Time Illustrates the Fallacies Inherent to Public Education

Even if we assume these objections are otherwise valid, so what?

Over at Time, an “expert” is attempting to make the case against school choice, but his entire argument merits only a shrug of indifference - even if all of his objections were true, so what?

First, he objects that most programs only help a small # of students. Well, if you make the programs stingy (as anti-choice people always do), you won’t help many people, but you can’t complain about the problem you created. Besides, so what? When did a government program have to help everybody in order to be a good program? Indeed, what government program would meet that standard? Furthermore, does he know how markets work? Only a few people benefit from Ruth Chris’s, but the existence of Ruth Chris forces other steakhouses to improve - margins matter in markets, so marginal changes can have enormous results. What business could survive losing 10% of its customers? What if those are its most profitable customers? If you know economics, you know #’s are meaningless - margins are what count. I’d rather lose 100 bad customers than 1 key customer, so don’t tell me #’s; I need margins.

Second, he objects that many of these schools discriminate. Uh, so what? Are you saying you’d prefer that MORE students could attend schools run by people who hate them? Is the problem that too few students get a chance to be discriminated against (Objection #1 above) or that too many students get a chance to be discriminated against (Objection #2)? Pick a lane, pal, pick a lane. If these programs only keep people in the schools they already attend (Objection #1), then they can’t change the discrimination issue at all. And if schools that discriminate are bad, why do we care if we’re being excluded from bad schools? Huh? I would think being excluded from a school that discriminates is a blessing if schools that don’t discriminate are better, right? This argument is like saying that restaurant puts bugs in its food and it won’t let me eat there; wouldn’t that be a good thing? Unless you want to eat bugs, it would be, so is he arguing that schools that discriminate are better than schools that don’t & thus I’m hurt when I can’t attend those schools? Ugh, the logic here is just laughable.

Finally, he objects that these schools attained poor results, often because they went out of business soon after they began. Well, that would be interesting if I had any reason to believe these students fared worse than public school students or if I had any reason to believe these students fared worse than they otherwise would have fared. I need comparisons people. That’s like saying people who go the hospital are more likely to die than people generally. Well, duh. The question is whether people who go to hospitals are more likely to die than similarly-situated people who didn’t go to the hospital. In the abstract, dying rates tell me nothing.

He closes his nonsense by saying these educational losses are comparable to those suffered during COVID. Really? The idiots who closed the schools for NO REASON and who told us this would be FINE because kids were resilient or whatever are now using the consequences of their own mistakes as the definition of catastrophe. Well, that’s funny & that exposes why school choice matters. But for the mass exodus out of the public schools, they’d still be closed - the teachers NEVER intended to go back to work or to reopen; they were forced to reopen because the public was leaving. If you make it easier to leave, you make it harder to make mistakes, thereby benefitting everyone (even those who’d never leave public schools). See how margins work? I might never leave Ryan’s steakhouse for Ruth Chris’s, but the mere fact that I can forces Ryan’s to improve - that’s the magic of markets (they help people who aren’t even aware of how they’ve been helped)!

The public schools are disasters which, even according to their fans, “occasionally” do idiotic & cruel things (like COVID 19 response). So you want to make it easier for public schools to do cruel & idiotic things (like COVID 19 response)? Or do you want to make it easier for people to escape, thereby making it harder to make such errors and/or to persist in them? The fact that this idiot can’t defend public schools w/o citing their most recent disaster tells you all you need to know: the system is indefensible. Sure, private schools will do bad things, but as this expert admitted the result is that they go out of business. In contrast, public schools will do bad things to MORE students for LONGER & suffer precisely ZERO consequences… how is that a defense of public education?

Let’s get real here: the ONLY reason this expert can invent for public education is that public education helps LGBTQ+ kids. Uh, okay, but wouldn’t attending a school that ACTUALLY wanted them help them even more? Why would I want anyone to attend a school run by people who hate them even if those people are sufficiently cowed to pretend they like them? Is that a benefit? In what universe? So, sure, choice means gay kids can’t be educated by people who hate them (unless those people like $ more than they hate gay kids), but so what? Wouldn’t it be better for gay kids to go to schools run by people who like them? I’m really struggling to understand how it benefits anyone to oppress others into pretending to like them - it helps those doing the oppressing, I’m sure, but does it help anyone else?