Perhaps because I'm from New York, I have a little more compassion for some parents who send their kids to government schools. (Just a little.)
Why should a parent have to pay double tuition for each of his children? That is what every parent who sends his children to private school without vouchers is forced to do: he pays once through his taxes, and again through the check he pays to the private school. Meanwhile, many gov't school families don't even pay once.
In New York, the broken-down, incompetent, corrupt gov't school system spends over $10,000 per student (over $11 billion for 1.1 million students). You can imagine the tax burden that creates. Meanwhile, there are no vouchers in New York. And so, many working-class families have nothing left, after paying tribute to Leviathan. Still, I know working-class black and Hispanic parents who must have cut deals with the Devil, to send their kids to Christian schools, because I know they can't afford the tuition. (I don't know any working-class white families well enough to tell you what they do.) Other people find out where there's a halfway decent public school, and get someone in the school district to let them use their address, in order to smuggle their kids in.
The vast majority of the public schools here are execrable, and those parents who encourage their kids to terrorize and assault classmates and teachers alike, and the administrators who refuse to arrest or expel the thugs must share the blame. But with that said, I think that the best-case scenario would be one in which you have universal vouchers paying the same amount for private schooling as the local public schools receive, there is no more edschool requirement for teachers, and because of the options and the competitive pressure vouchers and homeschooling generate, every school-seeking parent can choose between quality private and public schools.
"The Conspiracy of Ignorance: The Failure of American Public Schools (9/13/99)
A Cato Institute Book Forum featuring Martin Gross with comments by David Boaz, Executive Vice President, the Cato Institute.
New York Times bestselling author Martin Gross has exposed the waste and inefficiency inside the federal budget in previous books. In The Conspiracy of Ignorance he diagnoses the educational child abuse in our public schools."