Should Libertarians Support School Choice? A Soho Forum Debate
Corey DeAngelis of the American Federation for Children debates libertarian author Stephan Kinsella.
HD DownloadEducation activist Corey DeAngelis and attorney Stephan Kinsella debate the resolution, "Today's school-choice movement in the U.S. is worthy of support by libertarians."
Taking the affirmative is Corey DeAngelis, a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children. He is also the executive director at Educational Freedom Institute, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, a senior fellow at Reason Foundation, and a board member at Liberty Justice Center. He was named on the Forbes 30 under 30 list for his work on education policy and received the Buckley Award from America's Future in 2020.
Taking the negative is Stephan Kinsella, a libertarian writer and patent attorney. He was previously general counsel for Applied Optoelectronics, Inc., and an adjunct law professor at South Texas College of Law Houston. His publications include Against Intellectual Property, International Investment, Political Risk, and Dispute Resolution, and a forthcoming book Legal Foundations of a Free Society.
The debate was held at New York City's Sheen Center and hosted by The Soho Forum, which receives fiscal sponsorship from Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason.
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I'll take both, please. I will happily vote for the abolition of the Educatopotato State. But that ain't happening, so until then, I will happily vote for school choice.
It is noteworthy that many who see School Choice as a panacea have a difficult row to hoe in explaining why it won't be any different than what is happening with Universities- namely a bunch of government cash flooding driving up the price of schooling, without any real improvement in quality. I think there is still a moral choice to be made- if we are going to spend taxpayer money to incompetently care for children, we should put as much of that money in the hands of the parents as possible. But I have many suspicions that it will still be a shit show, even if it is a more moral one.
Most non public schools like charters cost 20% less per student for better results.
My own high school in the mid-90's spent about 1/3 per student compared to the local public school district, with significantly better academic results. We could educate about 10 students at our school for the price of 3 at the public one.
We just didn't have all the administrative overhead. There were maybe 4-6 employees at our school that didn't teach classes. The sports coaches taught PE, health, or other subjects. My baseball coaches were also my AP Chemistry and AP Calculus instructors. My tennis coach taught French. Hell, even one of the lunch ladies taught home economics.
And yet the same WAS true for private universities. But now the private universities are some of the most expensive schools in the country. Why is that?
Again, I'm not arguing against the market here. Intuitively I think competition helps things. But something with the government cash broke the secondary ed market. Figuring out why it is broken will keep us from breaking primary education as well.
Yeah, I think the big difference is that my high school did not receive any government funds. Not even for the lunch program.
Could we start by asking if libertarians should support state-sponsored education?
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Why is this even a matter for debate (among “libertarians,” no less)? For that matter, in what realm should we not have a choice in any aspect of our lives?
Should Libertarians Support School Choice?
Sure but I'm not paying for your spoiled special little brat Johnny to go to an anti-social private school or enjoy a bouncy house with a water slide attached to it at his home school. Hell no!
Wpuld you rather pay for this?
https://www.quora.com/If-you-had-a-child-in-middle-school-who-was-being-bullied-how-would-you-handle-it/answer/Dennis-Manning-9
Do you complain about having to pay for the government indoctrination centers known as public schools?
I don't know why they haven't started impeachment against Biden, he's beyond demented.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12442589/Biden-SpaceX-Elon-musk-hiring.html
Biden administration SUES Elon Musk's SpaceX for 'only hiring US citizens' and 'discouraging' asylum seekers and refugees from applying for jobs
The company that I used to work for once hired this Asian guy for the aerospace division. ITAR was required. After making the job offer to him, it was found out that he was actually born in Japan and moved immediately to the US. Because of this, he was not eligible to be involved in any of the ITAR projects, including SPACEX . He was switched to the non-aerospace projects and did well there.
The regime hates us and is at war with us.
Relative to what and with what strings attached? The devil is in the details here
Replacing public education with the exact same requirements is silly. Replacing public education with educational attainment standards only has a chance of being valuable.
Private accreditation standards will surely become a thing if government indoctrination ever stops.
Yeah, if government's paying for it, government's dictating what goes on there.
+10000; Exactly….
Why else would the middleman (gov) be there?
Politicians aren’t teachers in schools.
Politicians don’t make stuff so their add-value earnings are $0.
The only way governments pay for anything is with other people’s labor/earnings.
Government is 100% a liability-dependent on hard-working citizens. Their only asset is legal gun-force which can either be used to ensure Liberty and Justice or dictate, steal and enslave.
It would be nice if more people could look that fact in the eye.
My questions for the affirmative side:
1) How will school choice provide equal educational opportunity to all children?
2) How will school choice provide accountability and adequate information to the parents and rest of the public?
The details in the answers to these questions will matter. If the affirmative side would not answer with much or no real detail of how they envision school choice to work, then they should not be taken seriously.
1) Because they’ll all have choice. That was easy to answer.
Should teachers/workers be slaves of bad/lazy parents and their kids? Lift minimum age work restriction and kids don’t have to be ‘banned’ from earning “equal educational opportunity”.
2) First off; Commie-Education doesn’t have accountability or adequate information (exactly what ‘school choice’ is trying to fix). But individuals and their kids who demand it can finally obtain it. The entire world wide web operates on private (not-gov-gun) protocol standards because individuals require it. The only thing that stops/distorts supply from meeting demand is gov-guns.
The real culprit here is sticking gov-guns in places they have no logical purpose to be. 'Guns' don't teach kids. So what are they doing in education? People teach other people and so long as there is demand to learn there will be supply.
Communism has never and will never be better than liberty and justice because its only purpose is to TAKE what hasn’t been *EARNED* until it takes everything and dies in its self-created zero-sum resources game.
1) I said details. Waving the invisible hand at the problem doesn't say anything.
2) Ignoring more than two decades of testing and accountability measures implemented first by Republican governors (namely George W. in Texas and Jeb Bush in Florida), after which George took it national with No Child Left Behind. Every kid tested, results made publicly available ... Jeb's plan even included giving a letter grade to every public school. From you, more invisible hand waving about how it would work for school choice. Not to mention unhinged ranting about commies and government guns.
1) The 'detail' is decided by each free-person to earn their opportunity or didn't I clarify that enough?
2) Commie-Education was a HUGE mistake of Republicans precisely why the thinking of Jeb Bush and other RINOS will never get any USA patriots support and by his campaign success not a lot of Republican success in general.
And BTW: Ranting or not it's undeniable truth that needs to be acknowledged instead of the plague of cognitive dissonance about what government really is if the USA is ever going to stop it's tracks into Nazism.
What's clear enough is that you don't know and don't care how things actually get accomplished in the real world by real people as long as you can extol the virtues of the free market in lofty but totally vague terms and go on and on about commies and Nazism.
What's clear is you never were looking for an answer to your question. You just wanted to make some big power-mad plans on how "real people" "accomplish" things.
How's this for an answer: They don't need your big-plans to plan their lives for them.
No, I wanted an answer. I wanted someone that wasn't just going to spew ridiculous ideology to answer.
Have you ever gotten a job done by telling people that commies and Nazis are going to take over if they don't watch out for them?
"Have you ever gotten a job done by telling people that commies and Nazis are going to take over if they don’t watch out for them?"
All the time. More coherently said as, “If YOU don’t do it; it’s never going to get done.” Shoveling ones own responsibility onto someone else is the very foundation of socialism and communism.
And that is the answer I supplied and the answer you didn’t like.
This is the epitome of why "libertarians" aren't taken seriously. Anyone against choice of any kind is not a libertarian.