Yikes: Louisiana's bold bid to privatize schools

[Selatius]

14. You can't dictate to teachers like they work on an assembly line.

The biggest reason why this can't be done is patently obvious if you just think about it for a second.

Say you operate a plant that turns out potato bread. One of the necessary inputs for that operation is potatoes, and you want the best ones in your batch before you process them. With the best potatoes, you can turn out a quality product. What do you do with the bad potatoes?

You reject them.

The same can't be said for kids. As a teacher and as a school and as a societal moral responsibility to all those kids, the public school system must accept all the kids, including the bad ones and the ones with learning disabilities. Quite a lot of charter schools boost their scores precisely by rejecting the poorest performing students. Those students are dumped onto the public school. This is why so many schools are failing to achieve the high scores necessary under NCLB because they're left with the bad students, while the private charters pick and choose the best.

If you favor maximum choice for the parent, you shouldn't accept this arrangement for the fact that many public schools in Louisiana will disappear due to charters and religious schools unfairly dumping the failing students on them. Eventually, you'll be left with nothing but privately run schools and religious schools, and the nearest public school that actually is performing could be several towns over.