How would one have meaningful 'competition' without privatization?
Possible, yes. Practical? No. Democratic bureaucracies are effectively incapable of learning and adapting. Schooling is basically implemented identically today as it was 100 years ago.
> Schools just have to be allowed the leeway to experiment without threat of privatization
This is a strange statement to me. In what sense is privatization a threat to public schools? If public schools were so great and privatization were so bad, why would people want to send their kids to privately run schools? Wouldn't public schools invite the challenge if they believed their model was superior?
The fact that they even view it as such an existential threat tells you basically all you need to know. Even they believe they'd be outcompeted almost immediately.
> And it’s not as if high-performing countries arrived at their (almost exclusively public) systems without this kind of iteration.
Firstly, the idea of differential country performance of schools is largely a myth. When you disaggregate by ethnicity, most of that disappears. Japanese kids in the US do about as well here as they do in Japan. Which is to say that differential performance between countries is more about who is in those countries than how it is those countries educate.
A good old prisoners dilemma. If you got more resources to spend on education, you don't want to sit in the same class as someone who can only contribute little to the course. Just like worse graduates will ruin the prestige of the school and thus value of your degree. Outcome-base exclusion can be fine, unless it ends up as proxy to select for socio-economic factors and thus make society offer less equal opportunity.
Just looking at "existential threat" -> "outcompeted" only works in a highly simplified world with no market failures and other issues.
> differential performance between countries is more about who is in those countries than how it is those countries educate
I'd like a source on that. I do understand culture will have a significant influence, especially on what value people place on education. But your statement seems to go a lot further into "school doesn't matter" territory. This directly contradicts with earlier statements and e.g. many chines studying in the US.
