For 'fair', read 'tightly controlled by thousands of meddling bureaucrats who will end up making things even worse than they are now. At a huge great expense to the taxpayer'.
'Fair' could mean, for example, that every class must have at least one bully and troublemaker, one drug dealer and one mentally handicapped kid.
F*** that.
Now, this is what I call a fair schools system (with further tweaks and fine-tuning in the comments).
A grim document
6 hours ago
2 comments:
"Clearly, the best way to enhance parental choice is to improve unpopular schools," he said. "In many areas, however, other strategies must also be employed.”
This is bizarre. Instead of increasing the supply of good schools, he is proposing to manage the demand to funnel it towards poorer schools.
Suppose I were considering health and diet. It is observably the case that some people make consistently better diet choices and, probably as a result, enjoy better health.
The sensible thing to do is to make those same choices available to other people too, in the hope that they will pick up those choices and thereby benefit themselves.
What doesn't make any sense whatsoever is to go round to the areas with overall better health and say 'hmm, far too many people using the decent fishmonger here. We'd better make some of them go to the burger bar in the next village’.
There are no 'other strategies'. The only one which matters is improving state schools by any methods you choose. Vouchers could do it, which is fine by me except I favour privatization of schools under the slogan 'A private education for every child'.
I'm not ideologically bound to any particular solution, however I would like to avoid a situation where a significant number of consumers (i.e. parents, not children) reserve the right to choose something which is so darn stupid that it defeats the purpose of going to school at all, such as junking the science class in favour of fundamentalist theology.
I want the state's role reduced to its minimum core, but I accept that it has got some role as a public arbiter or guarantor of what the schools provide as any individual consumer is in a weak position compared to any school.
Vouchers = privatisation. I don't see a conflict there.
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