Here are ten reasons why parents should keep their kids in public schools:

1 – Public schools can cripple your child’s ability to read. The schools use a special reading-instruction method to do this called whole-language (or balanced literacy). But that’s a good thing. Why do kids need to read anyhow? It only gives them ambitions to go to college. Parents have to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for college tuition these days, so if your child can’t read, you end up saving a lot of money.

2 – Public schools can wreck your child’s ability to do math, with “fuzzy” math curriculums. But that’s a good thing. That way, your child will not strive to be a scientist or engineer and make a lot of money. Having a lot of money causes stress, and you don’t want your kids to be stressed in life, do you? Also, if your child grows up to be a supermarket check-out clerk, you don’t have to worry. The machine scans in all the prices and will tell your child how much change to give back to the customer.

3 – Public schools violate your God-given parental rights to choose who teaches your child and what he is taught. But hell, aren’t we swamped today with too many choices anyhow? It’s only reasonable to let education “experts” who have been trained in our finest “teacher” colleges tell us how to educate our children. After all, haven’t these education “experts” done a superb job educating our children up to now?

4 – Public schools give your child a “well-rounded” education. Your child’s day is filled with shocking sex-education classes, multiculturalism classes that spit on American values, save-the-earth environmental propaganda classes, drug-education classes that give your child all the dope about these drugs so he can choose wisely, and violence- prevention classes for those kids who get violent from being bored to death in public-school classrooms.

5 – Public schools give your children great socialization. Where else can your kids smoke a joint in the bathroom, meet roaming drug dealers in the schoolyards, be raped or assaulted by violent bullies on the prowl for victims, and join a racial clique that promotes harmony among the students? That’s a lot better than the “bad” socialization of homeschooling that “isolates” kids from this wonderful interaction with their peers.

6 – Public schools give your kids a great sex education. As parents, we don’t want to talk to our kids about embarrassing sex matters anyhow, so this takes us off the hook. Your child’s sex-education classes will teach her why homosexuality is a “normal” lifestyle and why sexual promiscuity is OK, as long as you remember to “protect” yourself. If your teenage daughter then decides to experiment and gets pregnant, that’s great also, because the welfare office will give your daughter monthly welfare checks, food stamps, rent subsidies, and free health care. What more can you ask for?

7 – Public schools will give your child free drugs. Yes, Ritalin is now the drug of choice for millions of school children. But isn’t that a good thing? Ritalin will help your son stop “fidgeting” and “pay attention” in class, even though he is bored to death. Ritalin also helps the teacher maintain discipline in the classroom. After all, if your son disrupts the class by “acting out,” the other kids can’t learn anything, right? So Ritalin is a wonderful way to mentally strap-down your child to his desk.

8 – Your child can “participate” in your school’s Teen-Screen program. These are “mental-health” screening programs that help determine if your teenager is mentally deranged. A health “expert” in your public school will ask your child questions such as, “have you been unhappy lately,” or “do you get along with your brothers and sisters?” From your bewildered child’s answers to these illuminating questions, the health “expert” will give his opinion as to whether your child might have a mental “disease.” He might then “recommend” that you take your child to a psychiatrist who might start your child on a cocktail of mind-altering drugs. But hell, having your child labeled with a mental “disease” isn’t that bad, is it? Your child will lose the confidence to go to college, and we’re back to advantage number one, where you’ll save a lot of money on college tuition.

9 — Your child can stay in school for twelve years. Well, maybe he won’t know how to read a bus schedule or his own diploma after twelve years, but twelve years go by fast, don’t they? Why teach your child to read at home with phonics so he becomes a great reader in only two years? My God, what will your child then do with all his free time once he can easily read War and Peace? He might actually come to love learning.

10 – Finally, public schools are cheap day-care centers. We all work hard these days because income, real estate, social security, and dozens of other taxes loot half our paychecks, and big-government-created inflation sharply increases the cost of everything we buy. So since we can’t save a penny, we can’t afford private day-care. That’s why we need public schools to house our kids while we make a living to pay the bills.

