When I was in high school, back in the late 90s, I was sent to an career center that was made up of almost entirely inner city kids. In that class, we were learning Ohm's law, and to figure out resistance in a circuit by dividing the voltage, by the amperage. Pretty simple stuff.
We had 3 amps, and had to divide it by 7 volts, to figure out our resistance. Simple long division.
This kid next to me, asked me how to do the division problem. I was caught off guard, and just stared at him. This was 11th grade. How the heck can a kid even get to 11th grade, and not know long division?
So I started to pull out a pencil and paper, at which point he hands me a calculator "No using this, show me how to do it".
Now I was a D- student. I was lousy at everything. Yet compared to the school system tasked with educating 5 times the number of students, I was looking pretty smart.
Now to be fair, I would like to see the video, and how exactly the teacher corrected the grammar. I've seen teachers that come across as berating students, and that doesn't work too well.
However, everything else he said... entirely believable. Most of the public schools need demolished and replaced with private schools.
Why? Private school is always an option for anyone.....public school is the default position...you want to eliminate the default position for what purpose?
A market. You are creating a market.
https://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Tree-Personal-Educating-Themselves/dp/1939709121/?tag=usmb-20
So this economist went to some of the poorest places on earth, and found that they have a thriving private school system, that is cheap enough that the poorest people can afford to pay for quality education for their children.
Now, the question is why don't we have that here, and why do they have it there?
The idea is counter intuitive. You would think that a place where people are exceptionally poor, would have more public education and less private capitalist education. And that a place where people are relatively rich like the US, would have less public education and more private education.
However, that ignores the fundamentals of economics.
The more you provide a product or service for free from the government, the more it ruins the market for that product or service. We saw this in Haiti for example, where the US sent over products and services for free, and the result was it destroyed the few existing jobs that Haitians had, because how can a business stay open and profitable, when another country is giving away products for free? So Haitians ended up worse off, because now they had fewer jobs.
That same effect is true of education.
Because the state run education sucks so badly, there is a large market for private schools.
Additionally some people always say in the US, that without public schools people could never afford to educate their kids, at least not with any quality education. Yet in these poor countries, we see exactly the opposite.
Because again... market forces. In the US, private schools are expensive because that is where the market it. Rich people are the majority of the private school market, and thus that is what the market generally caters to.
However in most of the market for education is the poor. They can't afford super expensive educations like the US middle and upper class. So that is who the market caters to. They find ways to make education super inexpensive, so they can serve their market. You can't make a profit, without customers, and you don't have customers unless the product is affordable to them.
So you'll see schools in the middle of a strip mall, and they will have a contract with the restaurant next door to provide cheap lunches for the kids. Or in many cases, because the schools are small and scattered all over, the school will be close enough for the kids to walk home and get a meal, and then come back.
But when you don't have million dollar bits of land, and a 3/4 mile track, and a multi-million dollar football stadium, and a million dollars in computers to play games on instead of learning how to spell your own name.... Education can be remarkably inexpensive.
Additionally the quality of the education is fairly high. Now keep in mind that it is remarkably high relative to a poor country. By western standards it would be average at best. But then you have to remember, they are achieve average by western standards with a tiny fraction of the cost.
And the reason why is again... the market forces. Each small independent school, is competing with all the other small independent schools. They have to achieve good results, or the parents take their kids and their money, to a different school.
The free-market works every single time that it is tried.
