we could cover the same ground as K-12 currently does (and maybe more) in fewer years. I was constantly bored in school and finished my Associates Degree while in high school (mostly did it because it took less time per day vs high school), and I’m not particularly smart, I just had good parents that helped keep me engaged. And that was in a progressive state that invested a lot in education (near top in the nation for teacher pay as percent of salaries, top half for total spending).
Expanding options in teaching style should allow us to increase the pace of education. To get there, we need a mixture of:
increases to teacher salaries - my dad went back to school after teaching for one year because of pay
give individual schools more control over curriculum and teaching methods
improve access to transit to different schools for kids - could be as simple as buses between schools initially
But all the “solutions” I’ve seen are:
free college
more tech in classes
new buildings
They all seem to miss the point.
is just another way to kill critical thinking
I think it gives a context for those discussions.
Like for a vocation, class work could include comparing pay and obligations for self employment vs working under someone, deciding whether to buy or build something, comparing the impact of spending more to do a good job vs going cheap to get it done fast. Or factoring safety costs and benefits, identifying potential hazards, etc. That’s probably a lot more interesting to a teenager who just wants to work than analyzing Macbeth.
Having a college degree increases the average lifetime earning by about 1.5 million dollars
These kinds of statistics are super misleading though. College degrees are all but required for a lot of high income jobs, but a lot of degrees are completely worthless (at least from an earning perspective). So you’re getting a lot of upward skew on the data from doctors, lawyers, etc. Those lucrative fields are very competitive since there’s a limited number of spots available, so my guess is that increasing the number of people in college will largely increase the number of people in less lucrative fields.
And yeah, trades don’t pay as well as degrees, but they pay a lot more consistently. A lot of college graduates don’t get a job in their field, and many resort to vocations anyway. It’s a lot better to find out that a vocation is right for you in high school than after trying college.
If you’re interested in STEM, you’re probably not interested in a vocation anyway. I’m talking about the rest of students who are told to get any degree.
In the long run the average individual with a “useless” degree will make more over their life time than anyone without a college degree. Even when controlled for familial wealth.
Are you talking about averages here? Because I’m wondering if it’s comparing to all people without a degree, when it should be comparing vs people in the trades. If you don’t get a job in your field, what are the chances that you’ll go to even more school to finish an apprenticeship or something? You’ll probably take what you can get (management role at a restaurant or something) because those loans need to be paid. We shouldn’t be comparing against GED only here, but other skilled professions.
I don’t think we need free college. If you’re going to college, you should be expecting to get value from that investment. But we do need to get prices back to being reasonable, a lot of your tuition isn’t going to your professors, but all the other nonsense schools do (probably a lot of it ironically dealing with financial aid).
Even public schools are in heated competition
Kind of, but they’re competing for test scores, not student satisfaction, actual achievement, etc. Growing up, we had an important state assessment, so we spend a lot of class time studying specifically for it. That sucked, and I don’t think it was very productive, but it probably helped the school secure better funding or something.
That’s not constructive competition because it leads to teaching to the test. Teachers don’t want to do that, but they need to in order for their school to look good and get funding.
As a libertarian, I agree, that’s pretty standard.
My personal views are a bit different though. I want schools to all be charter schools (so publicly funded, privately run), and require city transit to service the schools in the area (i.e. no more school buses). That way kids can pick their school based on the merits of the school, not whatever boundaries they happen to live in. Good schools would survive, bad schools would close.
Inner city public schools tend to suck, so those kids should have more options. That’s the main intuition here.
The metrics of good and bad will be gamed even worse than the neo-liberal’s “no child left behind” system does. Those with early adoption, or starting from a heightened pedestal, will use their advantage to kill competition. The bad schools would be shuttered, replacements will be scrapped as margins thinned, and you will end up with the same old bad areas simply being without options at all or, if forced, even worse ones than previous. Tensions with the public will be worse as pocketed politicians skirt doing anything about this. Suggestions like forcing the ones left to take everyone will just have everyone invested in this system pointing out that it would just be the public school system again. This will deepen the divide between haves and have-nots.
