Free Public Education?
by Renny Hartmann

Instead of collecting millions in real estate taxes from local property owners to support thousands of public school districts, citizens should be able to retain their “contribution” to public education and elect to send their children to schools of their own choosing by paying direct tuition.

This proposal is not as radical as it sounds. Most mandatory public school laws are only about a century old. New Jersey’s law dates from 1874 and requires all young persons from six to sixteen to attend. California (a much younger state) passed its mandatory attendance in 1913. Therefore, the imperative for states to provide free public education is not ancient and immutable. The US Constitution itself says nothing about education. (Federal legislation regarding schools and colleges comes either through the executive for defense or interstate commerce clause.)

Prior to mandatory attendance, children still attended schools, but they were provided privately in homes or through religious organizations or community involvement. Costs were borne directly by those involved.

The original compulsory system was devised when America was 90 percent rural and most school calendars are still geared toward a farm economy where young family members were needed during the summer growing season. As the nation has about reversed that statistic, those calendars are mostly archaic.

Early public one-room schools in Dover Township (now Toms River Township), New Jersey, claimed to educate first through ninth graders with enough skills for them to run a household and/or a small business. Their typical curriculum assigned forty vocabulary words a night and forty math problems a night. High school, begun in 1891, followed a very common college preparatory curriculum of grammar and composition, science, math, foreign language, and history. The arts were after-school programs.

My former high school students would’ve croaked at forty anything per night and actually now current graduates take about two years of community college education to reach what my 1950s high school provided for me.

Curricula are constantly dumbed down to accommodate larger and larger populations of more and more diverse and often disinterested student populations.

Costs seem uncontainable for whatever is offered. Many school systems today run budgets that could’ve supported some cities a few years ago.

I would take that money and leave it in the hands of the consumers of education. Cities like Washington, DC, cost about $16,000 per student and according to the NAEP, graduate its high school student with mostly a fourth grade reading level. The average educational cost today nationally is nearly $9,000 per student.

Leaving the tax monies in the hands of the purchasers of education would eliminate some of the inequities of real estate taxes, end the gerry-rigged revenue sharing of state and federal funding. Considering that the Tenth Amendment leaves anything not enumerated in the Constitution to the states, federal funding and federal mandates could be discontinued. The federal government in 2006 spent nearly $54.4 billion on education and yet it only supplies about 10 cents on the dollar to any local school budget. States supply about twice that. Those costly exchanges of collecting and rearranging taxes would disappear.

1) The very process of not assessing and collecting and dispersing taxes would save millions by itself. The total US costs of education (not counting unwanted pregnancies, illegal drugs, school crime, all the social ancillaries) is c. $500 billion, half a trillion nation-wide.

2) Parents and students who made their own choice of a school would be more invested in supporting its programs and activities

3) If choices were within township or city limits, current facilities should be ample enough for any current shifting of student populations

4) Calculations would have to be made to account for renters and what their landlords have paid in real estate taxes that go toward school budgets. My liberal friends always wail about my idea here that “the poor” would be left out. I suspect ways of educating the poor would actually improve.

5) Boards of education could be changed to boards of trustees that like businesses oversee general implementation of good economic practices, legal observance, and, in this case, educational standards

6) Minorities could immediately escape the plantations that particularly urban schools have provided, for those that did not function to education-buyers’ community standards would simply cease to exist; no mayor’s budget or governor’s grant would continue to prop them up when they fail the purview of boards of trustees above

7) The sometimes truly pernicious effect of the teachers unions would be erased by those associations’ initial loss of power. My association, the National Education Association, and all my local permutations, of which I am still a member, has backed every untested, radical, often useless social idea to come down the pike for forty years. In 1972, the president of the NEA proclaimed it the method of future social change and what a change it has been: the highest SATs were 1972, unwed teen pregnancies were first recorded by the CDC in 1972, and the sex, drug, crime, and denigration of teaching actual academic skills has been on the skids right into the present. “School reform” itself dates to 1983.

I do not oppose unions and would certainly believe that teachers and other educational staff might form new organizations, but they would no longer hold classrooms hostage, dominate elected public officials, nor offer powerful voter pressure to support political agendas

8) Political mandates to teach no smoking, pro-condom use, no trans fats, pro-touchy feely socialism, no drugs, pro-pacifism, and every other leftist idea would only be included in curricula if tuition payers wanted to buy them

9) All the nitwit legal spider’s web of what teachers can and cannot say, can and cannot teach (consider the importance of religion in history and literature), all the “politically incorrect” thoughts and actions that are now censored (true censorship because it comes from a government institution) would no longer be forbidden

10) Private schools are run not much differently than my list above

Of course, schools will still have bureaucracies (there’s always hierarchy), parent disputes might sometimes erupt around a school like maniac parent spectators at Little League games, but there would still be more direct and personal responsibility considering the costs involved. Not that many people would really try to torpedo an institution they have actually paid to create and receive rewards from.