• State law requires all children to attend school until the age of 16.
• State governments determine the minimum standards of education and experience that people must meet in order to qualify for employment as teachers in the public schools. None of these standards is demonstrably related to the effectiveness of these people as educators. In fact, in most states these standards discriminate against those with the greatest education and experience.
• Federal law authorizes federal subsidies to public schools that meet certain standards. The vast majority of these standards are unrelated to the effectiveness of the schools as institutions of learning.
• Local governments tax property-owners to pay for government-run public schools, whether or not those property-owners have, have had, or will ever have, children in the public schools.
• Public schools' effectiveness in educating students is universally recognized as being unacceptable.
• Public schools are widely perceived to be a hotbed of criminal activity and mindless conformity.

What's wrong with this picture? Or more to the point-- what's right with this picture? The answers to these questions are, of course, everything and nothing, in that order.

Let's accept, for the purposes of this discussion, that society, represented by the government, has a legitimate interest in, and responsibility for, ensuring that the nation's young people all have an opportunity to receive a quality education. There is, it is clear, a vast difference between the state's (and here I use the term in its generic sense, referring to government at all levels) fulfilling its responsibility of ensuring that children have an opportunity to receive a quality education, and the state's being in the business of providing education, and doing so in the form of a taxpayer-subsidized near-monopoly. Moreover, even with this near-monopoly in the business of education, the state has failed, by its own standards, either to provide, or ensure the quality of, education for which it has assumed responsibility. It has failed in each and every aspect of fulfilling this obligation.

• It has failed in its capacity as provider of education. By its own admission, and despite the continuing upward spiral in the cost of public education, the public school system has not only failed to provide an adequate education for our children, but in recent years has been unable even to assure the physical safety of the children that it daily imprisons.
• It has failed in its attempts to ensure that the people that it hires as teachers are capable educators. The Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey, which is the organization that administers the GRE (Graduate Record Examinations), reports that the average score on the GRE by people graduating from college with a major in education is lower than that of people who graduate with any other major. It is important to note that a Bachelors's Degree with a major in education is virtually the only education-related requirement for initial employment as a teacher in the public schools. Moreover, there is no assessment made by the government of the candidate teacher's ability to actually teach.
• It has failed to assure that children outside the public schools receive a quality education. While there are some standards imposed on education within the public schools, the requirements imposed on other educational programs, including home-schooling, private schools, charter schools and parochial schools are much less stringent, and are, in some cases, virtually nonexistent.
• It has failed to recognize and act on the fact that there is no correlation between the length of time a child is confined in a school building and the quality of education that the child receives. Accordingly, it has failed to justify its requirement that children spend a specified number of years, months and days in school, and it has failed to justify its enormous expenses for school personnel, buildings, equipment, supplies and transportation, which expenses have been greatly magnified by the excessive, and unsupportable amount of time that children and their teachers are required to spend in the public schools.
• By its own admission, it has failed even to establish a meaningful standard by which quality of education can be measured, so that it is patently incapable of objectively assessing the extent to which any educational program, including its own, is actually effective.
• And it has "achieved" all of these failures while continually increasing the cost of education at a rate dramatically higher than inflation, as reflected in the following table, reproduced with permission from Michael Hodges.

Education Productivity Data
Year	Spending/Student (1993 Dollars)	SAT Score	SAT Score/$	Productivity Index (1960=100%)
1960	$1,700	975	0.57	100%
1970	$2,830	948	0.33	58%
1980	$3,835	890	0.23	40%
1985	$4,342	906	0.21	36%
1990	$5,193	900	0.17	30%
1994	$5,400	902	0.17	29%

Can you think of any reason why we should permit the state to continue to botch our children's education, and do so at great cost both to us as taxpayers and to our children themselves? I, for one, cannot.

I suggest that we take decisive action to limit the state's involvement in education solely, and at most, to the development of standards by which the quality of an educational process is measured. And we must insist that these standards not be monolithic; that is, that no single standard should apply to all children and all educational institutions in all situations. President Clinton's recent call for national educational tests is a perfect example of the monolithic, inflexible kind of standard that must be avoided. Children (and adults too for that matter) need to be exposed to a wide variety of educational stimuli, but they must not be required or expected to achieve any predetermined level of expertise in any specific field, beyond the ability to read, write, and speak effectively. Children must be allowed to develop into their own persons, not be constrained, compelled or encouraged to fit whatever cookie-cutter mold is currently in vogue.

I further suggest that the costs of childhood education be borne directly by the legal guardians of the children being educated. In situations where these guardians cannot afford to pay for their childrens' educations, scholarships funded by charities, private institutions and foundations can be used, or, as is the case with medical care, the cost to the regular customers can be increased to accommodate the pro bono provision of services to the indigent. But in a well-conceived and implemented educational system there will be relatively few situations in which such scholarships or subsidies are required. The true costs to provide a child with an education vastly superior to what is presently available in the public school system is much less than what we have been paying for those dismally inadequate services.

By making better use of technology, better use of the business community, and better use of local residents in the educational process, we can at once:

• Greatly improve the quality of education that our children receive. This includes:
• Fostering children's creativity and inquisitiveness.
• Improving childrens' involvement and interest in the educational process.
• Improving childrens' educational performance, as measured using meaningful standards.
• Helping children to more nearly achieve their full potentials.
• Better preparing children to take a productive place in the nation's economy.

• Reduce the time spent in the educational system for the vast majority of children.
• Cut the dollar cost of education.

By reducing the government's involvement in education to the appropriate minimum, we will gain the additional benefits of:

• Many fewer government employees involved in administering education.
• Freeing educators from the enormous administrative burdens presently imposed on them by government regulations, guidelines and threats.

By placing all educational institutions on a level fiscal playing field, i.e., by eliminating the government's stranglehold on the educational system, we should also accrue the additional benefits that typically result in a competitive marketplace.

There must be a downside to what I've just suggested as an alternative to the educational status quo, but I can't think of what it might be. If anyone out there can help me with this I'd like to hear (well, actually "read") from you.