[thwayunion]

> Aren't politicians involved whenever the will of the voters is being enacted? What if most parents in MO support what the politicians are doing? What if they called their representatives and asked them to take action against libraries?

Indeed. I think jessuastin probably meant something like nationalized identity-driven politics. It's a valid difference.

> If you oppose top-down meddling in public education then I assume you support vouchers? That's about as bottom-up as things get.

I like choice but not vouchers. There are basically two issues with vouchers.

The first is that they're usually implemented in a fashion that is simultaneously regressive (on income) and re-distributive (on geography). Ie, they're often implemented as pure grift.

The second, and more important, is that we already have experimented with a hybrid public/private system where some public funds flow to private options! The result is runaway spending and the market driving emphasis toward a bunch of bullshit cost disease stuff instead of actual learning outcomes. No matter how bad our public K12 system is, you will never convince me that our higher ed system is better, and that's what an American public/private hybrid system would, empirically, end up converging to.

I could get behind a voucher system that (1) gives each kid the same amount of cash and also (2) caps all tuition and fees for any school receiving even a dollar of voucher cash.

I'd also be okay with just not providing state funding for education at all, but it'd be a sort of terrible world for most families and I genuinely wonder how many people realize how bad things would get for most families...