They would also still be an authoritarian imperialist state and probably would’ve never produced some of their most culturally relevant pieces of art from the 20th century.

They have to do better than public schools, with those gone they will be in competition between each other. There will no longer be a standing baseline school. In the few places that put their money where their mouth is, and moved to some sort of charter system, it didn’t take long for things to end up like the corporate world. First ones in, and the ones with the biggest money behind them, ended up being all that was left, with fewer schools, them not willing to take on more and more students, them pointing towards their vanishing “operations margins”. That if they lost these their discretion on payments of staff and services would be gone and they would just be public schools, with extra steps, again. Public schools were re-opened. This generally didn’t even take over 5 years.

Charter schools were not designed to take over public schools in the first place. They were created to pick-up the demographics that had more resources than those in poverty, but not quite enough to really afford private schools. Private school vouchers against taxes will always be a wedge in this debate. The same people who want the charter system want this. These people are often libertarians. I don’t care about no true scottsman ideas of what a libertarian is, the libertarian composition gets most of it’s money from these people, so this is what libertarian is. There is also the whole libertarianism was never meant to be a means of creating liberty but, instead, just completely handing over power to the new lords, industrialists, and this is why the early libertarians were so enamored with fascism. Not that fascism isn’t an issue with the modern libertarian party.

The government didn’t originally want the loan system we got. The extremely wealthy paid people until the bill read in such a fashion, and continued until schools could basically ask for whatever and get it. I mean, if the only thing keeping people out of Harvard and Princeton was their academic performance, well then it would no longer be the country club with classes anymore. The only way to ensure that “elite” schools could keep the poors out is to allow them to ask whatever they wanted. This makes a wave throughout the whole school system though, and is raises the prices at every level eventually. The only other way was socialized schooling, which you mentioned. This is not an option to the libertarian billionaires. So the compromise is to set up a system to extract as much tax money as possible. Also, most private loans has some form of government subsidy, even if hidden, and often preferably hidden, behind a byzantine system of bureaucracy. Corporations get to extract tax money and it’s difficult enough to find out how little risk they actually take on. This allows them to keep their government scapegoat.

I did underwriting for Sallie Mae for years. This was in the early 2000s and moving to a charter system was THE hot topic in the US school industry. We did a lot of research on this subject. It ultimately didn’t take over because it can’t. It either makes the short side of the stick just not exist anymore, or it becomes a public school via forced private entities. You either have public education, or you have the poor go without. This is not tenable in the long run. While it would be a huge dump of resources into the “upper middle” and create a bunch of gains initially, it is myopic. The loss of those resources at the bottom create a larger drag than the reassignment of those funds creates in gains. There were smaller cities that tried this. It was an unmitigated disaster. That is why the government, and the banks, haven’t budged since and it’s mostly people who have never done anything with the education system at large that keep it as a talking point, or some pet project at the local level with rich people and their government stooges. We need to get private industry out of the school loan system. So we can scrap school loans. Education just needs to be available to everyone. This includes vocational training and certification. This is what was actually wanted, but private money interests butted in and turned it into a method to extract tax money, the current loan system, like always. Then they turned the narrative around.

Your point about the school busses doesn’t really matter much. If the government has to pay for the transportation to these schools it will get in the way of private industry profiting off kids getting to school. So this will not be popular amongst the privatize everything set, unless they can turn it either into a segue into being that, or just extracting tax money.

I think we agree on the last point except, rather than burden better schools with more students, we come to the reality that bad schools are bad because the areas are poor. This mean they have more mental health issues, have more physical health issues, and just all-around have more issues because being poor is more expensive per capita than having wealth. So we need to put more money per capita in. This actually gets brought up often, but then the poor, poor, white suburbanites cry about how it’s unfair, even though their schools generally receive more resources even in places where local income doesn’t affect school budget (ie TX). So “inner city” and rural schools stay falling apart.

Also we need to stop using “inner city” as the whipping boy. This is a racist dog whistle. Rural USA is poor, it is soaked in drugs, violence, bad schools, few opportunities, pregnant teens, etc. It’s just easier to keep this on the down low when it’s mostly white, and it’s rather isolated. They “benefit” from not being paraded around like minority demographics, and because it’s easier for the local government to ignore a LOT of the problems there. So it never goes on record. Everyone here knows you don’t just go wandering around rural Appalachia, but everyone also claims it’s so safe. Documentaries routinely come out putting a spotlight on how a lot of rural USA looks like “developing” nations and has drugs and crime everywhere. They then gasp, then go right back to “rural = better life” but might be boring.