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Of course you become disgusted and start to think that the problem may be a structural one that can’t be fixed—that you’ll never be able to sink a solid foundation on a garbage dump. The contractor, who doesn’t seem to have a waiting list of other customers, keeps saying that if you give him another $100,000, then another $100,000, he’s sure he can find a way to lay your foundation and build your house. But you’re bankrupt by now, so you have to walk away from the house.

The same scenario has been running for the past fifty years in our public schools. To cover their embarrassment at their constant failure to educate our kids, school authorities endlessly demand more tax dollars. They point to all the alleged deficiencies of our public schools. They claim that the schools are overcrowded and run-down, and that good teachers expect high salaries. They demand more tax dollars to modernize the schools, reduce class sizes, expand programs for struggling students, and always, increase teacher pay to recruit and retain better teachers.

The problem with public schools, however, is not lack of money. The real problem is that many of these schools are, in effect, an educational garbage dump. No matter how much money we pump into them, they will not improve because their foundations are rotten. They are a compulsory government monopoly—that is the rot under their foundations. Just as the state-controlled food system in the communist Soviet Union produced failure and famine, so our government-controlled public schools produce educational failure for our children. In both cases, that failure is built into the system because compulsory government control wipes out free choice and competition.

The problem with public schools is not lack of money but that government control guarantees mediocrity in our schools. We have falling SAT scores, high dropout rates, and depressing math and reading scores across all grades. As we saw in Chapter 1, the grim statistics are endless. Yet school authorities have the nerve to continually ask for more money.

Giving more money to public schools is usually a waste of time. Paul Craig Roberts describes a 1984 Kansas City public-school experiment that eloquently illustrates this point. Because of a desegregation lawsuit, Roberts writes,

“Kansas City spent $2 billion building the most expensive school system in the world. Beginning teacher salaries rose from a low of $17,000 to a high of $47,851. Fifteen new schools were constructed and 70 had additions or renovations. The luxurious facilities include a planetarium, a vivarium [a little zoo for frogs], greenhouses, a model United Nations wired for language translation, radio and television studios, movie editing and screening rooms, swimming pools, a zoo, a farm, a wild land area, a temperature-controlled art gallery, and 15 computers per classroom. Students can study Suzuki violin, animal science, and robotics. Language instruction spans French to Swahili.

Despite the extraordinary facilities and massive sums of money, student performance is so low that recently the state had to strip the Kansas City School District of its accreditation. The school district has fewer students and is less integrated than in 1984 when Judge Clark took control of the school district in order to achieve “mathematical racial balance.”

If  more money meant better education, our public schools should have vastly improved over the last 75 years. Yet the reverse is true. In dollars adjusted for inflation, public schools spent about $876 per year for elementary and secondary school students in 1930, when student literacy rates were close to 90 percent.² In 2003, as we noted earlier, public schools spent about $7500 per student, while literacy rates fell to the 50-70 percent level (see Chapter 1 statistics).

In the year 2000, the five states whose students got the highest SAT scores were North Dakota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Dakota. Yet, per-pupil spending in North Dakota ranked forty-first among the states, in Iowa twenty-fifth, Wisconsin tenth, Minnesota sixteenth, and South Dakota a lowly forty-eighth. In contrast, the District of Columbia had the fourth highest per-student spending of all the states but ranked almost at the bottom of the list (50th out of 50 states and the District of Columbia) in student achievement.³ Clearly, there is little correlation between money spent per student and student achievement.

Many studies have shown that most private Catholic schools do a better job educating children than public schools. A 1990 Rand Corporation study examined big-city high schools to find out how education for low-income minority children could be improved. The study compared thirteen New York City public, private, and Catholic high schools that had many minority students. In the Catholic schools, 75 to 90 percent of the students were black or hispanic. The study found that:

“The Catholic high schools graduated 95 percent of their students each year, while public schools graduated slightly more 50 percent of their senior class;  Over 66 percent of the Catholic school graduates received the New York State Regents diploma to signify completion of an academically demanding college preparatory curriculum, while only about 5 percent of the public school students received this distinction; 85 percent of the Catholic high school students took the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), compared with just 33 percent of the public school students; The Catholic school students achieved an average combined SAT score of 803, while the public school students’ average combined SAT score was 642; and 60 percent of the Catholic school black students scored above the national average for black students on the SAT, and over 70 percent of public school black students scored below the same national average.⁴

Recent studies confirm many of the Rand report’s findings. A 1997 study by Derek Neal, then associate professor of economics at the University of Chicago, analyzed the effect of Catholic high-school education on high-school and college graduation rates. Neal found that when inner-city students transferred to Catholic schools, their probability of graduating from high school increased from 62 percent to at least 88 percent. He also found that hispanic and black Catholic-school students were more than twice as likely to graduate college than minorities students who attended public schools.

Also, Protestant-affiliated school students consistently show superior academic results compared to public schools. The National Center for Education Statistics (NAEP) administers the National Assessment of Educational Progress(NAEP) to test the knowledge and skills of the nation’s students in grades 4, 8, and 12.

The NAEP’s  2003 test results showed that students in the Protestant-affiliated schools (as well as Catholic-school students) consistently scored well above public-school students in math, reading, writing, history, and geography. At all three grade levels, a significantly higher percentage of Protestant and Catholic-affiliated school students scored at or above the Basic, Proficient, and Advanced levels compared to public schools. Protestant and Catholic-affiliated school students also consistently scored higher on both verbal and math SAT scores compares to public-school students. Similarly, as for Catholic-school students, hispanic and black students in Protestant-affiliated schools were more than twice as likely to graduate college than minorities students who attended public schools.

Yet, the average annual tuition costs for Catholic and Protestant-affiliated schools for the 2002-2003 school year were approximately $3500-$4000 per elementary-school pupil and $5500-$6000 per Secondary school pupil. The average public-school cost per pupil was approximately $7300. ⁵

These studies show that Catholic and Protestant-affiliated schools give a superior education to public schools, especially for inner-city minority students. They give a better  education at half the cost for elementary-grade students and about 30 percent lower cost for secondary or high-school students. Something is clearly wrong with public schools if they do an inferior job educating children for almost twice the cost of religiously-affiliated schools. Obviously, more money does not mean better education.

When we compare the academic record of home-schooled vs. public-school students, the cost vs. achievement differences are even more startling. In 1998, the Home School Legal Defense Association commissioned Larry Rudner, statistician and measurement expert at the University of Maryland, to do a study on the academic achievement levels of home-schooled students. The study tested 20,000 home-schooled students on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS). The study found that home-schooled students did extremely well on the test compared to public school students. Home-schooled kids scored in the 75th to 85th percentile range, compared with the 50th percentile national average for public-school students across the country.

The study found that in every subject and grade level of the ITBS battery of tests, home-schooled students scored significantly higher than public and private school students. On average, homeschool students in the first to fourth grades performed one grade level higher than comparable public and private school students. By the fifth grade, the gap began to widen, and by the eighth grade, the average home-schooled student performed four grade levels above the national average.

Home-schooling parents not only give their kids a superior education, but spend, on average, far less than even Catholic or Protestant-affiliated schools to achieve these superior results. For example, the basic Alpha-Phonics program (see Resources section), which can help teach a child to read through several grade levels, only costs about $30, and is an excellent, easy to use program. Even if we assumed that an average parent spent about $1500 a year on learn-to-read or learn-math books, computer learning software, and other learning materials, that is about one-quarter the average $7500-a-year that public schools spend per student, and half the cost of tuition at the average Catholic school. Clearly, once again, it is obvious that more money does not guarantee a better education.

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When you as a consumer buy something for $8500 a year, wouldn’t you absolutely expect to get your money’s worth? Wouldn’t you expect a special tutor or $8500 a year private school to teach your child to read well, even if it takes individualized instruction?

Yet MILLIONS of public school children ‘graduate’ who are barely able to read their own diplomas. So what are the schools doing with our children for 12 years, at $8500 a year in tax money per student, with such incompetent results? Shouldn’t parents expect an educator or school getting $8500 a year in tax money to, at the least, make their child a good reader?

If public schools are supposed to be the education ‘experts’, as they always claim, why do they need the help of parents, parents attending ‘conferences’, etc. to do the basic task of teaching children to read? As John Stossel’s 20/20 TV program “Stupid in America” showed about one boy who was already in high school and could barely read at 5th grade level, when the parent took that boy to a private school, in short order that boy’s reading level dramatically improved.

So, while I agree that parents can certainly help with their children’s education, public school teachers should not try to pass the blame onto parents shoulders for students’ poor reading skills, when it is THEIR primary job to teach children to read in their classrooms, especially with the schools getting $8500 a year of parents tax money to pay for high-priced public schools that aren’t doing the job parents are paying them to do.

Also, I do not really blame public school teachers for this problem. I blame the system they have to work for that either does not teach public-school teachers how to teach children to read with phonics any longer, or because of the general incompetence of a government-controlled, bureaucratic school system that can  strangle good teachers with senseless regulations, meaningless curriculum that wastes children’s time, or idiotic reading instruction methods like whole-language/balanced literacy that can literally cripple children’s ability to read.

The same teachers who now teach in public school, if they worked in a good private school that taught kids to read with phonics, and had the children spend much more time on the basics of reading and math, would be good teachers, because the system/school they worked for would be far more competent in educating children, and give parent’s their money’s worth.    Joel Turtel

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However, many studies show that smaller class size does not guarantee that children get a better education. The pupil-to-teacher ratio in public schools in the mid-1960s was about 24 to 1. This ratio dropped to about 17 to 1 by the early 1990s, which means the average class size fell by 28 percent. Yet, during the same time period, SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) test scores fell from 954 to 896, a decline of 58 points or 6 percent.¹² In other words, student academic achievement (as measured by SAT scores) dropped at the same time that class sizes got smaller.

