>'FDB wants to lower the dropout age to 12; Schools guarentee that kids get to have interactions with lots of other kids, even in very rural areas; Schools guarentee parents time to themselves, to not worry about keeping their kids safe. Aren't these important points?'
Yes, but 5 - 12 is still a looong time for a kid. All those points are orthogonal to charters.
>'I think FDB wants to shut down charters because he recognizes that they're immoral [citation needed], and public schools are simply what we're supposed to maintain for taking care of and educating our kids (at this moment in history.) It seems like Alexander is just saying "you're dreaming too big!"; in every era some people always exist to say this."'
Personally, I'm very fond of Alexander's passage against public-schools-only near the end:
"I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing things super, super backwards!"