The voucher system for parental choice in education is like paint on a rusted car. It looks a little better for a little while, but what you need is a new car. It's almost pointless to try to move the bloated inertia of the current system in a new direction. What we need is a lot of little directions, and that comes from cities abandoning ownership of education if favor of monitoring education.

Schools should be run as businesses in the free market. The government's role should be limited only to the city level, and then only as a standards committee defining a core curriculum and granting accreditation.

Schools exist to teach. However, for many students, this simple and obvious purpose is confused because public schools have two missions: education and social engineering, with increasing emphasis on the latter.

Busing, for example, has nothing to do with quality education. It is blatant social manipulation which has harmed, rather than helped the children. The idea behind busing and forced desegregation came as a reaction to the separate but equal school systems before the civil rights movement. Of course, they weren't equal. The black schools were poorer, older, and more crowded. Busing, we're told, breaks the racial barriers and grants all students equal access to the best education possible.

If education, rather than social reconstruction, had been the goal, the answer to old schools would have been new schools or renovations. The answer to poor schools would have been reallocation of tax funds. The answer to crowded schools would have been more schools. Instead, the federal judges decided that we were bad citizens and had to be forced to play nice together for our own good.

A school should be a community facility, accessible to parents and students, a source of pride and culture for a neighborhood. Sporting events, plays, concerts, PTA meetings should be as much a part of the neighborhood as the local mall or movie theater. Busing destroys that relationship for many kids. They have to get up earlier to go across town to someone else's neighborhood and someone else's school. Busing makes it harder for students to be involved in special events, makes it harder for parents to be involved in the school at all, and breaks the relationship that should exist between a community and its schools.

This disconnection of schools from neighborhoods, the moving of people as if they were just another racial check mark, is demeaning, destructive, and has more to do with white liberal guilt than education.

Social reform extends deeply into the schools themselves. How much sex education should be taught? What should be the historical perspective of Native Americans or World War II? Evolution or Creation? Prayer in the morning? How should environmental issues be presented? With educational issues revolving around such social training, the important questions: can students read, write, calculate, and think, all take a back seat.

Even if social indoctrination were not an element of public schools, we're still left with the fact that directing a large school system with a few elected board members is simply ineffective. As in any government office, decisions wind their way through a paper trail of rules, regulations, and procedures. It's a way of doing business that has been abandoned long ago by the corporate community, which now values empowerment at lower levels, self-directed teamwork, and a strong focus on the customer.

Because schools are public facilities, they are often not allowed to be as effective as they would like. They must hold public hearings, consider competitive bids for equipment rather than securing wholesale deals, and cope with mandates from Washington while facing dwindling money and using outdated management techniques.

If what we want is quality, state of the art, modern education, then that should be the mission statement of our schools. Is there any doubt that businesses can do a better job?

Some people do have very strong doubt, in fact. These are people who believe that, because of the profit motive, it is the purpose of any business to be as greedy and manipulative as they can be to feed the pockets of their rich stock holders. In their view, the greed motive of the free market can only be kept in check by a benevolent government. I doubt the benevolence of a government whose primary interest in public schools is to forward its liberal political agenda. Where have their good intentions led?

Even leaving the political issues aside, a government facility, by its very nature, simply is not as effective as a business. A private company can focus its entire attention the product, education, whereas a government must manage schools among a sea of other issues according to the latest legislative session and with often unpredictable funding.

Cities are finding out that paying for services is often cheaper than trying to run those services themselves. Cities now pay for things like garbage collection, road and building construction, and snow removal. Cities don't run airline terminals, utilities, phone, or cable television companies. Instead, they have a working partnership with them. The city sets rules for operation of these companies in the way it thinks best suits the community.

This is the model we should use for schools. The city should pay for schools the way it pays private companies for other city services. It should govern the schools by granting tax funds and by setting guidelines and standards. These standards should focus on results, rather than the means of reaching those results. Our cities would do much better as a customer of education than as the providers.

