No, the way non-technical people work (at least at the upper-management level) is that they ask their underlings for a solution to a problem, when they've really got the solution they want to hear in their heads. The underlings, who have ostensibly been hired for their expertise in their fields, give them technically sound answers, but answers that are different from what they want to hear, which annoys and confuses them. (For example, you might want to compete with Amazon, but your resources are two Java devs, a junior UX designer, and an unpaid college intern. The boss wants to hear "Yes, we can do that, no problem", when the truth is that it's completely irrational to even consider it.) Eventually, management gets tired of being told that what they want to do is physically impossible, no matter how much money it would save (and that's the important part, make sure you never spend any money, ever) and stops asking them for their input, choosing instead to say "This is what we're doing, go deal with it."

Upper management arrogance and ego are and always have been more important than technical realities. That's what needs to change. We shouldn't be encouraging CIOs to talk like CIOs, we should be encouraging people to not be fucking retards and actually LISTEN to the people they've hired to perform a duty.

Then there are the guys that equate "best practices" as "the lazy programmers trying to get more time to do something that we've already decided should take X." I consider testing/QA as an example of "best practices". At a previous job, we were in a staff meeting talking about the progress of a piece of software we were writing. The bonehead VP of Marketing asked our QA guy how long he would need to finish a testing project. The QA guy answered "6 weeks". The VP then said "You have 3. QA always takes too long."

Not "why is it going to take so long", or "what problems do you need to solve", just "That's too much time". Idiot.

Form a new union? In an at-will-employment state? Good luck with that. See you in the unemployment line.

So these challenges don't exist? Do you have solutions?

And that means that it never happens, right? And "poor academic performers" are not one of those protected classes, so it's perfectly legal to turn them away.

So, you fund an alternative school for the kids that the other schools turn away. Who's going to run it? How do you force a private company to open a location that is almost certain to lose money?

Also, what happens when nobody wants to open a school in your town, because they don't think they can make a profit?

I just don't see how going to for-profit companies to do this isn't trading one set of problems for another.

No idea how that happened.

The reason it looks like I'm skipping around is that there are so many problems with using private for-profit companies to provide critical town services. Who would decide whose children have to attend the "alternative" school? You're taking school choice away from these parents because it's more difficult to educate those children. Also, how can you force a private company to set up a school to for those kids? Such a school is sure to lose money, unless you're prepared to spend more to educate them, which seems unfair to the other children in the town, as well as putting the other businesses at a competitive disadvantage. How much do you propose regulating this market? At what point do the advantages of a free market go away, if you're going to dictate to a private company who they have to accept as a student?

So now you're saying we're going to dictate to a private company who they can and cannot do business with? Doesn't sound too free-market to me.

The trad

Ignoring the ad hominem for the moment.. What happens when none of the charter schools in your district will accept your child as a student, because they have a learning disability, or are autistic, or they're a poor student? The first two consume more resources than the average student, the third will drag down whatever metrics are used to measure the performance of a school. Are those students just supposed to not get an education?

For-profit entities compete by doing two things: increasing revenue and/or lowering expenses. Increasing revenue is hard in a market where the customer base is finite; it's easier to cut corners. It's only a matter of time before those cut corners lower the quality of the education offered. For-profit schools are not in the business of providing quality education, they are in the business of making money. It's not if you can do it better than the other guy, it's if you can do it cheaper.

Also, this is interesting: Charter schools aren't the free market miracle cures you seem to think they are. tl;dr: Charter schools game the system to make it look like they perform better than public schools, by dropping or turning away poorly performing students. Separation of church and state is also just theory. No fiscal responsibility, either; they don't have to tell you what they're spending your tax money on.

Very few? The public schools? What the hell are you talking about? There seem to be hordes of children around when I drop off my kid at school.

If you want to talk about a service very few use, well, how many people have house fires? Or medical emergencies? Not many, and a shitload fewer than those who send their kids to school.

And as far as private schools go, it's not like they have to compete at the moment; their exclusivity puts them in a different class. But, if all the schools are private, for-profit entities, you can count on the race to the bottom happening eventually.

Well, you might not start out that way, you could have multiple vendors providing competing services. But the inevitable consolidation that would happen would leave you with one company owning all of them. Then you're pretty screwed, aren't you. Even if there were no consolidation, you can bet your ass that there would be a rapid race for the bottom in terms of who can provide the service the cheapest, quality be damned.