Eric Hanushek, a University of Rochester economist,  examined 277 published studies on the effects of teacher-pupil ratios and class-size averages on student achievement. He found that only 15 percent of these studies showed a positive improvement in achievement with smaller class size, 72 percent found no statistically significant effect, and 13 percent found a negative effect on achievement.

It seems to go against common sense that student academic achievement would drop with smaller class sizes. One reason this happens in public schools is that when class sizes drop, schools have to create more classes to cover all the students in the school. Schools then have to hire more teachers for the increased number of classes. However, public schools across the country are already having trouble finding qualified teachers to fill their classrooms. As a result, when reduced class sizes increase the need for more teachers, schools then often have to hire less-qualified teachers.

As we might expect, teacher quality is far more important than class size in determining how children do in school. William Sanders at the University of Tennessee studied this issue. He  found that teacher quality is almost twenty times more important than class size in determining students’ academic achievement in class. As a result, reducing class sizes can lead to the contrary effect of hurting students’ education, rather than helping.¹⁴

According to the U.S. Department of Education, class sizes in America range from seventeen to twenty-seven children, depending on the location and economic status of the school district. These class sizes are smaller than those in many other countries.¹⁵ Another study from the U.S. Department of Education comparing class size in American schools to that in other countries shows that China and Taiwan have larger class sizes than our schools, yet their students do far better than American kids in verbal and math test scores. According to Casey J. Lartigue, Jr., policy analyst with the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom:

“Although American students lag behind other students in international testing, American classrooms have an average class size of 23 students [at the time of this study], incredibly few compared with the averages of 49 in South Korea, 44 in Taiwan, and 36 in Japan. Washington, D.C. has an average class size below the national average, yet ranks near the bottom in academic achievement. “

Similarly, a study on class size by policy analyst Jennifer Buckingham of the Sydney-based Center for Independent Studies found no reliable evidence that students in smaller classes do better academically or that teachers spend significantly more time with them in these classes. Buckingham concluded that a 20 percent class-size reduction cost the Australian government an extra $1,150 per student, yet added only an additional two minutes of instruction per day for each child.

Reducing class sizes can’t solve the underlying problems with public schools. No matter how small classes become, nothing will help if the teachers are ill-trained or their teaching methods are useless or destructive. For example, if teachers use whole-language reading instruction, they will cripple students’ ability to read no matter how small the classes are. Even if classrooms had one teacher for every student, that child’s ability to read would still be crippled if the teacher used whole-language instruction. In fact, smaller class sizes would give this teacher more time to do damage to each student.

Here’s an analogy on this issue of class size vs. teaching methods: Suppose a horseback-riding instructor was teaching one little girl to ride. This instructor’s teaching method was to tell the bewildered girl to sit backwards on the horse, facing the horse’s rump, and control the horse by holding its tail. Does it matter that the student-teacher ratio in this horseback-riding class is one-to-one, if the instructor is an idiot or uses bad teaching methods?

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Also, while an average of 35 percent of American mothers work, so do 30 percent of mothers in Japan, 33 percent of mothers in Taipei, and 97 percent of mothers in Beijing.¹⁸ Since Japanese, Taiwanese, and Chinese children consistently outperform American children on standardized tests, these excuses don’t explain why American kids do so poorly in school.

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A few rare inner-city public schools manage to give their students a better-than-normal education. These schools prove that poverty can’t be used as an excuse for bad education. Samuel Casey Carter, researcher and Bradley Fellow of the Heritage Foundation, investigated twenty-one of these schools where low-income children received a better education than kids in other public schools:

“Under principal Irwin Kurz, the 6th grade at P.S. 161 in Brooklyn, New York, has the second highest reading scores in all of New York State.”

KIPP Academy in Houston, Texas, under Michael Feinberg, is 95 percent low-income and 90 percent Hispanic. Within one year, students who enter the middle school with passage rates of 35B50 percent on the state assessment test are passing by more than 90 percent in both math and reading.

Seventy-eight percent of the students in Bennett-Kew Elementary in Inglewood, California, are low-income. For 20 years, Nancy Ichinaga’s school has been one of the highest performers in all of Los Angeles County.²⁰

Carter found that these principals succeeded where most other public-school principals failed because they followed seven important rules in running their schools:

1) Effective principals are free to decide how to spend their money, whom to hire, and what to teach; 2) Effective principals use measurable goals to establish a culture of achievement; 3) Master teachers bring out the best in a faculty; 4) Rigorous and regular testing leads to continuous student achievement; 5) Discipline is anchored in achievement; 6) Effective principals work actively with parents to make the home a center of learning; 7) Effective principals require hard work. ²¹

Many charter and private schools use these same educational rules, which is why low-income minority kids succeed in these schools. In contrast, millions of low-income children fail in public schools because the schools don’t apply these rules.

One more example will suffice to show that poverty is no excuse for most public schools’ dismal performance. Harvard University did a two-year study of tuition-scholarship programs for minority children in New York, the District of Columbia, and Dayton, Ohio. Students were picked by lottery to receive the tuition scholarships. Minority students who transferred to a private school from a public school soon did better in their studies.

Critics of previous tuition-scholarship studies where public-school students did better in a private school had claimed that students’ performance could have improved because of other factors, such as motivation or family background. But in the Harvard study, children were randomly assigned by lottery to private or public schools. As a result, neither poverty nor parents’ motivation explained the difference in achievement.

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However, minority parents often complain just as passionately that teachers don’t treat them with respect, that they give up on their children, and are only interested in collecting their paychecks.

This excuse implies that black or hispanic parents don’t value their children’s education as much as white or asian-american parents do. Inner-city minority parents allegedly don’t monitor their children’s progress in reading and other subjects, push their children to do their homework, or meet with teachers to go over problems their kids are having in school. Without parents’ cooperation, school authorities ask, how can we educate their children?

Who is right here? Are minority parents AWOL, and if so, why? If some minority parents are AWOL from the public schools, their comments to the former teacher-union president reveal why. These parents believe that teachers and principals don’t listen to them, don’t respect them, and don’t care about their kids.

The following scenario at a typical parent-teacher conference illustrates why some parents might go AWOL. Low-income minority and other parents who attend a conference might bitterly complain to the teachers and principal that their children can’t read, and that the school is doing a lousy job teaching their kids. In turn, to defend themselves, the teachers will give these parents their list of excuses. They might explain to the allegedly uninformed parents that teachers are the experts, and that their teaching methods are based on the latest scientific research. If parents press them, they might claim that no one could do a better job than they do, considering the alleged low salary they get or the big class sizes. Or they might tell parents that their kids have been getting passing grades, so why complain. But the parents might then respond, “but my kids can’t read!”

If parents tell teachers and the principal they want the school to change its teaching methods, do you think it will? If parents insist they want their children to learn to read with the phonics method, instead of whole-language instruction, many principals will probably say it is out of the question. They will say that school authorities set the curriculum and tell him to use whole-language instruction. Parents have no choice or power in the matter. That is the message many teachers and principals will convey to them.

Many teachers don’t know how to teach phonics anymore —their so-called teacher colleges never taught them. Principals have to obey the orders of their superiors in the Board of Education who insist they use the whole-language method. If schools had to teach phonics reading, that would require complete retraining of teachers. Most school authorities with tight budgets are just not interested.

So the teachers and principal at this “friendly” parent-teacher conference often politely look down their noses at parents and tell them, in effect, to buzz off. They say or imply that they know what is best for their children’s education, and they will make no changes in how they teach their kids.

In a parent-teacher’s conference, the school’s final argument with parents is, in effect, a gun. That is, compulsory-attendance laws force minority parents to send their children to these schools, and school authorities can dictate what and how children learn. Remember that teachers and principals are tenured civil servants who are almost impossible to fire, and they know this. In response to every frustrated demand and complaint by parents, teachers and principals can simply say, “Too bad, we’re doing it our way, and you can’t do anything about it.” They may not use those exact words, but that is the underlying message.

Parents quickly learn that their complaints fall on deaf ears. If a school refuses to act on parents’ complaints or give parents some control over their children’s education, naturally minority parents feel helpless. No matter how many parent-teacher conferences they go to, parents can’t change the system in any meaningful way, and it is the system that betrays their children. Teachers and principals are just little cogs in the system’s machinery. They can’t change the system, even if they wanted to. So low-income minority and other parents see that no matter how much they complain, nothing changes. Isn’t it understandable why they might go AWOL, why they might give up? Wouldn’t you?

Here is one parent’s experience with parent-teacher meetings as described in Education Week magazine:

“Parents are welcome in the building for the traditional cookie-bake fund-raiser. But when PIE [Partners in Education], our Nyack group [Nyack, NY], organized 30 volunteers to read aloud to children, they were not welcome. The program was arranged with the principal and teachers through the shared decision-making team. But once district employees realized this meant parents would be inside — with a chance to see how the school worked — the program was nixed. I don’t believe ours is the only district with a tendency to see parents as spies. . . . Parents are welcome in the building—but not for too long.“

Another reason many parents may go AWOL is because they think public schools are free. There’s a simple law of human psychology that says, when you pay, you pay attention.   When we pay for something out of our own pockets, we become careful consumers. This applies even more to low-income families or single, working mothers. A single, working mom might work longer hours or take on a second job to pay the bills. Her hard-earned money is precious to her, so she can’t afford to waste a penny. If she pays tuition to a Catholic or Protestant-affiliated school for her child, she is far more likely to watch like a hawk how the school is teaching her children. She will constantly check how her children progress in reading and other subjects. She doesn’t have a second chance with her children’s education, because she doesn’t have much money to spare.