Require city transport to allow school kids? Well that runs contrary to the wishes of the libertarian billionaires who are in the process of privatizing all of that. Sure they may virtue signal at first and, seemingly, eagerly jump on the idea. The whole time they will be working on convincing everyone that this is just giving hand outs to the kids of lazy parents who can’t even pay a few dollars a day for their kid to get to school. Also, a bunch of cities already do this. Having a high school, and often college, student ID gets you on the bus at no cost at point of service. When these cities privatize their public transportation these types of services for students, seniors, small children, etc., free rides, and discounts, are immediately put on the chopping block.
Inner city schools often suck because of decades of efforts to disenfranchise the minority populations in them, especially the ones left over after white flight. The public school system at large sucks because there is a massively moneyed interest group who wants it to fail. So they can impose a system of chartered schools, and private schools, at the public expense, without needing to concede the resources they currently do to the demographics they don’t want to.
The only offered solutions offered will be loans to pay for primary education. Loans that will be backed by the government, with few limitations on the schools, like the system devised by investment firms in the 70s that became things like FAFSA, and further means of turning as much tax money over to private interests as possible. This has already happened in pocket instances, and continues to.
Fortunately, for now, these issues have slowed the adoption rate of such policies, and created strong resistance to it among the broader population. This is one of the reasons the GOP has gone so much harder on schools in the past few years. It allows for the billionaire set to divert that tax money to their pockets, and it also allows the fascists, and theocrats, they have allied themselves with to impose their dogma on everyone. They even say as much in the Project 2025 document.
I don’t follow. In my area, charter schools use the same metrics as public schools, they’re just expected to outperform in order to keep their charter. They’re also not allowed to discriminate, so admissions are based on a lottery system.
They have an unfair advantage because they don’t have to provide buses, which means only kids whose parents can take them end up going, and those parents tend to have more time to be involved in schools.
It’s more than that, it should shift the burden of getting kids to school onto the city transit system. This would, at first, just put city transit in charge of public school bus routes, but those routes would be adjusted to overlap with other city lines . If we merely require buses to take kids for free, that’s only going to help for kids and schools already along bus routes (which is exactly 0 schools in my area out of 6 or so).
Having the city handle transit for school kids puts charter and public schools on the same footing since it removes the requirement for parents to take their kids to attend a different school.
This way, schools can specialize, such as IT, science, or fine arts. Public schools are usually jacks of all trades, masters of none. Allowing schools to specialize should improve outcomes since kids could move schools until they find one that works for them. They would all be held to the same metrics, they’d just differ on the extras they provide.
Right, and this would enable kids to leave those crappy schools and go to ones in more privileged areas. So those inner city schools would need to improve (i.e. specialize) or completely fail.
Private schools should never receive public funding. Full stop. If parents want to send their kids to a private school, they can pay for it and give up the public funding (which improves public and charter schools for everyone else). So I’m very much against voucher systems.
Charter schools should receive public funding because they’re providing the same service for the same price. But they need to be on equal footing with public schools.
The government shouldn’t be in the business of loans. The issue with FAFSA loans are that they’re not dischargeable in bankruptcy, so there’s pretty much no risk to the lender. If risk is low, the lender will lend to people who really shouldn’t be taking out loans.
If the only loans available were dischargeable, private loans, banks would only give loans to people who have a high chance of repaying them, so people with good grades studying in-demand fields. Or perhaps companies would offer scholarships in exchange for a contract to work upon graduation. Also, since loans would be harder to get, schools would be more motivated to keep prices affordable since kids wouldn’t just be able to get a FAFSA loan to pay whatever ridiculous tuition they charge.
Either we should go for free higher education or remove federal loans entirely. I’m totally fine with federal grants, but anything coming from the government should be free of any obligation to repay. I’m convinced that federal student loans are largely at fault for drastically increasing higher education costs.
