“Absolutely none of this school choice nonsense will even be remembered 10 years from now.”

Please explain to me why school choice is bad.

“…testing- weighing the cow doesn’t make it fatter”

It does tell you when you’ve reached the desired weight, though, doesn’t it?

“Finland with virtually no testing wipes out USA in international tests.”

And what about TIMSS? Korea? Singapore?

“Big improvements in teacher pay need to come before any increase in accountability.”

So that we can attract a better class of teacher, I presume? But then it follows that we should fire the current crop of incompetents, don’t you agree?

And a nit; on your home page I found this rather odd sentence:

“Could I knit-pick on this policy?”

Is this the English you’ve been teaching your students? You might claim that I’m nit-picking, but this is your field, isn’t it?

For the love of GOD get on with what works, reducing class sizes (STAR research Tennessee), improved teacher training (no not alternative certification that is a loser as well). Finland demands two masters degrees from teachers and then turns over control to them. Hmmmm I wonder why they are on top? Big improvements in teacher pay need to come before any increase in accountability. History shows without it all you get is a teacher shortage. Who the hell wants to teach in Louisiana or Mississippi or inner city LA or NYC? Only a few very dedicated teachers and that fills about half the jobs.

“If you look at which sectors of our society are considered consistently broken, it’s those where one group pays for the product/service but another receives it.”

I absolutely agree.

I think, in fact, that all parents should pay something towards tuition.

Yet cars have been getting more reliable and more energy efficient over time – this is causing problems for road maintenance which is funded by petrol taxes in NZ, as the money is falling despite more cars on the road.

Stupid blockbuster movies – have you seen the special effects on those babies? Yes, sometimes the plots are stupid, but that’s common in popular culture – consider for example how Shakespeare resolves As You Like It by having Orlando’s brother Oliver fall instantly in love with Celia.

And junk food eateries use the cooking technique of adding fat to make the food taste better – this is the second-most common cooking technique in the world, used in every cusine I know of (lard in Mexican cooking, bread-and-butter in English cooking, ghee in Indian curries, coconut milk in Thai curries, stirfries, confit in French cooking, potatoes cooked au gratin) etc (the most-common technique is if you heat the food it gets easier to chew). The trouble with our current diet is that fat is a lot easier to get nowadays than it was for most of human history so we have tastebuds attracted to the wrong things, it’s not the fault of schemers consciously convincing everyone that these foods are wonderful, instead the schemers are making food that we find wonderful.

That’s the problem with health care and public education… offering the same broken, warmed-over **** for a lower price is not going to solve anything. If you look at which sectors of our society are considered consistently broken, it’s those where one group pays for the product/service but another receives it. That incentive structure is fatally flawed.

The only reason health care isn’t as bad as in single-payer systems like Great Britain is because the people paying for health care right now at least have to nominally care about the satisfaction of their customers. The Democrats are pushing for a system where not even that matters.

If this were to happen in a school where parents payed even a token amount for their children to attend, that school would not have enough students to operate in the fall. Parents would take their money elsewhere. However, I’m sure Clayton Valley High School will continue to operate because it’s free, and that makes it good enough for a lot of parents.

Now, just imagine what kind of horror stories are possible in a hospital system run with the same incentive structure as public schools.

You may be right; there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence about the things that are wrong with single-payer systems in many countries.

But the horror stories about the current monopoly are here and now.

The current model, where “free” public schools compete against private schools that charge make public schools the only rational choice for families, even if the conditions are downright abusive. Under the current system, private schools have to be many times better than their “free” public competitors to make them worth the price. Anything that can be done to level the playing field some, like a decent-sized tax credit or voucher that can be used at any school, would go a long way to prevent the worst of the worst in the public schools.

Incidentally, the Democrats’ “public option” is a play very similar to “free” public schools to drive private parties out of the health care space. The horror stories of denials and abuse at the hands of the new monopoly will come in time.

Also it appears that Dr. Willingham majored in Psychology.

Whenever a psych major starts to talk about probability I get very nervous. He may be an exception, but in general psychologists are fairly blunt knives.

Willingham suggest that parents might not make the “correct” decisions, but entirely ignores the fact that the public school system has made the wrong decisions for lo! these many years.

So you have a possibly misguided apple vs. a provably bad apple, and he’s siding with the provably bad apple!

This is quite distressing. If this is really the best Willingham can do, it raises serious questions about the level of his post.

As for Senor Claus, I suppose he’s doing the best he can with his laboured (and, of course) mistaken) sermons.