Parents, there are many other reasons NOT to keep your child in public school, but I hope you get the point by now.

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“We” have to give the schools more money. “We” have to pay the teachers more. “We” have to get parents more involved in their children’s public schools. “We” have to get parents more involved in their children’s homework. “We” have to find a way to close the achievement gap between white children and black or Latino kids. “We” have to demand accountability from our public schools and teachers. “We” have to end the drugs and violence in our public schools. “We” have to improve our teaching methods so our children can read their own diplomas when they graduate high school. “We” have to teach our children environmental propaganda about saving the earth and global warming. “We” have to teach kids to “respect” other people’s lifestyles with classes about homosexuality in their sex-ed classes.

And on and on it goes. Every “we” pressure group is at each other’s throats about what “we” have to do to “improve” the congenitally-incompetent public schools and our children’s education.

Do you notice the one common factor in all these disastrous problems with our children’s education in public schools? Right you are — it’s the “we” part. Americans have been brainwashed into thinking education is a collective “we” enterprise that must be run by governments that “we” elect. Since “we” are all taxpayers, and our taxes pay for the public schools, all of us “we” have the right to input our demands, desires, complaints, and suggestions about how to “fix” the system. Hence the endless bickering, fighting, backstabbing, grab for “public” tax dollars, power plays, and government-induced incompetent education.

What’s the real solution to finally giving our kids a decent education? Get rid of the “we.” Education must be made a private concern of individual parents, NOT a collective “right” of education run by a government-education monopoly called public schools. Let each parent educate their own children in their own way, paying whatever they can afford, in a quality, low-cost, fiercely competitive, private/independent school system. Each parent should be responsible for their own children’s education in this free-market, private-school system, just as each parent is responsible for feeding their children with food they buy from private grocery stores and supermarkets.

The problem with public schools is that they are “public” and run by government. The problem is that these government-run public schools exist in the first place. Government is the PROBLEM, not the solution to our children’s education. Get government out of the education business, and the problem is solved quickly and permanently.

No more “we” taxpayers demanding a say in the collective, government-run education system called public schools. Make it illegal for any local, state, or Federal government to own, operate, or collect taxes for any school system.

Put an end to the ridiculous notion that “we” all have a “right” to an education, so “we” need tax-supported government schools to enforce that “right.” There is no such thing as a “right” to an education. Education doesn’t grow free on apple trees. Schools, books, and teacher salaries all have to be paid for by someone. That’s what tuition is all about in a private school — to pay for these expenses. To claim that your child has a “right” to an education, is to claim that you have the right to steal from your neighbor to pay for your child’s education, through school taxes imposed by your local government.

Ask yourself this. Do you have the right to put a gun to your neighbor’s head and demand money from him to pay for your child’s sneakers or Wheaties cereal? Do you have the right to steal money from your neighbor to pay for ANYTHING your child needs? If you have some moral sense and answered no, then you also don’t have the right to steal from your neighbor for your child’s education either, no matter how much you love your child, because it’s wrong to steal, and two wrongs don’t make a right.

Yet a public “we” school system requires that “we” all steal from each other to pay for our children’s education, courtesy of compulsory school taxes. But what about single people, married couples with no children, parents with children in private schools, homeschooling parents, and older-retired people with no children in school? All these people, your neighbors, have no need for public schools because they have no school-age children in public schools. Why do your neighbors with no school-age children have to pay school taxes so that your children go to public school?  What if they passed a law saying you have to pay taxes for public golf courses, yet you hate golf and would never set foot on a golf course?

Public schools need compulsory taxes to stay alive. These taxes let some parents with school-age children steal money from their neighbors who might not have school-age children. The “we” of the public-school system therefore requires massive collective looting on a grand scale, turning us into a nation of education thieves.

So how do we end this moral nightmare that creates congenitally incompetent government (public) schools? Put an end to the “we.” Get government out of the education business. Turn education over to parents and the life-giving fresh breath of a fiercely competitive free-market education system, where each parent has complete control ONLY over their own child’s education. Then this free-market of education will sharply raise the quality of our children’s education, and sharply lower the cost of this education for average parents. The best of both education worlds without having to pay a single dollar in school taxes. Wouldn’t that be great?

