Tenured failure and self-indulgent pedagogy
If one judges matters by intentions (such as by presuming that effects flow from intentions), one lives in a very congenial world. You are always right, because your intentions are always good. Those who disagree with you must, therefore, have “wrong” intentions and so always be wrong
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Article of Faith II: any department of the Government may as well be the Government.
Therefore: the provider of education should not be any government department. Which is, in practice, privatising the school system.
Providing more autonomy to the principles, especially as regards school works and HR matters, I'm all for it. Allowing deviations from the syllabus where that will enhance learning, within reason. But the purpose of a private enterprise is to make a profit. If there are provisions for the education of students to happen in the process of making a profit, then students will get educated to some level. But the rise and fall of ABC learning that profit takes precedence over quality, unless there's a buck to be made from selling the quality. And there are only so many niches for elite schools, and only so many dollars to pay for them.
It's late, and I have to go shopping before I can go to bed, but the thing about the education department, shoddy as its operation is, is that its purpose is to provide education to all school-age children in its purview. That is its purpose. If it is broken, then it needs to be fixed, because that purpose has not gone away, and that purpose is too important to be defaulted to the lowest bidding contractor.
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As for ABC, that private providers can fail is actually a reason for private provision.
As for "fixing" public provision, if the problems are endemic to being public provision, then they are not going to be "fixed", one is just going to go around in circles with endless arguments over funding, schemes, etc.
There is Government-as-in-the Cabinet etc and there is government as in the state. Claiming the bureaucracy is somehow profoundly different from 'big G' government implies a lack of accountability (since the latter is the bit the voters get a say over). The point of having it in a government department is that it places it under direct Ministerial control.
If you want something not so, you put it in a statutory authority. Which raises issues of accountability again but is sometimes sensible.
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The first half of that sentence is arrant bullshit and you know it, given that I thought I made my thoughts on the place of quality as a selling point, and with a limited market (everyone wants it, but not everyone is willing or able to pay for it), and besides, schools are a more-or-less captive market (people don't tend to shop around for schools once they've selected one).
And the point of a private enterprise is to make profit, period. They make profit by providing a service, but profit is the point. If it costs more to add quality, but there is no incentive to increase prices to pay for it and then some, then there is immediate disincentive against doing so. There are non-profit organisations which provide services, but then they are not exactly “private” either. And they have their own problems.
If you've been talking all along about making all public schools into non-profit community organisations, such as kindergartens are, then say so. There may even be benefits in doing so... but these would have to be investigated from more than a doctrinaire position of “look, if the government is doing it it's bad, OK?”, just as it can't be rejected from a position of “only the government can do this”.
I believe I have good arguments, however, as to why widespread or universal corporatisation of schools is a really dumb idea.
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Your penchant for interpreting dissent in the most stupid or absolutist way possible leads you up all sorts of hysterical denunciations and misconstruals, but that is not anyone's fault but yours.
I certainly would not want to exclude corporate provision, but I doubt there would be much even in the most open market.
That profit is how a lot of private provision is motivated does not make it evil, stupid, bad or otherwise a poor way of doing things. Hence the extremely productive system we live in.
And implying, as you did, that private supply is somehow antithetical to quality is just dumb. It is public provision which has the more endemic quality issues. Not least because it faces an excessively "understanding" regulator.
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