Free Private School

Who sends their kids to private schools? Those who can. Everybody else? Public school. Now, call me a genius if you want, but it seems obvious to me that private schools are more desirable to most students and parents. That said, I applaud the Philadelphia School Reform Commission's decision to turn over 42 failing Philly schools to private companies. If they give the companies (and other entities, including an NGO and 2 universities) enough leeway, the schools could become very much like private schools, at least from the institutional side.

Now, they can't become like bona fide private schools: one of the important determinants of how well students learn is the intelligence and involvement of those around them. Private schools have a serious edge in that department since those that attend come from families that place a high value on education (since they were willing to spend some obscene amount for schooling their kids), they generally come from 2-parent homes, and I hate to say it but they can also be congenitally brighter (smart people tend to make money and to have smart kids) than their "average" counterparts. All that can't be introduced in Philly, but if the competition factor is introduced in the institutional side, teachers will have a serious incentive to, um, teach, and the administrators will have an incentive to hire effective employees, pay competitive salaries, and do what private schools have been doing for years: outperforming their public counterparts.

Others have made the above arguments much better than I can, so my apologies.