In Defense of Public Education

I originally posted this as a response to a conservative commentator on one of Maxine Chernoff's Facebook post.

What is it that I find completely abhorrent and distasteful about school vouchers and the privatization of education? Oh, I don't know. It might have to do with those pesky French republican ideals, shared by the French left and right and very much the rest of the civilized world, but completely unknown to American conservatives, of public good and civic duty, where education is considered a public good and therefore should not be subjected to economical vicissitude. Or perhaps due to the belief that under a democratic or republican society (republican taking its roots, after all, in the Latin "res publica," the public thing), the people of West Virginia, Kentucky or Eastern Washington deserve the same level of education as someone from California or Massachusetts. Because quite frankly, is the private sector going to invest where there is no profit to be made? Which very much rules out any sparsely area. Have you seen any Art Institutes (the ones operated by EDMC) in Charleston, WV, or Lexington, KY? Or it might also have to do with the belief that the humanities and the arts, under a democratic society, are also a public good, and that with private funding, the only thing that will succeed will be knockoffs of Thomas Kincaid, because that's what sells (if you say otherwise, you obviously know nothing about the economics of art). 

As for your claim that the decline of education is due to "radical liberal policies" in the 1960s, it's disingenuous at best. Kennedy and Johnson made a heavy investment in STEM subjects. After Johnson? Five Republican presidents served, as opposed to three Democratic ones, only one of whom served two full terms. Not to mention none of them were liberals. That's 16 years of Democratic administration since 1969. That doesn't even make 40%. Republican administrations probably have had more influence on the evolution of public education than Democratic ones. And what do you make of Reagan's action of placing the UC and CSU systems into the free market in the 1960s and 1970s, when he was governor of California, the effects of which are still felt today?