Well yeah, the GOP is full of complete nonsense here. They’re worse than the Democratic Party on education, even though I think Democrats also have poor policies.
What we need is higher paid teachers, and to reduce the barrier for students in bad schools to go to better schools.
They have to do better than public schools, with those gone they will be in competition between each other. There will no longer be a standing baseline school. In the few places that put their money where their mouth is, and moved to some sort of charter system, it didn’t take long for things to end up like the corporate world. First ones in, and the ones with the biggest money behind them, ended up being all that was left, with fewer schools, them not willing to take on more and more students, them pointing towards their vanishing “operations margins”. That if they lost these their discretion on payments of staff and services would be gone and they would just be public schools, with extra steps, again. Public schools were re-opened. This generally didn’t even take over 5 years.
Charter schools were not designed to take over public schools in the first place. They were created to pick-up the demographics that had more resources than those in poverty, but not quite enough to really afford private schools. Private school vouchers against taxes will always be a wedge in this debate. The same people who want the charter system want this. These people are often libertarians. I don’t care about no true scottsman ideas of what a libertarian is, the libertarian composition gets most of it’s money from these people, so this is what libertarian is. There is also the whole libertarianism was never meant to be a means of creating liberty but, instead, just completely handing over power to the new lords, industrialists, and this is why the early libertarians were so enamored with fascism. Not that fascism isn’t an issue with the modern libertarian party.
The government didn’t originally want the loan system we got. The extremely wealthy paid people until the bill read in such a fashion, and continued until schools could basically ask for whatever and get it. I mean, if the only thing keeping people out of Harvard and Princeton was their academic performance, well then it would no longer be the country club with classes anymore. The only way to ensure that “elite” schools could keep the poors out is to allow them to ask whatever they wanted. This makes a wave throughout the whole school system though, and is raises the prices at every level eventually. The only other way was socialized schooling, which you mentioned. This is not an option to the libertarian billionaires. So the compromise is to set up a system to extract as much tax money as possible. Also, most private loans has some form of government subsidy, even if hidden, and often preferably hidden, behind a byzantine system of bureaucracy. Corporations get to extract tax money and it’s difficult enough to find out how little risk they actually take on. This allows them to keep their government scapegoat.
I did underwriting for Sallie Mae for years. This was in the early 2000s and moving to a charter system was THE hot topic in the US school industry. We did a lot of research on this subject. It ultimately didn’t take over because it can’t. It either makes the short side of the stick just not exist anymore, or it becomes a public school via forced private entities. You either have public education, or you have the poor go without. This is not tenable in the long run. While it would be a huge dump of resources into the “upper middle” and create a bunch of gains initially, it is myopic. The loss of those resources at the bottom create a larger drag than the reassignment of those funds creates in gains. There were smaller cities that tried this. It was an unmitigated disaster. That is why the government, and the banks, haven’t budged since and it’s mostly people who have never done anything with the education system at large that keep it as a talking point, or some pet project at the local level with rich people and their government stooges. We need to get private industry out of the school loan system. So we can scrap school loans. Education just needs to be available to everyone. This includes vocational training and certification. This is what was actually wanted, but private money interests butted in and turned it into a method to extract tax money, the current loan system, like always. Then they turned the narrative around.
Your point about the school busses doesn’t really matter much. If the government has to pay for the transportation to these schools it will get in the way of private industry profiting off kids getting to school. So this will not be popular amongst the privatize everything set, unless they can turn it either into a segue into being that, or just extracting tax money.
I think we agree on the last point except, rather than burden better schools with more students, we come to the reality that bad schools are bad because the areas are poor. This mean they have more mental health issues, have more physical health issues, and just all-around have more issues because being poor is more expensive per capita than having wealth. So we need to put more money per capita in. This actually gets brought up often, but then the poor, poor, white suburbanites cry about how it’s unfair, even though their schools generally receive more resources even in places where local income doesn’t affect school budget (ie TX). So “inner city” and rural schools stay falling apart.