As a result, she will push her children to study, do their homework, and listen to the teacher. She will encourage her children and consult with their teachers. She knows her hard-earned money, and her children’s only chance at a future, will go down the drain if she does not pay attention to her children’s education.

In contrast, low-income parents who think public schools are “free” because they don’t pay school taxes, are less likely to pay attention to their children’s progress in school. That’s because of another law of human psychology—if you don’t pay for it, you don’t value it. Low-income parents who don’t own a home, don’t waste their hard-earned school taxes if their children’s public school does a lousy job. Of course, most parents will be angry with the schools because they love their children and want the best for them, but for low-income minority parents, the financial sting is gone. Low-income parents who don’t pay school taxes for public-school education might value it less, so might pay less attention to their children’s progress.

Yet another law of human psychology applies in this matter — if you don’t pay for it, you don’t think you have the right to complain. If a stranger gives you something for free, you probably won’t complain if there’s something wrong with it. If parents think public schools are free, many might think they have no right to complain. They may think that because the education is free, whatever their children learn is better than nothing. So they go AWOL. If those same parents pay school tuition for a private school with their hard-earned money, they complain loud and clear if the school doesn’t teach their children to read.

Another question is why public schools need all these parent-teacher conferences in the first place. Sure, parents getting involved in their kids’ education is a good thing, and can only help their children learn better. Home-schooling parents know this first hand. However, if you paid a tutor to teach your child to read, you expect him to know his job and earn his pay. If public schools were the education experts they claim to be, why do they need so much help from parents?

Children are learning machines. They love learning — that’s their nature. Learning is wired into their brains. You only have to watch children at play to confirm this truth. If children are passionate learners, why do public schools constantly need parents’ cooperation to push their kids to learn?

When children find something that interests them, no one has to push them to learn. In fact, kids constantly ask their parents hundreds of questions, and love when their mother or father teach them a new skill such as cooking or riding a bike. Millions of kids today are more computer literate than the average public-school teacher. I’ve seen articles about young children who were teaching their teachers how to use the computer. When most children learn a new skill they enjoy, they don’t need much parent involvement. Children often become so absorbed in their new toys or skills that they forget all about their parents, until mom calls them to dinner.

When children go to summer camp, they learn boating, archery, baseball, drawing, dancing, and camping skills. Do the camp counselors constantly call parents and ask for their help to get the kids to learn these skills? No. If anything, there is only one parent-visiting day the whole summer when kids show their parents all the exciting new things they’ve learned, without the parent’s involvement.

When self-motivated high-school graduates go to the college of their choice to study something they love, do college professors constantly whine that they need parent involvement? Do the professors tell parents to nag their children to study and do their homework? No. If anything, parents complain that their college kids don’t call them enough and only see them on holidays.

When children constantly need parental involvement to learn, something is terribly wrong.  As **John Holt, author of How Children Fail, points out, what is wrong is that public schools strangle children’s innate love of learning. In public school, passing the next test is the goal, not learning anything useful or interesting. Each child’s unique interests, strengths, and weaknesses are ignored for the sake of covering the material and making sure kids pass the standardized tests. Children must sit in a class full of maybe twenty-five other students for six to eight hours a day, and learn boring facts that don’t interest them, from often ill-trained or mediocre teachers. Is it any wonder that public schools can’t keep children interested, and cripple their natural passion to learn? That is why teachers and principals constantly complain that they need more parent cooperation and involvement. The schools wreck children’s love of learning, so they try to enlist parents to help undo the damage.

Low-income minority parents do not want to be AWOL. In fact, they fight for school choice because public schools hurt their children the most, and because they have the least options. George A. Clowes wrote recently in School Reform News, “African-Americans are no longer willing to accept that poverty and dysfunctional families are the reasons black children cannot learn. Black parents are demanding that their children be taught to read, write, compute, analyze, think.”

When the free market gives parents real school choice, these formerly AWOL parents become involved parents. Theodore J. Forstmann and his business partner John Walton are successful entrepreneurs with a passion for helping children get an education. They created a multimillion-dollar, private scholarship program called the Children’s Scholarship Fund. Forstmann and Walton pledged $100 million of their own money to fund 40,000 scholarships for  kids trapped in the worst public schools. With the help of other prominent business leaders and celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, they raised another $70 million in matching funds. They made these scholarships open to low-income families across America.

The demand for these scholarships was explosive, especially from minority and low-income parents. These are the same parents that principals and teachers claim are AWOL from their kids’ education. Forstmann’s program received over 1,250,000 applications. In many areas, huge blocks of the eligible population applied: 26 percent in Chicago; 29 percent in New York, 33 percent in Washington, D.C., and 44 percent in Baltimore.

In his September, 1999 testimony before the U.S. House of Representative’s House Committee on the Budget, Forstmann pointed out that the incredible demand for his scholarships revealed a huge dissatisfaction with many of our public schools, and the need for alternatives.

In short, many parents go AWOL from public schools because they have little control over their kid’s education, the schools keep failing their children, and no matter how much they complain, nothing changes. When these same parents get school choice, all of a sudden they spend lots of time and energy on their children’s education.

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The reason for this time crunch, according to Mr. Chase, was that many unskilled or low-income minority parents work long hours for low wages, especially single mothers. Because they often have to work two jobs just to pay the bills, many single mothers don’t have time to attend parent-teacher conferences or to keep up with their children’s educational progress.

Mr. Chase talked about employers who don’t give single mothers paid leave, flextime, or day-care benefits so they can have more time for their children. So society, in the form of uncooperative employers (or allegedly needed laws that would force employers to be more cooperative), creates this time crunch for parents. Without society’s cooperation in this matter, the argument goes, parents don’t have the time and allegedly can’t give schools the backing and cooperation that teachers need. ²⁸

This argument doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. As we will see in Chapter 8, the average parent needs to spend only two to three hours a day home-schooling their children to give their kids a great education. Most working parents or even single moms could manage this if they schedule their time right. So employers don’t necessarily have to give parents flextime or paid leaves for parents to give their kids an excellent education at home.

For over two hundred years in this country, before public schools became entrenched by the 1890s, families of hard-working farmers, craftsmen, and even laborers managed to teach their children to read at home. Colonial farmers and laborers often worked from sun-up to sun-down, but still managed to find the time to teach their children to read, write, and do arithmetic. These parents didn’t blame “society.” They just made sure they found the time to educate their kids.

Paul Barton, working for the Educational Testing Service, conducted a 1993 study called “America’s Smallest School: The Family.” Barton found that one of the important factors determining a child’s educational performance was the presence or absence of two parents in the home. As evidence, he pointed out that North Dakota ranked first in math scores and second in the percentage of children in two-parent families, while the District of Columbia ranked next to last in math scores and last in two-parent families (meaning that it had the most single-parent homes). ²⁹

Barton’s study reflects a disturbing trend—American family stability has indeed declined badly over the last fifty years. George Will, one of our most thoughtful syndicated columnists, pointed out in one of his columns that the percentage of children born to unmarried women in 1958 was 5 percent. In 1980, it was 18 percent. By 1999, it was 33 percent. In 1999, 48.4 percent of all children born to women of all races and ethnic background, ages twenty to twenty-four — were born out of wedlock ³⁰

However, this explosion of single-mother families does not explain or justify public school’s never-ending failure. Neither do the long hours that low-income parents, single or married, must work. As noted earlier, if public schools knew their job, they would not need constant parental involvement. Also, children of these same hard-working mothers suddenly become much better students if they are lucky enough to transfer to a private school. In spite of poverty, society, or their uncooperative bosses, these parents push their kids to succeed in a Catholic or Protestant-affiliated private school. The fact that single mothers often work long hours has little to do with public-school failure.

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School authorities and teacher unions use the same argument against charter schools. As we noted earlier, charter schools are public schools controlled by parent-teacher boards, not central school authorities. School authorities claim that charter schools, like vouchers, divert millions of taxpayer dollars from regular public schools, and can therefore undermine these schools.³¹ Public schools may have serious problems, school authorities say, but almost forty-five million American children attend these schools. Allowing school choice would “threaten” these children’s education.

Public-school apologists argue that, despite these schools’ never-ending failure and betrayal of our children, we should just keep using the same old failed solutions — spend more money, hire more teachers, and reduce class sizes — and hope we get better results (which of course we never will).

In the meantime, what happens to forty-five million public-school children? In effect, school authorities’ don’t care about what happens to children who are forced to stay — but rather what happens to the public-school system if they are free to leave. By this reasoning, no matter how bad the schools get, we must not help children leave because that might make the public schools worse. The question therefore is, do our children exist to serve the system and protect public-school employees’ life-time guaranteed jobs, or should our education system exist to serve our children?

School authorities and public-school employees would rather protect an irreparably broken, failed system, than risk the security of their jobs by giving parents real school choice. We can certainly understand public-school employees wanting to keep their guaranteed job security. However, should we sacrifice our children because these people fear competition and seem terrified of proving their worth in the real world, as the rest of us do in our jobs every day?

The argument that vouchers, charter schools, and other school-choice alternatives might destroy the public schools is one of the best arguments for school choice. Government-controlled public schools, not school choice, cripples our children’s education and future, and banishes millions of inner-city kids to a lifetime of poverty and ignorance. We need to scrap the public school system, once and for all, and the sooner the better.