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“Mayor, we’ve got a big problem on our hands,” said Police Chief Bud Anderson to Mike Branden, mayor of Palm City, Florida, a small city of 200,000 old-fashioned Americans, sitting in the middle of the Florida panhandle. It was a beautiful spring day in April.

Bud Anderson was a handsome man, in his thirties, dark brown hair, blue eyes, a wide, easy mouth. He wore a light-blue short-sleeve shirt and jeans. Mayor Mike Branden, also dressed casually, was in his forties, tall, and well-built. He used to be an orange-grower, his family going back generations in Palm City. He had a weather-beaten face, strong mouth, and calloused hands the size of mitts. He had just been elected mayor in November and won the election on his promise to clean up crime in the city.

Over the last five years, the city had become a little Silicon Valley, with computer companies moving in by the droves because there were no corporate taxes in Florida or in Palm City. The city was prospering, and the newly-rich computer millionaires and their employees with stock options were all building big, fancy houses by the river. The money and big houses had attracted the thieves. The city crime rate had been exploding, especially home burglaries and rapes. All the women in the city were scared and up in arms over the crime spree, and wanted something done. Mayor Branden promised to do something about it.

“Bud, tell me what you think the problem is,” Mike Branden said. “Tell me what you think we can do.”

“Well, Mike,” Bud Anderson said, “I think the thieves and rapists have it too easy. They’re smart. They case the mark’s house carefully before they break in. They only break in when they know the wife is home alone. But that’s not the real problem, Mike.”

“The real problem is that the women are defenseless. You may not know this, being so new as Mayor, but about five years ago the previous Mayor passed gun laws that made it illegal to have a gun in the house, and illegal to use one against a burglar. He also made it illegal for anyone to carry a concealed gun outside the house. That’s when our troubles started, Mayor.”

Mike Branden grew up with guns ever since he was a boy. He belonged to the National Rifle Association. He loved skeet shooting, and bought his kids their first rifles when they were eight years old. He taught them how to shoot straight and how to use a gun safely. His wife also owned a rifle and handgun, shared his love for skeet shooting, and was a crack shot. Mayor Mike Branden was not a college graduate, but he had guts, common sense, and imagination. He immediately saw the problem, and the solution.

“Well, I think we’ll change those gun laws, Bud. Thieves and rapists have it too easy around here. They know they can rob houses and rape women with no risk.

Let’s put the risk back. Let’s see what happens when they get shot if they break into a house or bother one of our women. I’m sick to death of all the gun laws in this country, so let’s try a little experiment. I’ll convince the City Council to revoke our gun-control laws. Next, I’ll convince them to pass a new law requiring every man and woman in Palm City to own a handgun or shotgun, and know how to use them safely. I want a pistol and shotgun in every home. I want every woman walking around town with a concealed gun in her purse or under her dress. Let’s see what happens when we change the laws. Let’s see what happens when we give the victims a way to defend themselves.

I also want you to put a series of ads in the Palm City Gazette and Daily Press that announces the new laws, so everyone knows that every Palm City resident will soon be armed. I want you to set up gun safety and training courses on the local firing ranges, so we know that every woman in this town will be dead shot.”

Bud Anderson’s eyes lit up with admiration for his new Mayor. He had been wanting to revoke those gun laws for the last five years, but never dreamed of the daring plan the new Mayor now wanted to put into action.

“That’s a damned fantastic idea, Mike. You’re going to make a hell of a Mayor. I think the citizens in this town are going to love you. They’re going to have a great time learning how to use a gun again, especially the women. I know the women will form gun clubs. They’ll probably want to buy designer guns with pretty colors. Hell, I might even buy a pearl-handled 45 myself.”

Mike Branden laughed out loud at his Police Chief’s boyish enthusiasm. He said, “I think the new laws should be in place in about a month, Bud. Let’s meet again in about three months and you can tell me whether we’ve had any success with the plan.” Bud Anderson gave a mock salute to his Mayor, said “yes, sir,” and walked out the door into the Spring sunshine.