Also we need to stop using “inner city” as the whipping boy. This is a racist dog whistle. Rural USA is poor, it is soaked in drugs, violence, bad schools, few opportunities, pregnant teens, etc. It’s just easier to keep this on the down low when it’s mostly white, and it’s rather isolated. They “benefit” from not being paraded around like minority demographics, and because it’s easier for the local government to ignore a LOT of the problems there. So it never goes on record. Everyone here knows you don’t just go wandering around rural Appalachia, but everyone also claims it’s so safe. Documentaries routinely come out putting a spotlight on how a lot of rural USA looks like “developing” nations and has drugs and crime everywhere. They then gasp, then go right back to “rural = better life” but might be boring.
The goal here is an education experience where kids and parents are in control (with kids getting more control the older they get), not districts. Some kids do better with more structure, some do better with less, and I don’t think the public school system can really provide that diversity.
I want a school system where you can get a good job with a high school education, and to get there, high schools need to provide a diverse set of marketable skills, from STEM to trades. I’ve heard good things about the German school system, so maybe the public school system can provide that, idk.
And maybe that’s where those areas you mentioned failed, they probably treated charter schools as the end goal and not a tool.
feel free to skip (discussion about libertarianism)
Feel free to skip this section, I’m merely trying to give context to how I use the term libertarian.
There’s at least three things people think of when it comes to libertarians:
There’s more than that as well that may fit (e.g. anarcho-capitalists like Javier Milei in Argentina), but that’s getting into the weeds.
I think you’re referring to first group, and I generally refer to the last, and I think of it more as a direction than a destination (as Penn Jillette puts it, “solve problems with more freedom, not less”).
And then you mention “libertarians” and “fascism” in the same breath, so you and I must have a very different understanding of libertarianism. American libertarianism has its roots in the classical liberalism of the founding fathers (especially Jefferson), and really got going opposing FDR’s coopting of the term “liberal” to mean “progressive.” Before FDR, libertarians would’ve been called “liberals,” in favor of small government.
Fascism is completely opposite to my understanding of libertarianism. At no point would I ever consider the needs of the state (not society, the state) to trump the liberty of the individual, yet that’s precisely what fascism is all about.
That’s about as far a I’ll go in the “no true Scotsman” discussion, which is neither productive nor interesting. I just wanted to clarify what I mean to give context when I use the term.
I use it because it’s low hanging fruit. An urban area already generally has a functioning transit system, so moving people from the poor part of town to a wealthier area wouldn’t be a big ask in terms of new resources.
Rural areas have a different set of problems. They don’t have the population to support competition, so those schools should probably remain government run, at least until there’s decent transportation to more densely populated areas.
Whatever system we end up with, it’s going to need to look different in urban vs rural areas.
I don’t think that should be the goal here. Maybe it makes sense ultimately, but the true goal should be to make K-12 education sufficient for most people (it currently is not), and for higher education to be available for those who truly want/need it. Many kids won’t finish high school, much less take advantage of free college.
The reason we got stuck with federal student loans is because the government made such a big push to get kids to go to college. A lot of kids couldn’t afford it, hence the direct student loan was born. So many kids get degrees because they’re told they need to go to college and find out later that many degrees just aren’t worth anything in the market.
Free education misses this point entirely imo. The core problem isn’t that students are getting into debt (that’s a symptom), it’s that they’re getting unmarketable degrees or simply drop out. Eliminating school costs fixes the debt problem, but it doesn’t solve the worthless degree problem.
We need to deemphasize college and make our K-12 schools as good as they can be. I think competition is the way forward, and there are a lot of ways that can be structured.
