While the wealthy can buy their way out, they have no stake in the common system

The argument

Proponents of this position argue that the decisive effect of private schooling is not on the pupils inside it but on the schools everyone else uses. Their claim is that a country's state schools are shaped by the people with the most influence over them, and that those people currently have the option of not using them. A family able to pay for a place elsewhere has removed itself from the consequences of an underfunded, overcrowded or badly governed local school, and proponents argue that an interest one can exit is an interest one stops defending. The effect compounds, on this account, because the families who exit are disproportionately the ones who could do most for the system they leave. Proponents argue that these are the households with time, confidence, professional contacts and the practised ability to complain effectively to officials, and that this capacity is exactly what a struggling school most needs and now never receives. They add that the same households are over-represented among those who set education policy and budgets, so the people deciding how good state schools need to be are frequently people whose own children will not attend one. Proponents argue that a ban closes the exit, and that this is the point of it. If every family's children attend the schools the state provides, then every family's attention, political weight and willingness to pay is directed at making those schools good, and the pressure falls where it can do some work. The argument concludes that banning private schools would improve education for the great majority by removing the arrangement that lets the most influential families opt out of caring how good it is.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that the mechanism does not need a ban to be addressed and that the ban would not deliver it anyway, since wealthy families would simply move to the catchment areas of the best state schools, pay for tutoring, or educate their children abroad, all of which reproduce the exit in a form harder to see. They add that the argument treats children as instruments, holding pupils in schools their parents judge inadequate in order to generate political pressure, which is a cost borne by the pupils rather than by the policy's designers. Critics also note that systems without private schooling have still produced sharp inequalities between state schools.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Families with means exit poor schools by moving house, hiring tutors or teaching at home, so closing one route does not restore the stake the premise relies on. [Rejecting P2] The influence of such families is exercised through wealth and contacts rather than through where their children sit, so it would not be redirected into the common system by a ban. [Rejecting P3] Holding children in schools their parents judge inadequate in order to generate political pressure treats pupils as instruments, and the cost falls on them rather than on the policy's designers. [Rejecting C] At most it follows that exit weakens the common system, which is an argument for making state schools good enough that nobody wants to leave.