Careful with such absolutes.
Conservatives were right about fixing how we teach kids to read and we ignored them.
As a result of us pushing Three Cueing, the last 30 years has show a decline in literacy.
Most people are vain, yes.
It’s a…weakness in schools drawing from a geographic area.
A school is not just the facilities and the teachers. It’s also the student body, and going to school with kids who care about education is better for education outcomes than a school with people who don’t.
This is why private/selective schools get such outsized results, they pick and choose the “best” students and let the wealthy leach buy their way in.
The effect is that the public schools don’t have this “cream” or the money.
If you want good outcomes. You functionally need to outlaw private schools.
I am not saying that private is always better, but the catchment rules for public mean that your kids might be going to a relatively bad public school just purely due to demographics.
History says that educationally minded parents are unwilling to send their kids to such a school…which further entrenches that schools low performance.
You might be willing to do so, but the aggregate are not.
It’s why this situation is politically fraught: short voting incentives prevent politicians from fixing it as it costs them their voters.
Doesn’t matter how logical you are: the net effect is that in the immediate, some kids who could have gone to private schools (with great familial effort) won’t be able to and thus receive a lower quality education.
Will you sacrifice the quality of your kids education for the greater good?
History, cause we have seen all this before, says you won’t.
People say this, but if we did as you suggest, there would be massive complaints that parents can’t freely choose their public schools due to catchments.
Further, it doesn’t preclude privates from charging extra on top, so you would still have a two tier education system as they private schools can attract the talent and teach only the best/easiest/richest students.
The fundamental issue of education is that if a school can choose its students, it will be a better school.
Our best public schools are basically either selective entry or just “happen” to be in suburbs with rich people or have a large population of Asians.
And yet today my landlord has told me that they are raising my rent 20%
I am not saying it is guaranteed that it would descend into corruption, but surely you can see how a body with the singular power to investigate and judge the only people who can constrain it would be ripe for abuse?
Since they report to a standing committee made up of MPs, giving them the unilateral power to investigate and judge those same MPs gives them a good deal of power.
Alternatively, if those MPs are somehow "immune" to prevent this, then it gives THOSE MPs an outsized bit of power in government.
The biggest danger is if the corruption is used subtly since we wouldn't even notice; it would even look like they are "rooting out corruption"
If it could do either of those, it would be in charge of government defacto as any offending politicians can just be investigated and sacced with no limits.