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It is certainly true that America has a diverse population, especially in big cities, but public schools are not the solution to educating these children. Any immigrant child who does not speak English will have a difficult time in school, just as an American child whose parents moved to Japan or Turkey would have a hard time in Japanese or Turkish public schools because he or she couldn’t speak the language.

So the first order of business for these children is to learn the language of their new country. Immigrant parents naturally expect their children to learn English. Yet look who we give this crucial job to — public schools, the same schools that can barely teach American kids to read.

Public schools are the worst place to teach English to non-English-speaking children, for many reasons:

First, these children get stuck with maybe twenty other kids in the class, including children from other cultures who speak different languages. It is almost impossible for even the most competent English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher to handle this diversity. These children need intense one-on-one instruction designed for their specific language to get them quickly up to speed.

Second, public-school classes also lump together children of different learning abilities. Out of alleged fairness, teachers often gear instruction to slower-learning students. Students who want to learn faster get bored and may take out their frustration on non-English speaking or slower children. The non-English speaking students can be shamed and humiliated by the other kids (children can be cruel). This treatment can destroy these children’s self-confidence and make them hate school and learning.

Third, as we saw in previous chapters, public-school children often get stuck with poorly-trained teachers who had the bad luck of graduating from a teacher college or university department of education.

Fourth, many public schools teach reading with whole-language instruction, not phonics. As we saw in Chapter 3, this reading method is an unmitigated disaster. Whole-language instruction used alone turns non-immigrant American children into functional illiterates with dismal reading-test scores. To use this same method to try to teach non-English-speaking immigrant children to read English is absurd. For all the reasons indicated above, public schools are the last place we should be sending immigrant children to learn English.

Many public schools try to solve this diversity problem with bilingual education classes. The schools teach non-English speaking kids reading, writing, math, and other subjects in their native language for sometimes up to four years while the children learn English through assimilation. There is a lot of controversy surrounding bilingual education. Advocates say it lets kids keep up with their studies while gradually learning English. Opponents say these classes retard immigrant children’s academic growth by not forcing them to learn English sooner.

In 1998, California’s successful Proposition 227 initiative eliminated bilingual  classes, and instead mandated “English Immersion” programs for Hispanic and other non-English speaking students. In these programs, all instruction is in English and geared specifically to teaching students English as fast as possible. Some studies have shown this method to be successful in helping immigrant children develop fluent conversational English in one to two years.

Even without these programs, young immigrant children often become fluent in conversational English in this same time period. They do this by assimilating into the culture and learning from other immigrant members of their community who have been in America longer and learned the language.³²

If young immigrant children can learn basic conversational English in this relatively short time period, then the diversity excuse does not hold water. Once these kids learn to speak English, they are in a similar position to American students who are learning to read from scratch. At this point, the above-noted serious disadvantages of public-school instruction kick in, and the immigrant kids are stuck with the same public schools American children have to suffer with.

The only system that can effectively handle diversity is the free market. The problem can be solved if private companies or former immigrants who now speak English set up local schools in their neighborhoods. If Chinese, Indian, Spanish, Italian, or Vietnamese entrepreneurs, churches, or social organizations opened local schools to teach new immigrants English, the problem would be quickly solved.

Why don’t we see more of these local schools in immigrant neighborhoods? One reason is that many immigrants struggle financially when they first come here, so allegedly “free” public schools seem like a better deal than paying tuition to a local private school. However, if we scrapped the public schools, the explosive demand for English-instruction schools would push local entrepreneurs to open such schools. As long as “free” public schools are around, local entrepreneurs have little incentive to risk their money opening private schools.

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Many public-school authorities either distrust the free market or don’t have the faintest idea how it work. Yet, they live in a free market economy that gives them the highest standard of living in human history. These people live in big, clean houses on paved streets. They have cars, computers, televisions, refrigerators, electric lights, indoor plumbing, supermarkets full of fresh food, airlines to whisk them away to vacations in the Bahamas, and modern antibiotics that can save their lives. All these marvels are products of the free market.

Yet out of blindness or self-interest, many public-school officials either cannot or will not see this free-market miracle of progress for humankind. Many have contempt for the bountiful free market which they insult at every occasion, especially free-market education. Others fear the free market because they fear for their jobs if education was privatized.

Despite their dependence on the free market in their daily lives, education authorities  must attack it. Their livelihood depends on keeping the state-run public schools intact. To justify their tenure-guaranteed jobs and power, they must loudly defend the public schools and attack free-market education. To do  this, they must attack the free market itself.

In October 1995, Pepsi company officials announced in front of Jersey City Hall that Pepsi would donate thousands of dollars into a scholarship fund that helped low-income kids attend a private school of their choice. What was the immediate response of the local teachers’ union? They threatened the possibility of a statewide boycott of all Pepsi products. Pepsi vending machines in the city were vandalized. Three weeks after their announcement, Pepsi company officials withdrew their scholarship offer.³³

Why would a teachers’ union do this? As we noted earlier, teacher unions and many school employees view vouchers, whether private or governmental, as a threat to their jobs and the public-school system. Vouchers allow children to leave failed public schools and take tax money with them. Teacher unions don’t want to deliberately hurt children, but to protect their system at all costs, they try to chain students to the wretched public schools by fighting vouchers.

School authorities claim that children’s minds and futures should not be left in the hands of potentially dishonest, commercial, for-profit schools. To school authorities, making a profit seems to be incompatible with giving kids a good education.

Yet, most of the wonderful, time-saving, often life-saving products and services we buy in the free market are produced by for-profit companies. Take food, for example. As a basic necessity of life, food is more important than education. Without food, we die. Without education, we only lack knowledge. Would school authorities say that food production is too important to be left in the hands of the free market? Should we close down all our for-profit supermarkets and local grocery stores? Should local governments own and operate all farms and supermarkets, as the Soviet government did in communist Russia?

As noted earlier, the Soviet Union tried state-controlled collectivized farms for seventy years. The end result was seventy years of perpetual famine. Meanwhile, for-profit American farmers produced so much food that they exported millions of tons of wheat to the Soviets every year. In fact, for-profit American farmers produce so much food that federal bureaucrats now pay farmers subsidies to not grow food in order to prop up farm prices.

Do public-school authorities claim that for-profit farms, supermarkets, and local grocers do a bad job giving us fresh food every day?  I think not, because we do not hear teachers, principals, or school administrators clamoring for socialization of food production in this country. They don’t do so because for-profit farms and supermarkets make their lives better by giving them a huge variety of fresh food at reasonable prices. If we ever socialized food production in this country, I believe public-school employees would scream bloody murder because they would hate the rotten food and lousy service in the new government-run food stores.

Yet, when it comes to our government-controlled public-school education system, school authorities and employees defend the system to the death. One reason they may do so is because they personally benefit by the system, so are willing to turn a blind eye to its failures and overlook the damage it does to millions of school children.

As we noted in Chapter 1, public schools only became fully entrenched and compulsory in this country by the 1890s. Before then, for over 200 years, our education system was voluntary and mostly free-market. Parents were free to educate their kids at home or at relatively inexpensive local grammar schools, religious schools, or colleges. Education was widespread, literacy rates were over 90 percent in the major cities, and parents had complete control over their children’s education. The free-market education system worked great before public schools came along.

We also have an thriving education free-market in our pre-schools and colleges right now. Millions of parents pay for and enroll their kids in thousands of these private schools and colleges across the country. Parents are free to choose which pre-school, kindergarten, or college is best for their kids and can easily change schools if they are not satisfied with its performance. Most parents appreciate the choice and quality these schools offer. If the free market can give kids a great pre-school, kindergarten, or college education, there is no reason it cannot also give us a superb 1st through 12th education system if public schools were privatized.

Japan has proved how effective an education free-market can be. It has a thriving, multi-billion-dollar education industry called juku schools. These are private, for-profit “after-school” schools that Japanese children start as early as the first grade. The schools are so popular that by the fifth grade, 30 percent of students attend a juku school. In 1991, it was found that over half of eighth-graders and an estimated 70 percent of ninth-graders attended these schools. A Tokyo survey found that 90 percent of students had studied at a juku by the time they advanced to the ninth grade.

Why do millions of Japanese parents send their children to private juku schools? In Japan, competition is intense to get into the most prestigious universities because students who attend these universities get the best jobs after graduating. Entry into these universities strictly depends on admission-test scores.

In general, Japanese public schools give children a better and more disciplined education than our schools. However, Japanese parents who want their children to get into the best universities are often not satisfied with their children’s public-school education. Parents send their kids to juku schools for three primary reasons. They want to improve their child’s chances on high-stakes entrance exams, get remedial help for a child who is falling behind in public school, or give their child more advanced instruction if the child is a fast-learner and is not challenged by public-school instruction.

The juku system is huge, vibrant, and fiercely competitive because there is such a big demand for these schools. Instead of forcing a one-size-fits-all curriculum on all students, these schools cater to the needs of individual students and parents who are their customers. They ask what parents and students want and need and design their curriculums and teaching methods accordingly. In juku schools the parent-customer is king, not the public-school employees.

The schools test students before admission to discover their current academic skills and competence. Then, unlike public schools in America, they group students by ability, not age, so  class instruction can be specifically geared to students’ individual needs. Also, the schools don’t allow slower students to be “warehoused,” as that would be bad for business. Instead, school administrators give frequent tests to determine each student’s progress and then revise their curriculum or teaching methods to ensure that each student gets the exact kind and level of instruction he or she needs.

Slower students are therefore not embarrassed or humiliated in class as they are in America’s public schools that group children by age, not ability. Also, faster-learning students can study more challenging material and progress more quickly in their studies.

