If you oppose top-down meddling in public education then I assume you support vouchers? That's about as bottom-up as things get.
Indeed. I think jessuastin probably meant something like nationalized identity-driven politics. It's a valid difference.
> If you oppose top-down meddling in public education then I assume you support vouchers? That's about as bottom-up as things get.
I like choice but not vouchers. There are basically two issues with vouchers.
The first is that they're usually implemented in a fashion that is simultaneously regressive (on income) and re-distributive (on geography). Ie, they're often implemented as pure grift.
The second, and more important, is that we already have experimented with a hybrid public/private system where some public funds flow to private options! The result is runaway spending and the market driving emphasis toward a bunch of bullshit cost disease stuff instead of actual learning outcomes. No matter how bad our public K12 system is, you will never convince me that our higher ed system is better, and that's what an American public/private hybrid system would, empirically, end up converging to.
I could get behind a voucher system that (1) gives each kid the same amount of cash and also (2) caps all tuition and fees for any school receiving even a dollar of voucher cash.
I'd also be okay with just not providing state funding for education at all, but it'd be a sort of terrible world for most families and I genuinely wonder how many people realize how bad things would get for most families...
The unwarranted assumption you make in this comment is that legislation in USA reflects the will of the population. That is very rarely the case, and this is a perfect example. No one in this state woke up this morning worried about porn in an elementary school library.
I support vouchers, because even imperfect improvements are improvements. If a child isn't being served by a school, even poor parents should be able to do something about that. We can imagine a world in which the public schools offer enough options to help every child, but we don't live there yet.
Bad assumption. That's a fundamental POV difference between "I pay taxes to fund the public education system" and "I pay taxes to pay for kids to go to some school". The notion that those tax dollars belong to the parents and not specifically the public school system depends on which of those you think is, or should be, the case.
For my part, if the money's not exclusively funding the public school system, I don't want to pay any taxes toward schools. Talk about bottom up!
[EDIT] FWIW I'm actually for allowing districts to experiment with this, because I doubt mine would do it and I think the results would be hilarious, but would prefer not to have to move to another state to avoid it, so would rather the red parts of my state not impose it on my district.