Race to the bottom is not a good analogy because the purpose of the process is to come out with a credential or the knowledge putting one on the path to more lucrative/higher status/personally enjoyable jobs, unlike with prison. If schools lower standards too much, the value of that credential is lost, or the truth comes out in standardized tests or work performance (if you can't do the job your school indicated you should be able to do, you'll get fired quickly and haven't really benefited). There may be an issue with time delay there, but civil torts might fix that: former students or their parents could sue schools for failing to uphold their end of the deal.
With that said, there are some subjects which are taught because they create positive externalities, not benefits to the individual: primarily, the knowledge needed to participate in representative government beneficially. What's covered in the standardized tests might take care of that, but it's a valid objection to school choice.
The inequality issue is a real one, but dragging some down in equality's name is not useful. Also, what you described happens currently in less direct ways, a big example being schools being funded by local property taxes from areas with zoning that prohibits low-cost housing. Even if you changed school funding to fix that, voluntary donations through social pressure could have a similar effect.
If the red tape issue is applicable to schools, why aren't all private schools in America drowning under red tape? Also, the issue in your analogy would have a simple solution: a law that a prison's operators have to pay a fine every time a prisoner escapes, or that any prison with above a certain rate of escapes is automatically shut down, instead of mandating a bunch of specific ways to prevent prisoners from escaping. As I noted above, test scores are the equivalent to this for schools.
Poor information, poor decision making, and perverse incentives in markets are problems as applied to schools, but again, test scores.
The purpose of public education is to socialize children to the needs of the State. Apparently that now includes convincing them to hate white people and submit to sexual mutilation. I think market forces prevent that sort of true evil from occurring. People who talk about “market failure” generally mean that the market did not deliver the specific results that THEY wanted.
Race to the bottom is not a good analogy because the purpose of the process is to come out with a credential or the knowledge putting one on the path to more lucrative/higher status/personally enjoyable jobs, unlike with prison. If schools lower standards too much, the value of that credential is lost, or the truth comes out in standardized tests or work performance (if you can't do the job your school indicated you should be able to do, you'll get fired quickly and haven't really benefited). There may be an issue with time delay there, but civil torts might fix that: former students or their parents could sue schools for failing to uphold their end of the deal.
With that said, there are some subjects which are taught because they create positive externalities, not benefits to the individual: primarily, the knowledge needed to participate in representative government beneficially. What's covered in the standardized tests might take care of that, but it's a valid objection to school choice.
The inequality issue is a real one, but dragging some down in equality's name is not useful. Also, what you described happens currently in less direct ways, a big example being schools being funded by local property taxes from areas with zoning that prohibits low-cost housing. Even if you changed school funding to fix that, voluntary donations through social pressure could have a similar effect.
If the red tape issue is applicable to schools, why aren't all private schools in America drowning under red tape? Also, the issue in your analogy would have a simple solution: a law that a prison's operators have to pay a fine every time a prisoner escapes, or that any prison with above a certain rate of escapes is automatically shut down, instead of mandating a bunch of specific ways to prevent prisoners from escaping. As I noted above, test scores are the equivalent to this for schools.
Poor information, poor decision making, and perverse incentives in markets are problems as applied to schools, but again, test scores.
The purpose of public education is to socialize children to the needs of the State. Apparently that now includes convincing them to hate white people and submit to sexual mutilation. I think market forces prevent that sort of true evil from occurring. People who talk about “market failure” generally mean that the market did not deliver the specific results that THEY wanted.