THREE MONTHS LATER:

It’s a hot July day in the Mayor’s office, and Police Chief Anderson and Mike Branden are having an enthusiastic conversation.

“Mike, mother-of-god did your plan work! The crime rate has dropped like a rock in Palm City. Burglaries are down 80 percent. Rapes are down 90 percent. I’ve never seen anything like it. It all started about two months ago, Mike. There was a burglary gang that had been hitting most of the houses. Well, about ten of them have been shot, three killed in the last two months. As soon as the burglar alarm goes off, the women took their guns from their purses and started shooting. I’ve interrogated some of the thieves we caught. They’re pretty stupid and don’t read much, so they weren’t aware of the new gun laws. They thought we were still operating under the old laws. You should have seen the shock on their faces. They were mad as hell. They never expected pretty young housewives to be spraying them with semi-automatic fire. They were mad as hell at you.”

“Then there were the rapists who didn’t know about the new gun laws either, the ones who prayed on women at night in the shopping-mall parking lots. Did they get the shock of their lives! About twenty of them have been shot already, five killed. They just came up to the women, brazen like, thinking they could get away with anything like they used to. Then the girls suddenly pulled out their pretty pistols and started firing away. You should hear how the women laughed with glee and pride when they told me their stories. They told me how thankful they were to have their guns. I think all the women in this town love you now, Mike. It’s a good thing you’re already married.”

“I think the bad guys are getting the picture, Mike. Burglars and rapists are getting scarce in Palm City. Matter of fact, I just got a call from Ben Radley, Police Chief at Hampton Bay. They still have the same idiotic gun-control laws we had here. Seems they’ve been getting a sharp rise in house burglaries and rapes there. Looks like our bad guys are moving on to easier ground in Hampton Bay. I sure feel sorry for the people in that town right now. Ben Radley wants to talk to you real bad. He wants to know how you got crime down so fast in Palm City. Who knows, Mike, maybe what you did here will spread all over the country. I hope so.”

“One other thing, Mike. Every teacher and principal in every public school in this town now carries a concealed gun. Every one of the kids know this, and they now feel real safe in the schools. They’re not worrying anymore about one of their deranged teen-age friends suddenly going on a shooting spree, like what happened at Columbine High School. If anything happens, they know they don’t have to wait an hour for the cops to show up. They know the teachers and principal can protect them. Did you know math and reading scores are going up at the schools, too? It’s the damndest thing.”

“Mike, I think you’re going to be Mayor in this town for as long as you like. I hope you stay on forever, because Palm City folks are really grateful to you. At first they were a little skeptical about your plans. But now, after they’ve seen the results, you couldn’t get them to give up their guns anymore. We’re even getting calls from newspapers, magazines, and TV stations all over the country. CNN wants to interview you, did you know that? They called me this morning. You’re becoming a celebrity, by god!”

Mike Branden laughed out loud. “Me, an orange grower, a celebrity? Forget the interviews Bud. How about we go fishing this afternoon after work? It’s getting kind of quiet around here, just the way I like it.”

Bud Anderson, grinning, stuck out his hand to shake Mike’s big, calloused hand, for he now counted Mike Branden as a good friend. That afternoon, they caught a dozen trout at Briar Creek lake. It was a fine afternoon.

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To most of us, driving a car seems effortlessness. Our eyes, hands, and feet work together seamlessly, automatically, without conscious thought. But we first had to learn the basics of driving when we were young. Remember back to your father’s driving lessons? He taught you how to turn the steering wheel, where the gas and brake pedal was, how to stay in your lane, turn signals and stop signs, use of mirrors, keeping to speed limits, looking ahead. All these basics took time and practice to learn. Now, those of us who have been driving for many years, take these basics for granted. We drive “automatically” and with skill.

The same process applies to another skill—reading. Read a book or a newspaper and it seems effortless. Yet such skill comes from constant use, from constant practice of basic skills learned at an early age.

