How much money would we save if we did away with public schools entirely?
I don’t know that, but I do know this: my husband and I shell out about $6000/yr for our three oldest to attend Catholic school (that’s tuition, books, lunches, and other fees), and I just watched my 8 y.o. 3rd grader do pre-algebra this afternoon. He’s reading at a near 5th grade level, and he’s the youngest in his class (he doesn’t turn 8.5 until next month). Just seeing those things alone make the price of tuition worth it.
Contrast that with the (public) high school my brother-in-law teaches in. High pregnancy rates, high failure rates (they tried to get him to pass students who were failing to make the numbers look good, which he refused to do), and he’s been physically attacked by students. Maybe throwing more money at it would help. </s>
It’s not just the money—how many kids would be better served academically, spiritually, and socially if we did away with public education? Or let’s call it what it really is—government education. Sorry, I have too much distrust in the ‘good’ that the government does to let them near my four children.
Yay! I’ll vote for that! Education will not improve until government is out of it completely. If government had been in charge of transportation for the last 100 years, we would still be riding horses.
“How much money would we save if we did away with public schools entirely?”
LoL a lot! Of course that really depends upon exactly what each state plans on doing to replace em. The Biggest impediment to such creative thinking is the Federal Government’s Department of education’s various bureaucratic rules regarding the money they make us jump thou hoops to reclaim.
One of the main reasons we need that useless and destructive department of the Federal government competently abolished.
I agree we should do away with public schools and instead I think New Mexico should go to a fully voucher system. All existing Public school infrastructure and personnel can either be maintained by the county or local government as locally owned corporations or be sold off to private organizations willing to run and administrate them as a private school.
Just one stipulation thou, no school shall be eledgable to redeem the voucher unless it accepts all students.
Mark Steyn made a comment last week on Rush that really struck me, he said that the Greatest Generation had an average education of eight grade and did the most for this country. What does that say about today?
I know in my county 80% of the budget goes to schools.