The reason private schools, and charter schools, perform better than public schools is that there are more teachers per students, and they have more resources to keep their curriculum up-to-date. Having more teachers per student is what allows for flexibility. When a teacher has 40+ students per class they can’t balance any special considerations for anyone. When a teacher has 12 students they can learn how each of their students learns and make accommodations for it. This also allows for greater consideration of input from places like parents. Though you need to be very careful with this. There are a lot of parents out there that believe they know better than everyone and will force everyone to comply if they can. See Moms for Liberty. This is achievable, many countries accomplish this. In fact, for countries in a similar range of per capita wealth, this is largely a US problem.
The reason the high school diploma only really good for the low end of the pay grade jobs isn’t because of schools. It is because employers want a whole bunch of barriers to entry. They also want to shift the burden of training. The reasons for this are numerous. From being able to get over qualified people because everyone wants a masters and 10 years experience for an entry level tech job, to using it as yet another reason they just can’t find anyone from this country to do the job, and that’s why they need foreigners who need a corporate sponsor in order to keep their visa. Nothing creates compliance with an employer like your life being destroyed if you lose the job. See also employer tied healthcare. The reason vocational courses were removed was largely due to demand from parents, though the efficacy of them is debatable. However a lot of places still have whole vocational curricula. Several days a week kids go to a secondary school that teachers various trade courses. This is common in the mid-atlantic and northeast. The problem is that the larger portion of employers want certificates from secondary education sources. A lot of big names in vocational industries actually used to be paid by those schools to do so. See EDMC schools. I mean, I am pretty sure it is still happening, but I haven’t been in the school industry in a long time. This allows employers to offload more of it’s expenses on training and creates a predatory industry the process. So a win-win from a capitalist perspective.
The point about treating charter schools as an end goal isn’t really meaningful. They replaced public schools with the promise they would out perform them. They were allowed a lot of freedom in how they operated. That was kinda the point. The problem was that they fell into needing to compete with each other because anyone could potentially go to any of them. None of them wanted to be the one where they kids that didn’t perform as well ended up. In fact once that happened they then had to start fighting with the public about why they got tax money when they were the worst performer. I mean, having to pay for under performing schools is why they moved to this. This quickly turned into them eating each other. This ended up with fewer total schools than when there was only public schools, while they were also fighting to not be forced to do much more than they were because that undermines the idea behind them.
This is the “on paper” definition of libertarianism in the US. The reality is that groups like The Silver Legion were the early adopters of the label, and they were fascism supporters. The zealots also took a liking to it, not because they wanted people to have personal freedoms, but because the arguments for states having more individual power, and less federal oversight over individuals in the form of taxes, was a scheme to weaken the secular government enough to force their theocratic initiatives on people. The corporate lords like the idea for similar reason, but instead of religion, it’s just having them be the government. These are where most of the money behind the US libertarian comes from. Even now you can watch libertarian groups, and the libertarian party, align themselves with the fascists. Just look at August Invictus as a starting point for this rabbit hole. This is why I mentioned the no true scottsman thing. All these people go “No. Of course I am not a fascist/theocrat/oligarch. I told you, I am a Libertarian! That is fundamentally opposed to that. I just want the individual liberty to live life as I see fit.” Then other libertarians point to the same contradiction in definition to explain how the libertarians here are not like that, and if they are they aren’t real libertarians. Which doesn’t matter because their movement was hijacked before they were born.
The reason we got stuck with federal loans is because in order to get more people into college the government was pondering giving out the money to do so. This caused a lot of interference on the part of private interests, not to mention public cries of socialism, and the result was that loans with virtually no barrier would be what happens instead. As time went on there was a concerted, long term, effort to make the situation today where schools can basically ask for anything and get it.
While I agree we need more vocational training, just making primary education focused on getting a job will be worse for society as a whole. We need broad, academic, education. We need to bring things back to focusing on critical thinking skills. This, more than pretty much anything else, has been under attack for decades. Primary school needs to teach people how to learn and how assess information. Moving towards primary school teaching people how to work a job, rather than the companies that profit from that labor, is just another way to kill critical thinking. In the contemporary age, where we are inundated with information like never before, this is more important than ever. We need more vocational secondary schooling. We also need to push for college as well. It is certain that university level education raises the long term earning power of those who take it. Having a college degree increases the average lifetime earning by about 1.5 million dollars, its about 600k for vocational certification. There is a distortion of perception around this because vocational certification has a larger up-front return than college degrees.