There are two elements to consider. First, what would such a system look like? Second, how do we get from where we are now to a privatized system? We're not ready for a totally private school system yet, primarily because of the current social and tax infrastructure which forces everyone to participate in the government mandated model. Second, we are going to need a great deal of leverage to convince the government to release it's crushing claw of social control. The first step toward that leverage is to remove the government from direct day to day management.

All schools would then be on equal footing. Religious schools, private schools, day care centers, home schooling, and new learning centers would all offer a richer set of educational opportunities to parents. The same taxes that were collected to run the schools directly could be spent more effectively. Much of the money would go directly back to the schools in the form of grants. In this case, grants are better than allowing the schools to bill the city for the service of education. On the downside, it allows the city to control to a large extent the curriculum, social priorities, and style of education. On the other hand, grants create a competitive environment where the education companies will have to be inventive and demonstrate their worth. More importantly, however, without at least this form of monetary control, we have no hope of convincing governments to relinquish the total control they now have.

The rest of the tax money would go to subsidies for low income families, student loans, and tax credits granted to families with children in school.

Why collect taxes, move them through an inefficient management system, and then give them back as free education or as vouchers? With a tax credit, the money would never have to make that round trip and could go directly from a parent's checking account to the school. They could add more of their own money to send their children to aggressively academic schools, schools with a specialized course of study, or they could keep they the money at home to be used to pay for home schooling.

I expect that such a system would attract fellowship money from large corporations which have a particular interest in supplying qualified engineers or chemists or other skilled labor to the community. Educational packages for employees might include special pre-tax deductions or even on-site elementary schools.

What would the tuition be for these schools? That would be left to the free market, depending on available money, operating costs, and competition. On average, tuition would be close to the tax credit per child per year and would extend to as high as parents are willing to pay. The per child tax credit should be about half of what schools now pay for the student, which, depending on the size of the school system, might be from around $3000 to $4500. So the tax credit would be in the neighborhood of $2000 per child per year with a total annual cap of $5000.

The ratio of support for a school should be around 60% from city grants and 40% from the parents, and most of the parent's contribution would come from tax credits. Some schools might be wholly funded by the city and some not at all. The critical difference is that the school board and its administrators would be in a position of demanding excellence, rather than trying to manufacture it themselves.

The dynamics of this system are that schools are privately run in a competitive marketplace, parents have many more choices, and cities still set standards and allocate the biggest portion of a school's funds. It serves the interest of the schools, the parents, and the city.

The biggest obstacle to this system is that the schools would have to give up their direct ability to control the minds of our children. This resistance would mostly come, not from the local school boards, but from national groups who have specific political goals and an active desire to set social trends and philosophies within America's public schools.

We the citizens of this country, however, need only care about our own children, their education, their growth, and finding schools that support our beliefs and priorities - and all the Washington committees and councils be hanged.

Once a city decides to privatize its schools, the mechanics of the change are quite straight forward. Sell school property. Remove teachers and administrative personnel from city payroll and assist their placement into the corporate schools. Encourage businesses to contribute money for the new start up schools. Look to established religious and private schools to offer leadership and examples. Start with high schools and then move to elementary and middle schools, privatizing over a few years based on the desires of the neighborhoods.

It's exciting for me to think about the innovations that would be enabled by such a school system. All manner of schools, from the strictly traditional to the radically new would be available. Some schools would specialize in particular subjects such as music, drama, or business. Teaching methods would include back-to-basics, uniforms, Montessori, military, and on-the-job training. In some schools, children might work in self-directed groups, teaching each other under the guidance of a coach. New grading systems would evolve that better track a student's strengths and weaknesses. Groups of home-schoolers could gather together to form basement school houses. High tech computer based education could link schools around the country.

Some school systems are doing quite well with magnet programs and charter schools, but there's no reason to wait for cities to dole out these favors in piecemeal stutter steps with all their strings and social mandates attached. We have the capability and the hunger for real reform, real choices, and real innovation and we're not going to get it if the debates about our schools continue to revolve around race, guns, drugs, vouchers, and condoms.

:^D