What are these skills? To read, you have to recognize words on a printed page, yet there are millions of them. Enter the wonder of the alphabet and phonics. It is by recognizing letters and their sounds that a child puts letter-sounds together to form words. Since all words are built from only twenty-six letters, the huge task becomes greatly simplified. The child need not memorize the word, only sound it out, read it, and find its meaning in a dictionary.

As in driving a car, reading is difficult at first. But, once learned, the skill becomes automatic, unconscious, effortless, and we read quickly without sounding-out every letter of every word. In the end, with practice, we read effortlessly, and all the knowledge of the world is open to us. Without learning the basic skills, however, reading is not possible.

Enter educrat “experts” who think otherwise. “Don’t adults read without sounding out every letter of every word,” they ask ? “So why teach children phonics? Why put children through the boredom, drudgery, and hard work of phonics and spelling drills? How can reading be “joyful” if literature becomes drills?,” they say. “Why wound children’s self-esteem and self-expression with tests and standards and high expectations?”

“If we have children memorize whole words instead of drilling on the alphabet and letter sounds, all this pain is gone,” they chime. “Do not teach them to sound out M-O-T-H-E-R. Have them memorize what the whole word looks like—teach them word-pictures, teach them hieroglyphics, so they “recognize” the word in a book. Have the child read “Dick and Jane” learning books that repeat each word a hundred times, so the child comes to “recognize” it. Do this for each word.”

“If the child can’t grasp a new word because he cannot sound it out, teach him “pre-reading” strategies,” they expound. “These “strategies” will help him “guess” what the word is. Have him look at the title of the story. Have the child look at pictures, look for “clues,” look for “patterns” in the story that make sense. Or skip the word and come back to it. Or ask a friend who also cannot read it. Or finally, when all else fails, ask the teacher. Anything,” say the learned educrats, “except actually sounding out and reading the word.”

This, the educrats say, is the “centered,” “self-esteem-enhancing” way to teach reading. Meaning and context—not basics. Group discussions—not letters, sounds, drills, and independence.

This is your whole-language method (now called “balanced literacy” or some other deceptive name). This is the hieroglyphics of Egypt transported to your children’s classroom. This is our educrats’ pet “reading” theory, foisted on 45 million public-school children-victims across the country.

The results were inevitable—half the nation’s high-school grads cannot read a bus schedule. Businesses lose $40 billion a year for remedial reading classes for new employees fresh from high school. Thirty percent of Americans functionally illiterate. The child who is taught phonics is able to read thousands of words in a few semesters. The “whole-word” child-victim is able to “recognize” only a few hundred words. Thus we have the crash in reading skills, the dumbing-down of our kids, the millions of frustrated teens who drop out of school, turn to crime, and end up in prison because they can’t get a decent job.

Yet, in the face of such failure, such disaster for our children, the educrats turn a blind eye and a deaf ear. In the face of reality — massive denial and rationalization.

Buy why? What do they gain? There is always a reason for irrational behavior, and the educrats have many.

Educrats think phonics believers are extremist Christian Rightists or educational simpletons unable to understand the “complexity” of the educrats’ so-called learning theories. Yet, let reality be the judge. The children who learn phonics read far quicker and better than the “whole-word” readers. And the “complexity” educrats proclaim is a self-serving fantasy of their making, designed to ward off competition. Educrats think they are gurus with special skills no parent can possess. Rather, they are education buffoons who don’t know how to teach phonics to your kids any longer, or don’t want to bother.

Educrats claim that phonics and rules will turn kids off to the joy of reading. Just the opposite is true — when a “whole-language” victim-child tries to read the many words he was not taught to “recognize,” he will give up in frustration. His frustration will end his reading and his ‘joy” in reading. The phonics-trained child can read any word and any book, and the joy of reading follows from his skills

This learning of basic skills need not be a struggle. What turns kids off? The insufferable boredom, the mediocrity of the educrats’ teaching methods, unchanged for 50 years.

Children learn the alphabet and letter sounds with delight at home. Sesame Street, “Hooked on Phonics,” the Internet, learning channels on cable TV, creative reading books especially made for kids by learning entrepreneurs can make learning letters and sounds a delight.

