SCHOOL CHOICE: TO BE OR NOT TO BE
THE SIMPLE PLAN TO SAVE WESTERN CIVILIZATION AND THE HUMAN SPECIES
With so many important issues facing humanity today, the battle for school choice doesn't necessarily appear to require top priority among human affairs, but once you stop and give it a modicum of thought, you will agree that the entire fate of humanity rests on an industry that has dangerously degenerated into a system of indoctrination, captured by fanatic Marxists whose salaries you pay for with your tax dollars so they can brainwash your children and make them believe absurdities.
It is a problem. It is an existential problem. Politics is downstream from culture, we know that. But where does culture come from? Hollywood, you may say, sure, but that's just one source, and a shrinking one at that. The streets used to be a major source of culture, but today's kids have left the streets and retreated into their bedrooms, shut the door behind them, and hooked their brains to the Big Tech platforms that have become masters at shaping and rewiring young neural networks. Mothers used to also be one source of culture, but that all went away in the early 70s when mom had to get a job. So today we have Hollywood, TikTok, and… the Classroom.
Hollywood and TikTok are worthy battles, don't get me wrong, but the power that teachers project over your offspring is little understood and much underestimated. It's a real face-to-face interaction, IRL, in a room behind closed doors, away from the scrutiny of any other adult, five days a week, and more than half of their waking hours. This massive injection of culture, philosophy, and ideology, is done to an entire generation all at once, and the children are kept together to echo to each other these ideas and reinforce these learned concepts and behaviors. Today’s children have almost zero interaction with adults other than their teachers: the parents are at work, and when they get home they get overwhelmed by chores, so interactions with their own children are limited.
So yes, school is the most significant source of culture in today's social reality.
It follows that we should focus on fixing the issues that affect schools, that affect our children.
And what are those issues?
KIDS ARE NOT LEARNING
Kids are not learning to read, write, and do math. These are skills that they will need in order to survive during their adult life.
KIDS ARE SUFFERING
Kids are suffering from anxiety, depression, and other mental disorders which have increased dramatically the rate at which they kill themselves: suicide is the leading cause of death among children today. How sad is that?
KIDS ARE BEING TAUGHT TO HATE
Kids are being taught to hate themselves and others based on the color of their skin. Yes, schools are manufacturing racism. They call it anti-racism, which is their word for reverse racism. Just when Americans had reached a point of social maturity where color blindness was the norm, Marxists started to successfully manufacture racism for their required "class struggle": since the historic class struggle between labor and employers had failed, a new type of collective identity needed to be exploited to re-ignite the conflict, so the focus shifted from the no-longer-oppressed laborers to the imaginarily-oppressed minorities such as non-whites and sexual deviants.
What is the solution?
In a free market, when you are not happy with the services a company is providing, you look around for a different company that is providing better quality services or products, and you move your business there.
But there is no free market for education.
So the solution is to create one.
To create a free market for schools we need to do three things:
REMOVE GOVERNMENT BARRIERS
TAKE BACK OUR TAX DOLLARS
VOTE WITH OUR WALLETS
By "removing government barriers" I mean we have to eliminate regulations that restrict the private sector from producing private schools. This means removing accreditation requirements and other hoops that the government imposes on those who are trying to start a school, whether they are a group of parents or a profit-seeking corporation.
By "taking back our tax dollars" I mean taking all of the money being funneled into government schools and dividing it among the student's parents. If the parents want to keep their kids in the government school, then they give that money to that school, but if they want to move their kids to a different school, their share of the money follows their kids, whether they go to a different government school, or a private school. No strings attached should come with that tuition money. The only requirement schools should have is to be able to attract students. That's all. And that’s a requirement that doesn’t need to be imposed by government, obviously. It is imposed by the market, aka the parents.
How much money should parents receive?
Exact formula:
Each government school shall make their annual budgets public. The entirety of the budget will be divided by the number of students enrolled in that given year. That amount shall be subtracted from the budget for every student that leaves the school. That same amount shall be mailed to the parents of that student. No new money shall enter the system. No government schools shall receive a penny more than their per-student allocation times the number of currently enrolled students.
By "voting with our wallets" I mean leveraging the "invisible hand" of competition, the natural selection magic of free markets, where quality and efficiency rule, undisturbed by the corrupt and unaccountable decisions of unelected bureaucrats of dubious merit.
OBJECTIONS:
"But private schools do not allow parental input"
They don't currently. But this is because there is very little competition out there, due to the overwhelming monopoly exerted by government schools. The entire industry will drastically change once parents are empowered and tasked with the selection, and at the same time barriers for new schools are completely eliminated.
"But school choice will increase private school tuitions like it did for colleges"
When the federal government began providing funding and loan guarantees for student loans, it injected new money into the industry, money that wasn't there before.
In contrast, school choice is not meant to inject new money, but instead move the money currently being injected into government schools into the private sector via parental discretion. This has to be done in conjunction with a comprehensive removal of regulations, lifting barriers to new schools. Accreditation requirements should be completely eliminated. A free market will be fertile soil for the rapid growth of private education, which will become exactly as large as required to absorb the exodus of students leaving government schools. With no barriers for new schools to form and compete, tuitions will decrease to match the amount received by the parents. Of course there will always be more expensive schools for those rich parents who want their kids to attend "exclusive" schools. But every parent will be able to not only send their kids to school but also shop around and pick the school they deem best suited for the important task of preparing their offspring for a successful and happy life.
"But without accreditation requirements the quality of schools will be poor"
No, it will not. That's not how the free market works. Parents are not stupid. Employers are not stupid. We live in the age of information at our fingertips. Everybody will know which schools are good and which ones are bad, and the bad ones will succumb quickly. Remember: there will be nobody forcing parents to keep their kids in any particular school. Parents can immediately remove their kids and enroll them in another school down the street, where the tuition will follow.
"But a lot of the same teachers will move too, and keep doing the same thing in the private schools"
We have Marxists & Degenerates teaching our children because government schools have done away with accountability and transparency. Parents are seen as a nuisance.
Private schools see parents as the hand that feeds them, and will cator to their wishes. If the parents want their kids to be educated by Marxists & Degenerates, then that is exactly what will happen in that particular school. The diversity and variation among schools will increase. There will also be religious schools that teach children absurdities at the other end of the spectrum, and there will be schools that teach your children exactly what you would teach them. That's how the free market works.
THE LONG TERM:
Ideally, the trajectory of school funding should not go from the taxpayers to the government and then back to the taxpayers who have school-aged children. The long term goal should be to reduce the taxes collected and the subsidies paid to parents at the same time. This is the most difficult part of the entire plan. Especially in view of the collapsing birth rates. Maybe we should just bite the bullet and put a parenthesis around school vouchers for now. There are a million other subsidies we can eliminate first, in all areas of the economy.