View source for Education

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{{DES | des = Libertarians strongly oppose public education: they wish to eliminate tax-funding for education, regulation of education, and make education independent of government. Libertarians favor privatization and corporatization of schooling. This despite the obvious market failures in education and the international successes of state-run education. | show=}}

Education is one of the great failures of libertarianism.  Unlike liberalism, libertarianism has no justification for goals such as universal education or equal opportunities in education.  Education has enormous market failures that would prevent an economically optimum production and distribution of education.  And the libertarian anti-government fixation dooms most of their proposals to failure while failing to explain the obvious government successes in education.

All of the top performing nations in education (Finland, South Korea and Singapore, for example) are inexplicable with libertarian ideology: they are centrally organized systems with state funding, public schools, no school choice or vouchers, state developed curriculum, national standards, teachers paid well above market rates, mandatory schooling, universal schooling, and state mandated teacher education programs.

If we want a top-performing education system, markets will NOT do the job because some will want to save money by purchasing lower quality services.  It's a major problem in the US where the quality of the schools is largely determined by the tax base available.  Parents who care about education move into communities with high enough taxes to have good schools.

Nor is the role of government in K-12 education sufficient: early childhood education, college and trade education all have enormous needs where markets fail badly.  Libertarians routinely oppose any government involvement with these: for example, they've railed against Head Start for decades.

Libertarian endorsement of [[vouchers]] is a stopgap solution on the way to total privatization, according to the [[Libertarian Party]].

[[Plutocracy|Plutocratic]], corporate, and conservative interests want to subvert public schooling to educate students according to their own agendas, break power of local government that they don't control, and break teacher unions.  That's the reason for the big push behind [[Charter Schools]] and for-profit education companies.  Despite ludicrous promises of better performance, charter schools seldom match public school performance, and for-profit education companies go bankrupt after conspicuous failure.

Private, for-profit education companies have a long history of being rip-offs, especially when government funds pay for students.  [[Virtual Charter Schools]] are the latest [[ALEC]]-sponsored attempt at undermining public schools through corporatization of education.  They target communities of color or poverty which are dispossessed and disempowered.

Vouchers, charters, privatization and other libertarian/conservative proposals can be viewed as strategies to pit the middle and lower classes, racial groups, ethnic groups, etc. against each other to distract from solving the real problem: [[poverty]].

The greatest gains for educational achievement in the US would come from five reforms:
# reducing poverty -- increasing the socioeconomic status of the poorest students
# adequately fund education -- reliance on local property taxes isn't enough
# significantly reduce class sizes
# put highly trained well paid teachers in every classroom
# respect the professional judgment of educators and empower them to lead education, rather than be bossed by bureaucrats and plutocratic "visionaries"
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