Ahh, yes the key to mathematics being an issue is public education. We should privatize it so that half the population goes from under educated to completely uneducated.
Or maybe we could go with the coal town model and have children accrue debt to a major corporation that they can literally never pay off in exchange for an education!
I literally did not literally propose privatizing in these comments. Here all I said was that public schools are dysfunctional if they are producing high school and college graduates who can't do elementary school math.
The solution to that dysfunction was outside the scope of this discussion. Literally.
So literally privatizing schools. Because vouchers will simply cause public schools to collapse while allowing private schools to pick and choose who to educate. I can guarantee you they won’t be accepting the students with low math scores who have absentee parents that treat school like a daycare.
Let me guess: if we just ignore the scores of those problem children who no longer have access to education, the math scores will look better?
So that's the argument you want to have and you're not going to be happy until you have it? How about this? Assume that it's more important for your interlocutors to improve education than it is for them to win a debate. Assume that they would like everyone to get a great education.
Presumably, we agree that public schools, in general, are not, currently doing a great job. I'm also assuming that, for some reason, they used to do a significantly better job.
I don't know what the point would be of recapitulating Friedman's arguments for school choice and vouchers in these comments. He's much smarter and a better writer than anyone you're likely to find here. If you've read them and made up your mind, a handful of HN comments are not going to sway you. If you haven't read them you should.
Or maybe we could go with the coal town model and have children accrue debt to a major corporation that they can literally never pay off in exchange for an education!