Teachers have a special and highly honored place in the juku system. There are no hiring or licensing restrictions for teachers as there are in Japanese public schools. The teachers come from many backgrounds. Some of them are professional educators, but many others are scientists, economists, college professors, other professionals, and even college students who like to teach. The fierce free-market competition between juku schools forces school owners to hire the best teachers they can find and dismiss those who are ill-trained or incompetent.

The juku system is also good for Japanese teachers. They enjoy giving individualized instruction to motivated students. Good teachers are appreciated both by their employers and parents. Their salaries are based on performance, not how long they have been teaching. Also, some top juku teachers who are in high demand earn as much as professional Japanese baseball players. Public-school teachers in America should take special note of this fact. It shows that a competitive free-market education system could give them high status and huge financial rewards if they do a great job educating children.

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These facts are true, but that does not make private schools unaccountable to the public. The absence of government oversight does not affect the general quality of education in for-profit schools, or the quality of most other products we buy in the free market. Would school authorities claim that most private airlines, homebuilders, or supermarkets sell bad products because they don’t have to open their books to the public? Of course there are always some mediocre companies who sell inferior products or services. However, the free-market system eventually rids itself of such businesses. An airline that has many crashes, a homebuilder whose houses fall apart in a few years, or a supermarket that sells rotten, high-priced food, will soon go out of business because of fierce competition. Only businesses that give customers consistent value and accountability over the long term — quality products at reasonable prices — will last in a competitive free market.

Private schools may not have to open their records or decision-making process to the public, but neither do car manufacturers, homebuilders, or supermarkets. All customers care about is if the car or house is well constructed, and the supermarket sells fresh food at a reasonable price. Customers care about results, not about the dubious privilege of looking into a company’s records. Likewise, private schools have to satisfy their parent-customers. Private school owners are accountable to parents because they know if they do a bad job and parents withdraw their children, they will go bankrupt.

Moreover, open school records do not in themselves guarantee accountability. In many public schools, records have been distorted because tests and coursework are often dumbed-down and grades manipulated to make a good impression on parents. Too often, failing students automatically advance to the next grade. Even if parents had access to true student achievement records, that record is often dismal, as we saw in Chapter 1. What does it matter if schools’ records are open to the public, if the schools can barely teach children to read? What is more important to parents, good record keeping or good teaching and academic results?

Despite appearances to the contrary, public schools are wholly unaccountable to taxpayers — the customers who pay teachers’ salaries and school upkeep. These schools could not have stayed in business after committing education negligence on millions of children for the past fifty years, if they were accountable to parents. Compulsory attendance laws force parents to send their children to these schools. Parents can’t tell school authorities what or how to teach their kids. They have little control over the moral values the schools teach their children. They can’t sue these schools for educational fraud and negligence. It is public schools, not private schools, that are unaccountable to parents.

If public schools had to depend on voluntary contributions from parents, most of them would soon be out of business. That is why school authorities fight tooth and nail to deny school choice to parents — they want to stay unaccountable to the public they allegedly serve

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Just as for-profit supermarkets serve Hispanic, Asian-American, African-American and other minorities, for-profit schools, both secular and religious, accept students of every race and color. Like most other businesses, the color most private schools are interested in is green, the color of money. If these schools reject eligible applicants because of their race, they only reduce their profits and hurt themselves.

In contrast, many public schools, particularly in crowded urban areas like Chicago and New York City, are as segregated today as Southern schools were before the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. As we saw in Chapter 4, our public-school system has created thousands of segregated inner-city schools throughout the country.  The Civil Rights Project at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education found that:

“70 percent of the nation’s black students now attend predominantly minority public schools, with 36 percent of the nation’s black students attending schools with a minority enrollment of 90 to 100 percent. Researcher Jay Greene found in a national study that 55 percent of children in public schools attended classes where 90 percent of students came from a single ethnic group. In comparison, 41 percent of private school students attended schools with similar conditions. The alleged resegregation caused by school choice is occurring in places where vouchers are still just a rumor.

As we saw previously, public schools resegregate because they continually fail minority students, year after year. Inner-city, low-income parents who work hard to move up the economic ladder, quickly relocate and move to middle-class suburban neighborhoods to find better schools for their kids. This process leaves behind poor minority families, and low-income neighborhoods then become even more segregated. This resegregation is reflected in the local public schools, where neighborhoods with 90 to 100 percent black or hispanic residents then have  public schools with 90 to100 percent black or hispanic students. Also, the lack of real school choice for minority and low-income parents means that students have no alternative but to attend these segregated and often violent public schools.

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As I will explain below, the claim that all children have a right to an education actually hurts the children it was intended to help. We must therefore ask a seemingly shocking question—do all children have a right to an education? If they do, public-school apologists are correct in assuming that we need government to guarantee that right so no child gets left behind. The very definition of the word “right” means that a person has a claim on the rest of society (other Americans) to give him some product or service he wants, regardless of whether he can pay for it or not. For example, if we claimed that everyone has a right to a car, that would mean if someone couldn’t afford a car, government would give that person the money to buy it (the payment might be called a car voucher).

Similarly, if we say that all children have a right to an education, regardless of their parent’s ability to pay tuition, then only government can guarantee this alleged right. Government has to guarantee this right because no private, for-profit school will admit a student if the parents don’t pay tuition (unless the student gets a scholarship). If a private school doesn’t get paid for its services, it soon goes out of business.

Local or state governments can guarantee this alleged right in two basic ways. They can own and operate all the public schools and force all children to attend these schools, or they can give subsidies (vouchers) to parents to pay for tuition in the private school of their choice. Since most school authorities strongly oppose vouchers, that means they support only a government-controlled system of compulsory public schools and school taxes to guarantee children this alleged right to an education.

But government produces nothing by itself. Government gets its money by taxing us. To guarantee this alleged right to a product or service, government tax collectors must therefore take money from one person to give it to another. They must take from Peter to pay Paul, as the saying goes. So, in effect, a person who demands food, housing, or medical care as an alleged right, is really demanding that government tax agents steal money from his neighbor to give him an unearned benefit he didn’t work for.

Education, like housing or medical care, does not grow free in nature. Just as someone must pay doctors, nurses, and hospitals for all the services they provide, someone must also pay for teachers’ salaries, textbooks, janitorial services, and school upkeep. Other than air, nothing that we need is free.

As indicated earlier, the average public school now gets almost $7,500 a year per student, paid from taxes. To guarantee education as a right, local, state, and federal governments must tax all Americans to pay for public schools. All of us are taxed, whether or not we have school-age children or think these schools are worth paying for. So when some parents claim that their children have a right to an education, they are really demanding that their local or state government steal money from their neighbors to pay for their children’s education.

Here’s an analogy that might help clarify this issue. Imagine that your unemployed neighbor comes to you and asks you to lend him money to pay for his children’s education. You reply that, though you sympathize with his problem, your answer is no. He responds by saying that he is poor, points out that you have a big house and a job, and insists that his children have a “right” to an education. You say, “Sorry, my answer is still no because I need my money for my own children’s education.” Suppose that your neighbor then gets real mad, pulls out a gun, puts it to your head, and says, “I asked you nicely. I told you my children need an education. You  have a job, and I’m unemployed, so you have a moral duty to give me your money.” Then he clicks back the hammer on the gun.

Obviously your neighbor has no right to put a gun to your head and steal your money because his children need an education. Nor does he, or any number of your neighbors, have the right to rob you by getting government to be their enforcer — by pressuring local governments to take your money through school taxes. Any school system that uses compulsory taxes is a system based on the notion that theft is moral if it’s for a good cause. No goal, not even educating children, justifies legalized theft.

It is only natural that all parents want the best education for their children, but do good intentions justify stealing from your neighbor? A mugger on the street who puts a knife to your throat and demands your money also has good intentions — he wants to make his life better with your money. One of the Ten Commandments says, “Thou shalt not steal.” It does not say, “Thou shalt not steal, except if you need tuition money to educate your child.” Since no one has a right to steal from his neighbor, no one, including children, has a “right” to an education.

Some might argue that I may be correct on this issue when it comes to adults, but surely we can’t punish innocent children for their parent’s failures? Just because parents are poor or unemployed, why should innocent children suffer and be denied an education? The answer to that question is one that many people find hard to accept, yet it is true — there are no guarantees in life, not for adults or for children. Good intentions to alleviate a problem do not justify hurting other people by stealing from them. Two wrongs do not make a right.

Moreover, if we agree that children have a right to an education because their parents are poor, then shouldn’t they also have a right to food, a bicycle, a nice house in the suburbs, and designer clothes? If poor kids (and all children) have an alleged right to an education, don’t they also have an alleged right to everything else that other kids have whose parents are well-off?  Why not then say that anyone, poor, middle-class, or rich who has less money than his neighbor, has the “right” to steal from his neighbor? Where do we stop if some people can legally steal from others because they claim their kids need this or that?

The answer is, we don’t stop, and we haven’t stopped. That is why our country has turned into a welfare state that is drowning in debt. When I use the word “welfare,” I don’t mean only for the poor. Rich, poor, and middle-class alike in America now claim the right to everything from corporate tax breaks and subsidies, to price supports for farmers, to Medicare, to rent subsidies for unwed mothers. When we let government steal money from taxpayers to give unearned benefits or subsidies to special-interest groups, we open up a Pandora’s box. We become a nation of thieves stealing from each other. Is this what we want America to become?

It is true that a free market does not and can not guarantee that all children have enough to eat or live in a comfortable house. Likewise, a free-market education system in which all parents have to pay for their children’s education obviously can’t guarantee a quality education for every child.