Phonics and drills are a drudge in government schools because educrats don’t have the time, skill, desire, or imagination to make them otherwise. Rather than blame themselves or their government-run system for failure, they blame everyone else. They now claim it is the child’s fault (he has attention-deficit disorder!), the parents’ fault (they don’t get “involved!”), or “society’s” fault (racism or “not enough money for the schools!”).

Educrats also say that drills and basics, tests and standards, are “unfair” to kids, cause them stress, and threaten their self-esteem. Just the opposite is true—real self-esteem comes from achievement, not from a teacher’s hot-air, feel-good compliments. Achievement needs tasks, content, ever-increasing complex skills children learn with guided effort. Joy, not stress, is the result of achievement. And what is more important than for children to learn that rewards come from effort and perseverence? Educrats hate phonics and true reading skills because their teacher colleges don’t train them in the phonics method. Teachers who are not taught the phonics method will naturally feel inadequate to teach phonics to children. It is not the teachers’ fault. Rather, the fault lies with educrats, teacher colleges, and educational theorists who have contempt for phonics.

Phonics and drills requires a “teacher-centered” approach in the classroom. This approach requires greater effort and responsibility on teachers and schools to create lesson plans that show real progress in reading skills. The teacher-centered approach requires teachers and educrats to constantly test and evaluate both students and themselves.

The “whole-language” reading method, in contrast, is allegedly “student-centered,” meaning that kids get to sit around in circles and talk about their feelings rather than learn to actually read. With “whole-language” reading, educrats can claim there are no standards, no way to test reading skills and achievement. There are few rigorous tests, low standards, and no failing grades.

“Whole-language” reading therefore achieves the educrats’ ultimate goal — if there are no standards or objectivity, no one can blame them, no one can question them, no one can hold them accountable for their failure to teach our children to read. The educrats don’t want to grade their students’ performance because it allegedly hurts the kids “self-esteem.” I believe this attitude is merely a projection of the educrat’s primal fears—they do not want parents judging their performance and holding them accountable for teaching their kids to read. The educrats don’t want their fragile self-esteem threatened by angry parents who expect public schools to do one simple thing—teach their kids to read.

Government schools are designed to assuage the educrats’ terror at being judged by parents, and being forced to compete in a free-market education system. Government (public) schools’ ultimate purpose is to be a full-employment program for educrats—to give them guaranteed jobs without accountability to parents. It is to placate these fearful educrats that our government schools dumb-down our children and turn them into illiterates with bleak futures.

So what can you, as a concerned parent, do to protect your child? As long as public schools are run by government and their educrats, they will never change. In my book, “Public Schools, Public Menace,” I tell parents about wonderful new education alternatives to public schools, such as accredited, low-cost internet private schools. Parents, I urge you to look into these alternatives, before your children are irreparably harmed by public-school whole-language, anti-phonics, “reading” instruction.

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So the contractor keeps trying new ways to fortify the earth to hold the foundations. He tries steel rods in the earth. He tries a different kind of concrete. But everything he tries doesn’t work because the garbage dump simply won’t support any foundation he tries to pour. Every time the contractor tries something new, the price of the house escalates. His “experiments” push the price to $350,000. Of course you are getting disgusted and think maybe the problem is 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 if you give him another $100,000, then another $100,000, he is sure he’ll be able to come up with a way to lay your foundation and build your house. But you are 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 education garbage dumps called public schools. As the education they’re giving our kids gets progressively worse, the educrats and Boards of Education keep whining in unison that they don’t have enough money to do a good job, the schools are overcrowded, teachers salaries are too “low,” millions are needed to repair the dilapidated schools, and on and on.

“Just give us more money,” the educrats whine. “Look at the condition of our schools. See how overcrowded they are. How do you expect to get good teachers if you don’t pay them more? All we need is more money, more billions. Then we will teach your children better.” It’s the same chant, over and over again. It is one of the favorite excuses spewed out by the educational establishment to rationalize the failure of public schools.

