I saw a description of a school

Context
A little over six weeks ago, the Louisiana State Legislature passed HB 976 (look it up on this site, if you like). This legislation, among other things, allows students in underperforming public schools to attend private schools using vouchers provided by the state. It is up to the private schools to decide whether and how many of these transferring students they will accept. Today I read in the Shreveport Times that the state Superintendent of Education is getting into some hot water because one of the private schools in question does not appear to have facilities to accommodate all the transfers they said they would accept.

Commentary
I am a firm believer in school choice, in that I believe parents should be allowed to enroll their children in the school of their choice. If the school is public, then children should be able to attend for free, regardless of the location of the school or the child's residence. I take something of a free market approach to public schools, believing that the good ones that attract lots of students should be allotted more tax revenue, and the ones that don't, not so much.

I like this idea in theory, but the practice might be a little tricky. C.E. Byrd, located a block from my house, has over 2000 students, double the number of any competing high school in town bar one. It is stuffed to the gills now and already a traffic nightmare, but I have every confidence that if more students were allowed to enroll, they would. Everyone wants to go to Byrd. So I can see that the same problem might occur at New Living Word School, the private school described in the Shreveport Times article linked above: they're anticipating a lot of demand.

My question is, "Why?" Late in this article by Diane Ravitch in the New York Times Review of Books, she talks about the belief some people have that private schools are, by their very nature, better than public ones. I attended a private school from 3rd to 12th grade (and college, too, but that's a separate issue), and it was academically better than the public school I started at (no link, to protect the guilty). I have also heard of people who enrolled their children in private schools that touted their superior academics and discipline, only to find that the standards for teacher recruitment were so poor that students slipped to below grade level in reading comprehension and were nearly held back a grade when they returned to their neighborhood school.

The discussion of whether private is intrinsically better than public would be academic (Hee!) if it wasn't for the fact that flesh and blood parents are trying to make decisions about their children's futures. The belief that a private school that has to compete more directly for its financial resources than a public one would provide a higher quality education is not an irrational one. Nor is there anything wrong with expressing a general preference for commercial solutions to problems over tax-based ones. It's not the way I roll, but there's nothing evil about it.

The problem comes from taking these philosophical opinions and substituting them for careful evaluation of the real choices before you. Schools, and all other institutions for that matter, are defined by more than just their revenue streams. The people involved, students as well as teachers, the physical location, even the history of a school can affect its success or failure. That's why everyone wants to go to Byrd. And hopefully considerably less than 315 kids will want to go to New Living Word.

What did you see today?