However, government-controlled public schools also can’t guarantee that every child gets a quality education. These failed schools can barely teach our children to read. Also, neither system can make guarantees because there are no guarantees in life, and because each child’s abilities, personality, and family background are so different that such guarantees are impossible. The real question, then, is not which system is perfect, but which system is more likely to give the vast majority of children a quality education that most parents could afford?

We have seen how public schools fail and betray millions of children, year after year. The only “right” most public schools give to school children is the right to suffer through a mind-numbing, third-rate education for twelve years.

In contrast, the free-market, while not perfect, gives us all the wondrous goods and services we buy every day, such as cars, fresh food, computers, refrigerators, and televisions. The superbly efficient and competitive free market gives us all these marvelous products at prices that most people can afford. Even the poorest American families today have a car, refrigerator, and sometimes two televisions in their homes. If we want to discover which system would give the vast majority of children a quality education at reasonable prices, I think we have the answer — the free market, hands down.

We therefore don’t need a failed public-school system to enforce an alleged right to an education, when there is no such right in the first place. Each parent should be responsible for paying for their own children’s education, just as they pay for their children’s food or clothing.

Finally, public-school apologists use this alleged right to an education to justify keeping our public schools alive, in spite of these schools’ never-ending failure. Many public-school apologists who claim that children have a right to an education do so out of good intentions. They want to give all children a chance to get a decent education. But, once again, good intentions mean worse than nothing if they lead to evil consequences. This alleged right to an education is one of the major excuses used to prop up our public-school system, a system that, as we’ve seen, has caused and continues to cause irreparable harm to millions of children.

Low-income  families today can buy quality, low-cost food in a competitive, free-market food industry full of grocery stores and supermarkets. In the same way, once compulsory public schools are out of the way, most children would be able to get a quality, low-cost education in a competitive free-market education system

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This excuse is directly related to the previous one. School authorities point out that at least in a public-school system, local governments force parents to send their children to school and pay for this schooling through taxes. This compulsory system insures that even children from the poorest families get an education, even if this education is mediocre to miserable. In contrast, they argue, a free-market system in which children do not have a right to an education, can’t guarantee even a minimum education to children from poor families.

As we noted above, it is true that the free market can’t guarantee a quality education for all children. However, let’s look at some poverty statistics that clarify this issue further. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, the number of families living under the poverty line in the year 2002 was 7.2 million, or 9.6 percent of all American families.³⁹ Census Bureau data for 2002 also indicate that 11,704,000 children under 18 years old, lived in families below the official poverty line.⁴⁰

Let’s assume for the moment that a free-market education system could not find ways to give poor children a decent education (we will discuss ways that it can, very shortly). Under this assumption, about 11.7 million children living in poverty would not get educated (however we define educated). Now contrast this number with the fact that our public-school system, as we’ve seen, guarantees a third-rate education to the vast majority of public-school students (almost 45 million a year). Our public-schools also waste twelve years of children’s lives, warp their values, give millions of children mind-altering drugs, make kids hate learning, and cripple their ability to read.

Also, public schools already fail most inner-city children from low-income families. So how can school authorities claim we need public schools to ensure that poor children get a decent education? Would poor children be any worse off with a free-market education system than they already are in our public schools?

The answer is no, because in reality, a free-market system has a far greater chance of giving poor kids a quality education that public schools do. That’s because an education free-market is extremely flexible, and has many powerful ways to give poor parents real school choice that fits their budget. Before I discuss how an education free-market would do this, let me first clarify what I mean by this term.

An education free market would have no compulsory public schools — government would be out of the education business. As a result, there would be no compulsory attendance laws and no school taxes. All licensing laws would be scrapped. Anyone who wanted to teach any subject could do so without having to get a license. Also, anyone or any company who wanted to open a school could do so without having to get a license to operate. Parents would judge teachers or schools based on their reputation, competence, and real-world results. Parents would pay for their children’s education out of their own pockets, just as they now pay for their children’s food and clothing. However, they would only pay for their children’s education, not their neighbor’s, because school taxes would be gone.

The free market, together with the elimination of school taxes and regulations, can help the poorest parents educate their children in many ways:

First, state governments can use their lottery profits to pay for education scholarships for poor children. I consider state lotteries part of the free market because they are voluntary, as opposed to taxes, which are compulsory. If millions of people choose to gamble a few dollars on their state lottery every week, that is similar to their losing a few dollars a week playing the slot machines in a private casino.

In fiscal year 2003, 39 states grossed about $45 billion from their lotteries, and after payouts and expenses, had about $12 billion in net profits for education and other programs in their states.⁴¹ If we divided this $12 billion a year by the approximately 12 million children living under the poverty level that we discussed earlier, that comes out to about $1000 per child, per year. This $1000 a year scholarship could help poor parents pay part of the tuition for a Catholic or other private school.

But the potential benefits of lotteries can go way beyond this. There is no reason why state governments should have a legal monopoly on lotteries. If state gaming regulations that forbid private lotteries were scrapped, and big corporations then ran lotteries (far more efficiently), more billions of dollars could be raised for education. Local governments could induce private corporations to contribute part of their lottery profits to education scholarships by giving them tax credits for such contributions.

Today, state lottery money is dumped into failing public schools. This is a waste of precious money and resources, since the public-school system is beyond repair, no matter how much money it gets. Instead, once public schools were scrapped, every cent of state lottery profits could fund tuition scholarships for children from poor families.

Second, state and local governments can also offer tax credits to individuals or  businesses that contribute to an education fund used for scholarships for poor kids. In 1997, Arizona passed a law that let taxpayers deduct up to $500 from their taxes for contributing the same amount to a “tuition organization” that gives education scholarships to kids from poor families. As of this writing, Arizona has thirty-one such scholarship organizations. In 1999, over 30,000 Arizona residents contributed almost $14 million to these scholarship clearinghouses, which helped almost 7,000 low-income students attend private schools. Many other states have created similar tax credit programs, including Iowa, Illinois, and Minnesota, raising tens of millions of dollars in scholarship funds for poor children. ⁴²

Third, private donors are another source of funding to help low-income children get a decent education. Americans are enormously compassionate. In 2001, they gave over $187 million to various charities in New York State alone.⁴³ Many philanthropist-entrepreneurs have also created multimillion-dollar private scholarship programs for poor kids. One example I noted earlier is Theodore J. Forstmann’s $170 million Children’s Scholarship Fund that provides about 40,000 scholarships to poor kids.

Fourth, if we scrapped the public schools and eliminated all school taxes, every homeowner would get back thousands of dollars a year in tax refunds for school taxes they no longer had to pay. School tax refunds will help mostly middle-class families who own homes. However, everyone pays other state and local taxes that are used to support the public schools. If states lowered their general tax rates after they dismantled the public schools, everyone’s taxes would be less. Less state and local taxes would give low-income families extra money they could put aside for tutors or private-school tuition for their kids.

The greatest help for poor parents, however, would come from the free-market itself. If we no longer had public schools, the parents of 45 million school children would be shopping for education alternatives. This would create a huge, multi-billion dollar market for private teachers and schools. As a result, we would then see an explosion of new, low-cost, competitive schools created to meet this demand.

Every former public-school teacher could tutor children or open a small school in her home or a local, storefront space. Any adult with a special talent or knowledge could tutor neighborhood kids for a reasonable fee. Millions of retired people would teach for next to nothing just to be around children. Major corporations like Disney or Microsoft might enter the education business and create thousands of local schools throughout the country. Children could learn valuable skills and earn money in work-study programs with local businesses. Local entrepreneurs in minority areas could open low-cost neighborhood schools without having to worry about getting a license to operate. In Chapter 9, I will examine in depth other free-market education options, such as the new Internet schools, computer learning software, and home-schooling.

Cristo Rey Catholic School is one example of the many ways free-market schools can give poor kids a quality education. This school has created a study-work program in partnership with businesses to help cover tuition costs.

“Cristo Rey Jesuit High School is a  Catholic School in Chicago, where 93 percent of the students come from low-income families. To give these poor kids a chance in life, the school developed a creative new way to finance their private education that other cities are now adopting. Student tuition at Cristo Rey is about $8500 a year, but the poor kids pay only  about $2200. The students pay off the rest of the tuition by working five days each month, eight-hours a day, at participating banks, law firms, and other companies in Chicago. Each company pays about $25,000 a year in exchange for the clerical work done by four rotating students. This work-study-tuition program has paid off big for these kids; Currently, about 85 percent of the children in this program graduate and go to college. “

As noted earlier, for many years, the free market has been satisfying millions of parents’ need for quality private pre-schools, kindergartens, and colleges. When children are ready for college, parents have thousands of local or out-of-state colleges to chose from with a wide range of tuition costs. Many parents or high-school graduates take out college student loans and pay back the loans after they graduate. Parents could take out similar loans to pay for 1st through 12th grade education for their kids.

Fortunately, in an education free-market, parents would not have to pay tuition for twelve years of private school. Public schools have been around so long that most parents think that education requires going to a school for twelve years. Nothing can be farther from the truth.