The idea that it is not debt, but instead useless degrees, that is the problem, is propaganda. You have bought into a lie here. STEM degree enrollment has been increasing by leaps and bounds, it is at an all time high. Meanwhile all other degrees, except Law and MBA, have been crashing. They are at historic lows and there is currently no end to the decline in sight. So the “valuable” degrees that get jobs are vastly more popular than those who do not. It is to the point where most other academic departments are on the precipice of extinction. Worst part is? In the long run the average individual with a “useless” degree will make more over their life time than anyone without a college degree. Even when controlled for familial wealth.
Competition will not fix schooling. There is already a huge amount of competition in the school industry, you just don’t see it much if you aren’t involved, except maybe for universities. Even public schools are in heated competition. I can’t tell you how hard so many schools work to be recognized as the best public school in their region/state/the US. Making it more so will just make it look like the corporate world, a race towards just a few controlling everything. Much like the corporate world it’s not because they are the best for the people they serve either. That happens already with charter, and private schools, even with the public schools there. If you look at the number of non public schools in a region over time, one with a long established population, or as their growth cools, you actually see a decline in their number, or number per capita, even as the capacity to go to them increases. They get to a point where there is one of a number of types of schools (catholic, jewish, performing arts, the one that offers a radically different environment to very high performers, the fine arts one, the secular very expensive non coed ones, etc.) to a given geographic area. You see those grow as the others fade away.
IDK, maybe?
The research on smaller class sizes seems mixed, so I don’t think class size is the main factor here (assuming it’s within reason; national average is 19). I think our charter school (about the same class size as our state average) self-selects families where at least one parent is invested in education. You have to apply for the lottery, coordinate dropoff and pickup, kids need uniforms, and the school expects parents to volunteer 40 hours over the course of the school year. That’s a lot of hoops to jump through when you could otherwise just have the kid take the bus. So kids are likely getting better support at home vs public schools.
Perhaps smaller class sizes matters more in poorer areas (i.e. teachers are providing the support instead of parents). What seems to be important is teacher quality, and what that means varies by child. So matching children with the right teacher/teaching method may prove more impactful than just reducing class sizes.
Sir Ken Robinson argues that giving kids a say in what they learn dramatically improves outcomes because people learn faster when they’re interested/excited about a topic. To do that, teachers need more control over their curriculum, and to do that, they need their leadership on board.
Schools teach principles, businesses teach application of those principles to their particular domain. Businesses expect you to show up with a solid foundation, and they’ll train you in their particular processes.
And that’s where high school specialization comes in. I’d like to see kids have the option between college prep and a vocation in their last two years. College prep would get them college credit for courses or even an Associates Degree, whereas a vocation would teach them a skill to make something like $20+ instead of $10-12 per hour straight out of high school. The vocation track wouldn’t prevent them from going to college, so kids could work a vocation while attending college to minimize or eliminate student loans.
The goal should be to provide a range of options so most (ideally all) kids have better options than what they’d otherwise get with a regular highschool diploma. But to make room for that, K-12 education needs to be more efficient, and you get that by getting kids interested in school, and how that happens is different for each child. Hence the need for different approaches.
Huh, I’d never heard of them, and a quick search shows no correlation with libertarianism. Every source (and I browsed several) just calls them fascist, pro-Hitler, anti-Semitic, etc, but never “libertarian” or anything similar.
The only similarity I see is opposition to FDR, but they attacked him for very different reasons. They were a relatively small org, though I guess big enough to be mentioned in It Can’t Happen Here.
This seems like a failure of the Florida Libertarian Party, not an actual symptom of rot in libertarian ideology. Fringe groups attract weirdos, especially if that group is so supportive of free speech. He lost the nomination by a landslide and switched to the Republican Party, so that tells me the nomination process at least is working in this case.
