The Education System

Our schools in this country are really bad. We are consistently pushing out ill-prepared and poorly trained students who lack the ability to think critically and who are not at all ready for the 'real world.' Every time, it seems, that a school system is performing poorly, they ask for more money in order to fix the problem and do a better job. Most of the time, they get the money and perform worse. It is clear to me that a lack of money is not the problem. In the school system I grew up in, The Plymouth-Canton School District, in Michigan, we were told that it cost about $10,000 per year per student to run the schools. Different districts or different areas may spend more or less than this, but for now that is not significant. In terms of fixing the problem there are two schools of thought (pun intended), the most common is the socialist view, which is to increase government oversight and control and take more money from taxpayers to fund this oversight. I think that Capitalism (keeping the taxes as they are) provides a much better way, where we take the $10,000 per child and give it to the parents each year for them to educate their children however they want. Private schools, religious schools, home school, whatever. This way, even the students from the 'disadvantaged' neighborhoods have an equal shot at world-class education. Fair markets will always weed out the bad schools and bad teachers. If the public schools were as good as the NEA would have us believe, they would welcome the change, knowing that they would give the children they serve the best possible education. Some may ask: 'What if the parent wastes the money and gives the child no education at all?' Well, if the parent chooses to home school, their children must demonstrate the ability to perform at the level they would be at if they were in public school. Going a little further, I think the best solution is to shut down the public schools altogether, stop taking the tax money for them and let parents work out their own children's education.