In Chapter 1, I talked about John Taylor Gatto, New York City Teacher-of-the-Year in 1990. Mr. Gatto taught English and reading for twenty-six years in some of the worst public schools in New York City. Let me repeat here what Gatto wrote in his book, Dumbing Us Down, because it is worth repeating: “The truth is that reading, writing, and arithmetic only take about one hundred hours to transmit as long as the audience is eager and willing to learn.” ⁴⁵

One hundred hours is less than three months of public-school time for the average child. Even if we triple the time to three hundred hours for slow-learning or less enthusiastic kids, that’s still less than one year of school time to teach a child to read, write, and do basic arithmetic. This statistic is shocking if we remember that millions of public-school students take reading and English literature classes right into high school, yet still barely read at minimum levels by the time they graduate. If Gatto is right, parents would only have to send their children to a good free-market school (or pay a tutor) for a maximum of two years to become good readers and know basic arithmetic.

If most children could become proficient readers in two years, then why do they need public schools to waste twelve years of their lives? Most public-school education is a waste of time, anyhow. Whether kids learn history, science, or English literature, teachers tell kids to read the next chapter in a dumbed-down textbook, and then give them boring lectures and tests on that chapter. Very often, many children in the class have no interest whatsoever in the subject. Kids resent having to sit through these classes, so public-school “education” becomes a mind-numbing drudge.

Also, why should children waste their time studying trigonometry, biology, or foreign languages if these subjects bore them? Why should kids spend years studying a subject they will probably never use later in life, unless they really like the subject and will make it their college major? Why don’t we value our children’s time as much as we value our own?

Once children learned to read proficiently, if there were no compulsory attendance laws or required subjects to study, children could study whatever interests them, for as long as they like. Many parents might think I’m naïve to believe that children would read and study without being forced. That is because many kids who go to public school hate it. When children find a subject they’re interested in, they can be absorbed for hours on end. Kids love learning if you let them learn about something that fascinates them, and let them learn in their own way and at their own pace.

So parents would not have to send their children to school for eight to twelve years, as they do now. Most parents would only have to pay tuition to a quality free-market school for two years to make their children proficient readers. After learning to read well and do arithmetic, most kids could continue their education through self-study, tutors, Internet schools, computer learning software, home-schooling or other relatively inexpensive options.

Also, fierce competition would drive down tuition costs to levels that most parents, even the poorest, could afford. The free market would create so many new schools and options that we would have an education supermarket. Happily, most parents’ biggest worry would not be the cost of tuition. Their biggest worry would be trying to choose among the thousands of high-quality, low-cost tutors, local schools, computer software, and Internet schools competing for their business.

Most people who buy a car today finance the purchase with a car loan, paid off over four to five years. The average car today costs around $20,000. If children attended school in an education free market for only two to four years,  parents could similarly pay off the tuition costs with a bank loan. If tuition costs were about $5000 a year, parents could take out a $15,000 to $20,000 education loan, and pay it out over five years. Sharply reducing the time children must spend in “formal” schooling greatly expands parents’ financial options to pay tuition costs.

These are only a few of the ways a free-market education system could help poor parents give their kids a quality, low-cost education. So school authorities’ excuse that we need public schools to ensure that poor children get an education, doesn’t hold water.

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On the other hand, an incompetent, dishonest, or disreputable roofer who leaves holes in your roof, will make excuses. He makes excuses because he wants you to pay him, even though he botched the job. He makes excuses to try to fool you into paying him, even though he doesn’t deserve your money.

This contractor, like most people, also has to justify himself in his own eyes. He doesn’t like to think of  himself as dishonest, incompetent, or a bad person — that would wound his self-image. So he rationalizes to himself, and makes excuses to you why his work isn’t so bad. He might tell you that he’s the expert on roofing, that you don’t know good roofing work when you see it, or that no roofer could do a better job.

If the roofer does a lousy job for all his customers, and keeps giving excuses, what happens? In a free market, where you have dozens of other roofers to choose from, you will fire this roofer and look for a better one. So will his other customers, and soon he will be out of business.

Just like our incompetent roofer, public-school authorities need to invent a constant stream of excuses. What do theses excuses accomplish?

1.  Personal justification — Every public-school employee believes he is a good person, and most of them are. School employees do not want to believe or admit to themselves that they work for a school system that continually betrays millions of innocent children. These excuses let them justify themselves and the system in their own eyes.

2.  Justify their privileged position —  Public-school employees need excuses to justify why they have a unique, privileged position in the work world. Most employees in the real world can be fired if they are incompetent. Most companies that do shoddy work can and do go out of business. Few workers in the real world have job guarantees like tenured school employees. Few workers get the fat benefits and pensions that public-school teachers, principals, and administrators do, especially for mediocre or incompetent work. Teachers who work in private  kindergartens, grammar or secondary schools, and colleges do not have these same benefits or job guarantees. So public-school employees have to pretend they are somehow unique. They have to pretend  they deserve their privileged position. Hence the excuses and self-delusion.

3.  Fear of parents — If public-school employees don’t make these elaborate excuses, they are afraid of open rebellion by parents. Already, almost a million parents are voting with their feet by home-schooling their children. Every year, thousands more parents give up in disgust with their local public school, and join the ranks of home-schoolers. Public-school authorities see this as a frightening and dangerous trend. As a result, they need a constant stream of excuses to stem the flow and convince parents to keep their children in public school.

4.  To induce guilt —  School authorities invent excuses to make parents feel guilty if they take their kids out of  public school. No one likes to feel they are a bad person, that they support policies that harm children. Americans are a kind, wonderful, generous people. Public-school apologists play on our good nature. They keep telling scare-stories about how school choice would hurt the children, destroy the public schools, leave minority children behind, and bring back segregated schools. Guilt is a powerful weapon. These excuses are a guilt-trip sword, aimed squarely at parents’ hearts.

5. Loss of funding —  Every time a parent takes her child out of public school, the school loses an average of $7500 a year in tax money. If the child was in a special education class, the school loses almost $16,000 a year (on average). When schools lose tax money, they lose power and control. If enough parents quit the public schools, many teachers might be fired because the schools would need fewer teachers. Hence the endless list of excuses to stop the loss of tax dollars and threat to teachers’ jobs.

6.  Fear of legislators —  If enough parents or parent organizations complain to local or state legislators about bad public schools, legislators may (a) reduce funding to the schools and education programs, (b) pass new laws that require merit pay, accountability, and teacher-competence testing, (c) require teachers to know their subject as a prerequisite for a license, (d ) eliminate tenure rules that guarantee jobs, (e) pass new laws or repeal old ones to make home-schooling easier for parents, and (f)  pass new laws that require schools to prove their competence with standardized tests, or lose funding. School authorities want to avoid such legislative punishments. Hence the frantic excuses to keep politicians at bay.

7.  Greed — If school authorities fool parents and legislators with their excuses, they then feel safe to demand higher teacher salaries and fatter benefits and pensions. Considering the fact that most public schools continually fail our children and give them a third-rate education, school-employee salaries and benefits should be lowered, not raised. Parents should get value for their hard-earned tax dollars. These excuses fool parents into thinking that public schools do a good job and school employees deserve their salaries and benefits.

School authorities constantly repeat these excuses to make parents doubt their own judgment and common sense, justify the continued existence of failed public schools, and fool or appease parents and legislators who want real school choice. Public-school apologists seem to believe that if they repeat these excuses long enough and loud enough, parents and legislators will accept them. It’s the big-lie technique.

Parents who want quality education for their children cannot depend on a public-school system whose only real achievement is an endless list of excuses why it can’t educate their children. Instead, parents should seriously consider leaving this system behind and finding education alternatives for their children, such as low-cost Internet private schools or homeschooling.

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The problem is the system they are trapped in. Too many teachers have become more concerned with their economic security than with realizing the best within them. This attitude is typical of many government employees. I should know, because many years ago I once worked for the City of New York, for three years.

When the City first hired me, I was young and eager. I intended to give the job my best efforts. However, I soon realized that little was expected of me. I saw the lazy attitudes of my fellow workers who had the security of tenure. Since I am only human like everyone else, I started to become like my fellow employees.

I soon realized that if I did passable work and did not make any waves, I would advance up the civil-service salary ladder just for showing up at the job. My supervisors did not make me work harder or become more competent. To make more money, I only had to grow old on the job. I quickly noticed that when I worked harder or came up with innovative ideas, I did not get paid more. I also saw that when I slacked off in my work or enthusiasm, I did not get paid less.

As a result, I gradually, insidiously, started to die inside. My spirit, initiative, and the best within me started to die. Most employees will act the same way under a similar system of rewards or punishment. If a person is not rewarded for trying harder or doing better, if he is not punished for being lazy or incompetent, most of us, myself included, become mediocre employees just putting in our time. By remaining a government employee, every undiscovered talent and possibility I had within me was being smothered in the stifling, undemanding atmosphere of government employment.

Why didn’t my government employers demand more of me? Because government agencies never go out of business—they are monopolies that stay in business whether or not they do a good job. These agencies get paid from taxes, not from individual “customers” they are supposed to be “serving.”

The public is forced to deal with civil-service employees of the Post Office, Social Security Office, or local Board of Education because these government agencies have no competitors. Worse, government employees know this. These monopoly agencies get their “customers” by force. They do not need your consent when they take your tax money or make you wait in line to see them. So if government employees or supervisors know their agency can never go out of business, if they are not afraid of being fired for incompetence, there is little incentive to work harder or innovate.

The same psychology applies in government schools. No matter how bad the public schools are, they don’t go out of business. The educrats just ask for more tax money to “fix” what they think is wrong, and the schools stay open for another fifty years, wrecking our children’s education.

In a free-market school, such things don’t happen. A private school that didn’t teach children how to read would soon lose parent’s confidence. Parents would remove their children from the school, and the school would soon be out of business. End of story.

In government schools, no matter how bad a teacher or principal is, it is almost impossible to fire him because of tenure. That would never happen in a free-market school. If students do badly because of incompetent teachers, parents will complain to the owner. The owner will quickly remove a teacher if he doesn’t improve his performance, because the owner could lose parent-customers if he doesn’t. End of story.