That said, the national Libertarian Party in the US is moving right, and I think that’s troubling for the reasons you’ve outlined. If we use the political compass as a reference, here’s where I place things:
Public prescription seems to put libertarians hugging the right edge top to bottom, and that seems consistent with what you’ve said. But libertarianism is a big tent, covering the entire bottom half of the chart. So my definition here is anyone who fits in the bottom half, which excludes people like Invictus and includes socialists like Noam Chomsky.
And that’s the problem, the goal was misplaced. The goal should be to get people into better jobs, not get people more education. More education generally leads to better jobs, but here are lots of ways to achieve that end goal.
It’s kind of like the idea behind EV subsidies: we want less dependence on oil, EVs don’t depend on oil, so we subsidize EVs. But there are tons of alternatives, such as investing in mass transit, hydrogen fuel cells, or cycling infrastructure. The solution shouldn’t be to pick a winner and pump money into it (in this case, college), but to design a system that benefits all favorable alternatives at the expense of the thing we want to discourage. For energy, this probably means carbon taxes (discourage fossil fuels), and for energy it means changing the focus of K-12 from “college or bust” to different paths depending on interest.
Sure, and that’s what K-10 should be about (or even K-8), and we should expect more from it.
I think the pace of education is way too slow and that we could cover the same ground as K-12 currently does (and maybe more) in fewer years. I was constantly bored in school and finished my Associates Degree while in high school (mostly did it because it took less time per day vs high school), and I’m not particularly smart, I just had good parents that helped keep me engaged. And that was in a progressive state that invested a lot in education (near top in the nation for teacher pay as percent of salaries, top half for total spending).
Expanding options in teaching style should allow us to increase the pace of education. To get there, we need a mixture of:
But all the “solutions” I’ve seen are:
They all seem to miss the point.
I think it gives a context for those discussions.
Like for a vocation, class work could include comparing pay and obligations for self employment vs working under someone, deciding whether to buy or build something, comparing the impact of spending more to do a good job vs going cheap to get it done fast. Or factoring safety costs and benefits, identifying potential hazards, etc. That’s probably a lot more interesting to a teenager who just wants to work than analyzing Macbeth.
These kinds of statistics are super misleading though. College degrees are all but required for a lot of high income jobs, but a lot of degrees are completely worthless (at least from an earning perspective). So you’re getting a lot of upward skew on the data from doctors, lawyers, etc. Those lucrative fields are very competitive since there’s a limited number of spots available, so my guess is that increasing the number of people in college will largely increase the number of people in less lucrative fields.
And yeah, trades don’t pay as well as degrees, but they pay a lot more consistently. A lot of college graduates don’t get a job in their field, and many resort to vocations anyway. It’s a lot better to find out that a vocation is right for you in high school than after trying college.
If you’re interested in STEM, you’re probably not interested in a vocation anyway. I’m talking about the rest of students who are told to get any degree.
Are you talking about averages here? Because I’m wondering if it’s comparing to all people without a degree, when it should be comparing vs people in the trades. If you don’t get a job in your field, what are the chances that you’ll go to even more school to finish an apprenticeship or something? You’ll probably take what you can get (management role at a restaurant or something) because those loans need to be paid. We shouldn’t be comparing against GED only here, but other skilled professions.
I don’t think we need free college. If you’re going to college, you should be expecting to get value from that investment. But we do need to get prices back to being reasonable, a lot of your tuition isn’t going to your professors, but all the other nonsense schools do (probably a lot of it ironically dealing with financial aid).
Kind of, but they’re competing for test scores, not student satisfaction, actual achievement, etc. Growing up, we had an important state assessment, so we spend a lot of class time studying specifically for it. That sucked, and I don’t think it was very productive, but it probably helped the school secure better funding or something.
That’s not constructive competition because it leads to teaching to the test. Teachers don’t want to do that, but they need to in order for their school to look good and get funding.