The problem is that our public schools are a government-controlled education garbage dump. No matter how much money we pump into them, they will not improve because the foundations of the system are structurally rotten. They will not improve because a government-run system, by its nature, strangles educational quality and innovation.

Innovation only comes from the fierce competition of a free market. That’s why our cars, food, and computers, keep improving in quality every year. Every manufacturer who competes for your consumer dollar has to constantly improve his products to convince you to buy from him. Every car or computer maker must prove to you that his product is better, safer, or cheaper than his competitors. The only way he can do this, and maintain your loyalty as a customer year after year, is to live up to his promises. Competition constantly drives the free-market to continually improve quality, competence, and innovation in all the products we buy.

Public schools, in contrast, are government-owned and operated as a monopoly. There is little competition. The schools get their students by force, through compulsory attendance laws. They get their funds by force, through compulsory real estate taxes. If the school is incompetent, it does not go out of business. If the tenured teachers are incompetent, it’s almost impossible to fire them.

Most private schools are expensive. Also, parents who struggle to send their kids to private school still have to pay compulsory real estate taxes to “support” public schools. The average family pays almost forty percent of their income in taxes, leaving little extra for private schools. That’s why most parents can’t afford these schools. The high taxes force both parents into the workforce, making it difficult for one parent to stay at home to home-school their children. As a result, government schools may not have a legal monopoly to educate our kids, but they have a de-facto monopoly, and the educrats know this.

That is why the educrats can experiment on our kids like guinea pigs, trying out every wacko educational theory their teacher colleges dream up. One such theory was the disastrous “whole-language” reading instruction method that turned millions of kids into illiterates. That is their idea of “innovation.”

The only problem is that their “innovations” are not tested in the crucible of the free market. Parents are not given the right or ability to accept or reject these “innovations” by public-school commissars. If the educrats’ “innovation” doesn’t work, and parents think the school is incompetent, the school doesn’t go out of business.

To cover their embarrassment at the constant failure of these “innovations,” the educrats then blame everyone but themselves. They blame the kids, the parents, “poverty,” or “society.” Or, they say they need more billions of dollars to try a new variation of the “innovation” that didn’t work for the last ten years. Parents can’t take their kids out of these failed schools because they can’t afford the private schools. The free-market can’t punish these public schools for their incompetence and poor results because these schools are an insulated government monopoly and the teachers are protected by tenure.

If government schools ruin children’s education and futures with their failed policies, why give them more billions of dollars? In fact, giving public schools more money to continue their education crimes against our kids would be criminal. It would be like giving more money to a drug addict so he could buy more cocaine and do more damage to his brain.

What matters is what the schools teach, how they teach, and if they are held accountable for what they teach. In government schools, there is no accountability. It is only government institutions like public schools that have the audacity to ask for more billions of dollars the worse they get. In effect, they profit from their incompetence.

But the educrats cannot do otherwise. If they don’t ask for more money, they can’t use money as an excuse, and are admitting failure. If they admit failure, they are admitting the failure of the entire government-school system. Just as the communists in the former Soviet Union could not admit failure, so public-school educrats cannot admit failure. They must make a constant stream of excuses why our children are being turned into illiterates, and why they waste twelve years of our children’s lives. They must constantly ask for more billions of dollars to “improve” the system, even though the government-controlled system is beyond repair.

Here’s one example of the “value” of giving more money to public schools. In 1984, as a result of a desegregation lawsuit and orders from U.S. District Judge Russell Clark, . . . “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, 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 wildland 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 that in 1984 when Judge Clark took control of the school district in order to achieve “mathematical racial balance.” (Paul Craig Roberts, The Washington Times, Dec., 9, 1999).

This is just one example of many. If a school’s competence and teaching methods are not put to the test of free-market competition, if schools are not punished for incompetence by going out of business, if teachers are not punished for incompetence by being fired, no amount of money in the world will improve the schools. Only the free market will.

The best thing we can do for our kids is to shut down the public-school garbage dumps permanently, once and for all. Let each parent pay for their own child’s education in a low-cost, competent, vibrant, and fiercely competitive free-market education system.

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