But government schools entrench mediocre education without hope of improvement precisely because the schools can’t go out of business and tenure protects bad teachers or principals. These schools and teachers are not accountable to parents, their true customers. That’s why so many public schools give a third-rate education to our kids.

So I offer this challenge to teachers and their unions. If you think your government schools do as good a job as private or religious schools, have the courage of your convictions, and prove it. Put your money where your mouth is. Instead of strangling parent’s freedom of choice, prove to us that you could do better.

How? Here’s a suggestion. Use your multi-millions of dollars in union dues to buy the government schools and run them as private schools, the way former Soviet Union employees bought the factories they worked in. Let us privatize the government (public) schools. Let the teacher unions buy every public school in the country. Instead of being government employees, teachers will then be shareholders in school companies they will own, like Microsoft shareholder-employees who became millionaires from their stock options.

When you, the unions and teachers, buy the schools, you will then compete with every other private school in the free-market. There will be no more compulsory-attendance laws that force parents to give you their children. There will be no more compulsory school taxes that pay your salaries.

You will compete on a level playing-field, like every other private business has to compete. You will have to prove to parents, your new customers, that you deserve to get their business and educate their children. You will have to be better than your competitors. If you teach well, you will succeed. You may even make a fortune in profits from your private schools, and congratulations if you do. If you don’t teach well, you will go out of business, as you should. Parent-consumers will decide your fate.

That being said, I predict that most of you would do great. I believe that once your unions bought the schools, your attitude and your lives would change remarkably. You would soon discover that your school’s success depended on your hard work, competence, and innovation. Fierce competition in the free market would force you to work smarter and harder and become great educators.

I believe that public-school teachers have not even begun to live up to their highest potential. All you need is to understand that the free market, rather than being your imagined worst enemy, can be your best friend.

So here’s the challenge—if you love to teach, if you think you are good educators, if you care about giving quality education to our children, prove it in the real world. Put your money where your mouth is. Pit your best against the best the free market has to offer.

Teachers, you especially will benefit from a totally free-market education system. There will be so many new schools opened, so much fierce competition for competent, innovative teachers, that teacher salaries will skyrocket.

K-12 education today is a $500 billion market, because most parents consider education as their first priority for their children. There is a huge, pent-up demand for your skills, creativity, and dedication. As a result, your incomes will rise dramatically. Your status as teachers will rise with parents as they see the new vigor and quality you bring to your profession. You will be respected and in great demand. By the way, did you know that the best private teachers in Japan are so in demand that they can earn as much as star Japanese baseball players?

So here’s the challenge I offer you. Live up to the best within you in a free-market education system, or let the best within you shrivel up in a government-run public school.

To mayors in cities across America, I extend this challenge to you. Stop wasting our children’s time and billions of our tax dollars on futile programs to “improve” the government schools. Politicians have been trying to “improve” these schools for the last fifty years, and the schools have only gotten worse. The public-school system is beyond repair because government is not the solution, it is the problem.

Instead, push to privatize the public schools in your cities. Push to get government out of the education business, once and for all. Challenge teachers to live up to their highest potential. Challenge them to consider the life-giving breath of a free-market education system. They will eventually thank you for it.

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“Public educators, like Soviet farmers, lack any incentive to produce results, innovate, to be efficient, to make the kinds of difficult changes that private firms operating in a competitive market must make to survive.” — Carolyn Lochhead

Here’s another argument that public-school bureaucrats use to “justify” their monopoly control over our children’s minds and lives. They claim that we cannot trust the free-market to educate our children because too many free-market (private) schools are greedy for profits, cheat parents and students, take their money, make wild promises, or go out of business.

Look at the trade-school scandals a few years ago, they say. Phony trade schools cheated students with bad teaching and empty promises. This is typical of the free market, they say.

No, it is not typical — rather, the opposite.

The few bad apples in any field in the free market are just that — the exceptions. The free market has a harsh task master called competition. Fierce competition in an education free market acts the same way it does for any product we buy, whether cars, food, or computers. Fierce competition forces all competitors to keep improving their product’s quality, lowering the cost, and giving better service to their customers, or risk going out of business.

To succeed, a free-market school owner must prove that his school is better than his competitors. All free-market (private) schools have to prove their excellence to skeptical parents — their customers. If a school does not live up to its claims, parents are merciless. Like switching channels on TV, parents can and do switch to a better school, for they love their children and want their money’s worth.

Yes, there are always a few rotten apples in any field, but competition forces the vast majority of apples in the barrel to be healthy. Parents are not stupid or fools. They would quickly see if Johnny reads better or worse. It does not take four years of meaningless education courses in a so-called teacher college to figure that out. Like a rising tide, fierce competition would force all educational boats to rise. Computers get faster, cheaper, and more powerful every year. Similarly, in a free-market education system, educational quality and innovation would explode, while competition would drive down the cost of tuition.

In a fiercely-competitive education free-market, your child would quickly learn the basics in safe, competent, innovative schools, rather than wasting twelve years in violent, drug-infested, chronically-incompetent government schools.

Also, what hypocrisy for the rotten orchard of government schools to point their finger at a few bad apples in the “private” sector. For in these monopoly government schools, the situation is completely reversed. The whole system, the whole government-controlled barrel is rotten, and the education for our kids is abysmal at worst or third rate at best. In a free-market school system, the bad schools would be the exception. In a government-controlled school system, the good schools are the exception.

You see, government (public) schools are a never-ending education disaster because they have absolutely NO accountability to parents. The schools’ teachers, principals, and administrators are civil-service government workers who are paid by their local State or city government, not directly by parents (as is the case with private-school owners). Yes, there are some good, dedicated teachers in the public schools, but the system breeds mediocrity on a massive scale, and it is the system that parents have to put up with.

Year after year, compulsory taxes prop up these schools, no matter how bad they are. Compulsory school taxes also pay teachers, principals, and administrators’ salaries, no matter how bad or mediocre these tenured government employees are.

So, no matter how bad these schools are, or how miserable the education they give our kids, parents are impotent to make changes in the system. That is also because every state has compulsory attendance laws that force parents to bring their children to these government schools (if they cannot afford a private school), whether they like it or not. In effect, these schools are government-enforced education prisons, both for parents and their children.

The difference between government and free-market schools is this — when government schools are rotten, when they dumb-down our kids with nonsense education theories that fail, 45 million children can suffer for twelve years, without parents having any recourse. If and when an entrepreneur-owned free-market school is bad, only a handful of children suffer for a few months while parents shop for a better school — with parents having full recourse and freedom of choice.

Public-school apologists criticizing private-schools for allegedly not being accountable to parents is a sick joke, but a joke that is tragic for our children. To education bureaucrats who point to alleged bad apples in the “private” education sector, we can only say — “Doctor, heal thyself.”

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However, many studies show that smaller class size does not guarantee that children get a better education. The pupil-to-teacher ratio in public schools in the mid-1960s was about 24 to 1. This ratio dropped to about 17 to 1 by the early 1990s, which means the average class size fell by 28 percent. Yet, during the same time period, SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) test scores fell from 954 to 896, a decline of 58 points or 6 percent. In other words, student academic achievement (as measured by SAT scores) dropped at the same time that class sizes got smaller.

Eric Hanushek, a University of Rochester economist, examined 277 published studies on the effects of teacher-pupil ratios and class-size averages on student achievement. He found that only 15 percent of these studies showed a positive improvement in achievement with smaller class size, 72 percent found no statistically significant effect, and 13 percent found a negative effect on achievement.

It seems to go against common sense that student academic achievement could drop with smaller class sizes. One reason this happens in public schools is that when class sizes drop, schools have to create more classes to cover all the students in the school. Schools then have to hire more teachers for the increased number of classes. However, public schools across the country are already having trouble finding qualified teachers to fill their classrooms. As a result, when reduced class sizes increase the need for more teachers, schools then often have to hire less-qualified teachers.

Teacher Quality and Teaching Methods Are Far More Important

As we might expect, teacher quality is far more important than class size in determining how children do in school. William Sanders at the University of Tennessee studied this issue. He found that teacher quality is almost twenty times more important than class size in determining students’ academic achievement in class. As a result, reducing class sizes can lead to the contrary effect of hurting students’ education, rather than helping.

Similarly, a study on class size by policy analyst Jennifer Buckingham of the Sydney-based Center for Independent Studies found no reliable evidence that students in smaller classes do better academically or that teachers spend significantly more time with them in these classes. Buckingham concluded that a 20 percent class-size reduction cost the Australian government an extra $1,150 per student, yet added only an additional two minutes of instruction per day for each child.

Reducing class sizes can’t solve the underlying problems with public schools. No matter how small classes become, nothing will help if the teachers are ill-trained or their teaching methods are useless or destructive. For example, if teachers use whole-language or balanced reading instruction, they can cripple students’ ability to read no matter how small the classes are. Even if classrooms had one teacher for every student, that child’s ability to read could still be crippled if the teacher used these reading-instruction methods. In fact, smaller class sizes could give the teacher more time to hurt (not intentionally) each student’s reading ability.

Here’s an analogy on this issue of class size vs. teaching methods: Suppose a horseback-riding instructor was teaching one little girl to ride. This instructor’s teaching method was to tell the bewildered girl to sit backwards on the horse, facing the horse’s rump, and control the horse by holding its tail. Does it matter that the student-teacher ratio in this horseback-riding class is one-to-one if the instructor is an idiot or uses bad teaching methods?

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