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In reply to the discussion: Delicious Wingnut Outrage: Team Obama wins fight to have Christian home-school family deported [View all]YarnAddict
(1,850 posts)does nothing to fix public education. But maybe those families feel that saving their own children from boredom/ignorance/bullying/whatever trumps fixing public schools.
And competition DOES help. Many years ago we had a charter school start up in our small town, mostly in response to the fact that our public school administrators were giving parents a huge FUCK YOU in regard to their concerns about their kids' education.
When the superintendent and school board saw the outpouring of support for the school, the number of applications, and the interest in it, things changed pronto. For the first time, our schools started offering AP, just as one example.
The fact that our schools thought they had a monopoly on how kids were going to be educated had allowed them to arrogantly do their own thing. Once that school started, they found out that they needed to listen to people's concerns.