The death of public school education?

Washington Post article:

Public school education, as we know it, is based on a system of regulations and structures that are obsolete. Take tying school funding to the mill rate. In a high tech world, it becomes all too easy for "cloud schools" to stay one step ahead of these regulations.

Regulators would have to first overcome the local political links that seek to prevent school funding from originating from where the students live - the extra money to Collier County public schools from wealthy students elsewhere, for example, or already significant pressure from wealthy parents to fight equalization pay. The political economy required to enact a new set of regulations is not insignificant.

When it happens, tying money for local schools to where students live is probably a good idea. But it essentially sets schools in competition with each other to attract the poorest students. Is that fair for students with wealthier parents, who then must face at the very least insidious obstacles in getting into the "best" schools? At the very least, we'll find out whether students make the school or if the school makes the students.

But overshadowing this entire debate is the question of just how much money a virtual school needs anyways. Probably very little. Likely much less than even the dollars per student of the poorest schools.

So actually the debate of how much funding is really tangential to the debate of whether schools should get any funding at all. They are too popular to stop getting public funding as "charter schools" - that's for sure. So as long as they continue to get formula funding, people will realize that they are effective for the highest-achieving students but not the poorest-achieving ones. But the former has much more political leverage, thus pushing virtual schools more and more into the forefront until finally virtual schools cause a significant collapse in several public school systems.