Mr. Jeff Jacoby is an idealist. He thinks that the states might be persuaded to give up their right to indoctrinate the majority of children for the first thirteen years of their education.1 He is absolutely right, the public school model is not the only model that would ensure the education of our children. If we privatized the public school systems and repealed the taxes that pay for them (primarily the property tax), we would all have enough money to pay for their schooling. If someone worries that this might not be enough, we can provide further tax credits for it as well. And of course religious schools could provide scholarships, and so on.
Alternately, we could use school vouchers. This is an every popular that seems, on the surface, to have the best of both worlds. The state still controls the budget; this money has to be spent on education. There is a class of people out there that do not trust you to make your own decisions about how you spend your money. You might not spend it wisely afterall. School vouchers do not have that trouble. I dislike, fear, the idea though. The Florida Supreme Court is now looking at a Florida bill that represents the first statewide school voucher program.2 Opponents charge that this bill causes public money to be spent on religious education. And in many senses, they are absolutely right. Because even if you cause the school to track where each dollar goes, spending this money on science and math frees up other funds for religion, and so the argument can be made that it is in essence funding religion. This may or may not win, it really does not matter.
What concerns me is that the use of public funds, in any way or form, opens the door to regulation. Just as many charities are now regulated, needing to conform to costly health laws that a restaurants would need to for example, so too our schools will be increasingly exposed to education laws. And this is not good, because it will expose them to the type of science standards that have put evolution debates in the court systems time and time again. It will expose them to history standards that can be used to push a secular interpretation of history. It will expose them to requirements for sex ed, and a host of other regulations. Because as long as you take government dollars, you are subject to their rules on how you spend them.
So if we are not going to use vouchers, let us return to the idea that people might be free to spend their own money. The public schools currently get several times the amount of money per student that the Catholic schools do, and yet no one can seriously say that the Catholic school systems do worse at providing education. In fact, many parents say they do a better job. This leads to an interesting line of thought: where does all that extra money go? Well, some of it goes to higher salaries for teachers, the fact that you take a pay cut choosing to work in a Catholic school is well known. But some of it also goes to the higher levels of bureaucracy in the public school system, the teachers' union, so on. All fat that could be cut from their budget to make the schools more competitive. This is the sort of thing that has led to the success of so called "charter schools" in some school districts, where a private firm gets a contract to run a school as long as they can improve the results the school gets on the SOLs (I might be somewhat inaccurate here defining charter schools. I do not know too much about them).
Another important point to remember is that universal public schooling is a relatively recent invention. One of the reasons that you see the use of public funds to provide bus service to Catholic schools in some north eastern states is because these schools were the "public" school system for a long time, until the states had the political pressure to build their own. In the South on the other hand, you did not see this development of schools. The richer families home schooled, and the poorer simply did not learn much. As a result you had the rise of the white cracker subculture in the south, that closely mirrors the black culture today.3 Going into the Civil War then, you see that the illiteracy rate in the south was very high, much higher than in the north, though neither had what we would understand today as public schooling.
But the failure of the south to educate really does not argue for the existence of public schooling. Rather, it speaks to the simple fact that education was widely believed to be unnecessary in the society constructed in the south. The sustenance farmers certainly did not need it, and the plantations needed only a few who could read and write. Similarly, in the small town, one's word was either good or not, regardless of the form an agreement took, and everyone knew it.
On the other hand, the failure of the public school system to adequately educate is pertinent. Illiteracy is still higher than it should be, especially among inner city students. Even where literacy exists, understanding of history, math, and science often lags. Critical thinking is nearly universally unknown. We have gone from a culture that nearly requires a high school diploma to succeed, to one that nearly requires a college diploma to succeed. From men being ready to take on responsibility at 18 and 20, to men still in some sort of extended adolescence nearly till 30, assuming they ever grow up and embrace responsibility. Clearly we are failing. It should then be just as clear that the system does not work, and simply throwing more money at it, to do the same thing, will not work.
Still, common sense tells us that this will not happen. The teachers' union is one of the more effective lobbying efforts on the left, and it would be political suicide to try to privatize education. Further, even were a state to try to do so, the federal laws would likely "preempt" and require state spending on it anyway. The political cost then, in terms of careers burned, for something with no grassroots pressure, is prohibitively high, and this post, like Mr. Jacoby's column, is very nearly a waste of space.