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COMMENTARY

Begging for bucks

POSTED BY JUDSON PHILLIPS | JANUARY 30, 2012

I was driving back from my children's school last week when a commercial came on. It was a commercial for a charity to help teachers provide supplies for their students. The commercial noted that many teachers pay for supplies for their students out of their own pockets.

It is true that many teachers do reach into their own pockets to help pay for supplies for their classes, but the effort to raise money for them misses the bigger problem.

A well-educated population is what makes our nation a first world country. The problem with public education is we are getting a really bad product. Any time you have the government involved with any endeavor, you have a very inefficient product. The government never has an incentive to be efficient. If they need more money, all they need to demand more tax dollars.

If we want to have the best education in the world, we need to privatize it. We need to set up a free market for education. The government does have an interest in educating children so the next generation is able to maintain and even grow the nation.

What we do not have to have is a public school monopoly. What we should do instead is create an educational voucher system. Each child should receive a voucher they can use at any accredited school their parents want them to go to. Schools will have to compete for their business.

Contrary to what liberals and the teachers' unions say, parents actually care about their kids' education. I have never met a parent who has said, I want to send my kid to a really bad school. Just the contrary, when parents of school age children move, the first question they ask is, how are the schools in the area they are moving to. If the schools are bad, they won't move there.

With vouchers and privatized schools, bad schools will be forced out of business. Poor students will not be condemned to really bad schools. They will be able to use their vouchers to go to a really good school. The only losers here are the teachers' union and those who demand a government monopoly of education.

That sounds like a plan to me.

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