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Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

A true voucher type system that made schools competitive would help with that. In the current system you either work for the district or you don't. A voucher system would include many employment options and even a reason for them to advertise and promote their teachers competitively.

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Money does not show up from nowhere. A district that can't afford to pay teachers can't afford to subsidize private schools. The vast majority of private schools don't increase student preformance instead they reject poor performing students.

A more sustainable solution is to have rotating class schedules, so teachers teach year round even if students don't go to class year round.

You'd have to come up with the money to pay those teachers the extra days, though. In my mother's district, their contract is for 191 days - I can't imagine that the union would roll over and work an extra 25% without getting paid for it.

The assumption is by having 25% fewer teachers you can pay the remainder 25+% more. With the extra based on the idea you don't need to pay for health insurance again. 42k * 1.25 = 52.5k which is not bad with full benefits and a pension.

We have a voucher system in sweden and it sucks. It sucks bad. Schools compete to offer better 'test scores', so the test scores go up, while the quality goes down. Sweden has been on a downward trajectory in the Pisa rankings since vouchers were introduced. Finland do it right. No vouchers, pay teachers well, high status job. As it should be.

How do you know the quality goes down?

PISA scores

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...

Considering the cultural and ethnic similarity between Sweden and Finland as Nordic countries, PISA score trajectory based on voucher vs highly paid public professionals is really shocking.

If what you are saying is true, that is shocking about Finland vs Sweden. Both are fairly ethnically homogenous and share similar Nordic sensibilities from what I understand, and tend to be co-compared for where they are different.

Wow

From what I've read, voucher schools don't outperform public schools, despite having advantages such as freedom to attract the best teachers, and being able to kick kids out for disabilities, behavioral issues, and low test scores.

In addition, I'm of the opinion that a voucher school system still needs to be backed up by public schools, for a number of reasons:

1. To make up for capacity shortages. There's no evidence that voucher schools would voluntarily maintain a surplus of seats, and there could be entire regions with permanent under-capacity, leaving kids with no schools to attend.

2. To bail out voucher schools that fail. At the very least I'd like to be assured (via legislation) that no public money will be spent to pay the debts of charter schools that are taken over by the state or by municipalities.

3. To educate kids who can't get into a voucher school.

Expecting healthy competition, after experiencing passenger aviation, cable TV service, or consumer banking, seems like a pipe dream.

An additional concern, which I don't know how to analyze: The number of passenger miles per day spent transporting kids to far-flung schools.

It creates constitutional issues that end up raising costs. Essentially, a school that is parochial, in order to take the vouchers, have to do crazy things like run as 2 separate corporations under the same roof, with all the headache that involves

What essentially ends up happening is long term refusal of the vouchers, private school prices go up, or you see alternatives that are even less constitutional (I'm looking at you Kirat Yoel) in order to replicate the same extra funds without the voucher headache on the private school school side.

Interestingly, in order for them to actually compete, you actually have to massively fund the school district as a public school, a la Great Neck North/South, or some of the suburbs of San Francisco, where you regularly hear about crazy good private and public schools with about equally good outcomes for their students

competition improves the gambling skills of administration it strangles those free spirits by forcing them to train the entrusted to perform under "circus-conditions" useless tricks.

Allow for a earning of teaching freedom by performance of student in reallife (aka student-tests, work-archievments). Allow teachers to take risks, aka bend the rules (skip circus-tests) by betting parts of there paycheck/benefits on there late-game-performance.

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