I specifically said self-selected, median students. 60-80% of students could be educated without the support services required for special education (high or low), but those students are put into facilities that are not efficient for the average student.

I also never said our public schools were failing, just that they have cost equivalent to private schools without any of the benefits.

I’m sure there are terrible charter and private school, just like there are terrible business. With a terrible business, I can go elsewhere. My community is stuck with a public school regardless of its quality.

Public schools also have little accountability and their monolithic structure amplifies bad decisions across cities. For example, my children’s school chose a math curriculum and purchased a seven year contract approved by “accountable” parties. Every year since that curriculum was adopted math scores in the district have declined. An entire generation is failing to be properly educated in basic math fundamentals!

The school district is flush with resources for everything but teachers and students. Want to put new technology in all of the classrooms and give a superintendent who failed all his metrics a raise? Sure. Maybe we’ll have money for teacher raises and a working math curriculum next year.

If a charter school costs the state less money (which even district run charters do), to pull out a portion of the population to meet their specific needs, why would you be against that? That leaves more money for special education.

I have skin in the game. I have a highly gifted child working two grades ahead in math (he went to a different district that could meet his needs). I have two students who need outside tutoring, one of which qualifies for special education services, and a fourth who would succeed in any environment you put him in. I’ve had to fight to get services required by law for my kids in a district that is supposedly working as intended by public school advocates. My wife taught in the district our kids attend. We are constantly discussing whether we should move them to private or charters that would better meet their needs or continue to fight the bureaucratic public school district.

If you don’t have school age kids and just read news articles, you probably don’t understand what parents go through when their kids don’t fit the slot the public schools provide for them. As someone living it, I’m happy that parents are able to find schools that fit their family’s needs, have resources from the state to attend them, and those resources cost me less as a taxpayer. If we had an option that suited us, we would take it.

In public middle school, I would have settled for not getting punched every day by muscular jock 8th grade bullies, and having toilet paper in the bathroom that hadn't been peed on. But apparently exotic requests like that were out of scope even in a mid-income sd.