The end of public schools??

To quote the first sentence of the article linked above "If your definition of "public school" is the regular public school system, you are talking about a slice of Milwaukee's educational infrastructure in which the student population is getting smaller each year." Milwaukee has been experimenting with school choice since 1990. School choice is a program that allows parents to use public funds, usually in the form of a voucher, to send their child to the school of their choice regardless of whether it is private or religious. The program was sold as a way of improving the public school system by offering competition and making the public schools fight for funding along side of charter schools, and so on and so forth. Let the free market decide what schools are good and which aren't. It doesn't work (see http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=678202). More and more public schools are closing down, and more and more charter schools are popping up. Why are we treating education as part of the free marketplace? Why are we privatizing education? At a time when jobs are scarce, and the dollar is plummeting, don't we need the best educated populace to compete in our global economy? Senator Herb Kohl, and baseball commissioner Bud Selig grew up in the same neighborhood I did (granted it was 50-60 years ago), and went to the public schools in the neighborhood. Today that neighborhood has one of the highest crime rates in the city, and a few of the public schools in it have closed down. We need to save our public schools not find an alternative. The problem with the public education system is endemic and reflective of the problems in our city and society on a whole. If we need alternative schools, then maybe we need an alternative society.