Oh, and your taxes are paying for things you don't personally use? Cry me a fucking river. I've never needed the fire department, should I be pissed that I'm paying for that?

When corporations do something bad, at least there is another organization above them to punish them.

How exactly, as a consumer, do you punish a corporation acting badly? Example: Car dealership rips you off. You go to the manufacturer, who says "Sorry, can't help, they're a private business." You complain to the dealership's parent organization, who hangs up on you. Short of filing a lawsuit (hey, look at that, government intervention), what do you do? You get fucked. Another example: BP. 1) Destroy an entire ecosystem that millions of people make their living from. 2) Wring your hands and look concerned. Pay a pittance (relatively speaking) in fines, while admitting no wrongdoing. 3).. 4) PROFIT. Still another: Bank of America and their contemporaries. Knowingly wrote thousands of shit-quality mortgages, but ultimately got to decide FOR THEMSELVES who was wronged by the practice.

Good luck changing ANYTHING in government, unless the change you want is more rules that nobody could possibly remember, let alone follow.

There's something we do every couple of years or so called "an election". You have far more say over who runs your local government than some faceless corporation hiding behind the corporate veil and a handful of shell companies.

I don't see how that's a benefit here. If we hand over education to the private sector, and the company running your school district goes bankrupt, yay free market, but where do your kids go to school while another company extorts massive tax breaks out of your town to take over the schools?

We have a similar problem in our town. The water company is privately owned. They run the company about as well as a bunch of howler monkeys on acid; when there was a boil order for a couple weeks in 2009, the company's response was to send a manager to the state regulator's chosen testing facility with samples so loaded with bleach that they couldn't measure the concentration, instead of actually fixing the problem. (That manager is facing criminal charges at the moment, and is likely going to jail.) But it's not like we can let them go bankrupt; a town needs a water supply. They've even had the balls to demand a near-doubling of our (already highest in the region) water rates, because they started building a new water treatment plant without securing financing first. Same principle applies; your children need an education. Once a company has a monopoly, they have no incentive to perform efficiently, or to even perform at all. Soon, your children would be instructed by telepresence from someone in Mumbai who they can pay one-tenth of what a newly hired, actually qualified teacher can make. Sure, the education is about as high-quality as offshore tech support, but hey! Free market!

If I decide that a solid religious education is important for my children, there is no reason why the money I pay in taxes should go towards the public school system in my school district. That money should be going to the private school where I send my kids, but I would be prepared to split that with the public school system for services that are shared between the public and private schools. (Example: the private school where I send my kids uses the same textbooks as the public school system, and uses a nurse that is employed by the public school system.) You don't get to complain me educating my kids in a private (religious) environment, unless you somehow think the 1st Amendment is magically invalid.

If you get to complain about your tax money supporting a public school system, I get to complain about my tax money supporting an institution that has no prohibition from discriminating on race, gender, religious affiliation, and so forth. You wave around the first amendment when it's convenient for you, but you forget that it's intended to keep the government from promoting a particular religion, which it would be doing if it funded a private school that includes participation in a particular religion as part of its curriculum. You can't have it both ways. If you want to send your kid to Catholic school because you think the quality of education or spiritual instruction is superior, have fun. Don't make me support a religion through my tax money. Bad enough that they're tax-exempt.

Actually, my guess is there is a correlation between parents who can afford to send their kids to these top-rated schools and the interest (and importance) they place on their children's education that results in those schools staying top-rated, rather than students intrinsically wanting to succeed. (That quality seems to be rare on its own; we only need to look at the poorest-performing school districts to observe that.)

Are you implying that people who can't afford to send their kids to school are less likely to value their child's education? How dare they be poor!

That is a good point. I guess what I'm saying is that in the absence of any real intel about what a company is like to work for, salary is the most quantifiable measure of how much an employee is worth to an employer for someone looking to get a job. Also, it's really easy to talk a good game about how great your corporate culture is in a job description, but a lot of the time it's total bullshit. You have to take "omg Xbox free soda etc etc." with a huge grain of salt. And, in the end, you can't eat job satisfaction or pay your mortgage with corporate culture. Show me the money.