There is an ancient saying “Match your strength to their weakness and you shall be assured of victory.” What is our American society good at? What is our biggest strength? First what it isn’t. It isn’t diversity, inclusion, compassion, nationalism, patriotism or anything else that you might hear from either a right-wing ideologue or a left-wing aged hippie ___. The strength of America is commerce. The business of America is business. What is the biggest weakness of America? Above all others including Chinese missiles pointed at us (Thanks Bill Clinton, I hope you enjoyed that smoothie) the lack of education provided for the next generation of Americans. Therefore the solution is obvious. Match our strength to our weakness and put business in schools. You would not be surprised at all to find a course in a school on women’s rights. You would not be surprised to find your child came home from school after a day of civil rights and diversity indoctrination. I bet you would be shocked to find that your child spent the day learning about free enterprise though. Children should be taught at an early age how businesses work. However, teaching kids about business is not what I was speaking about at all. What we should do to restore government paid for education to something worthwhile is hand over the entire process to private business as much as possible. In Fulton county Georgia over $11,000 is spent per child per year. That ponderous sum is near the highest amount that any school system spends yet they are near the worst in performance so it does not follow that more money makes better education. What I propose are the following changes. Schools already test the kids several times each year with both state and federal batteries. I propose taking 75% of the money that would normally be spent on educating a child in a government school and giving that as a voucher to the parents to take to the school of their choice be it another government school or a private one. The very same tests that the students take now would be used to measure the success of the private schools. With the profit motive assigned to the success of the children, private enterprise will find the proper method to teach the children. There is not enough space in private schools to close down the government schools and simply move the students over to the private ones now. But with the money being available there will spring forth new private schools as the invisible hand of free enterprise moves in to fill the need of education and to claim the economic profit. Ask yourself this question: “Could I take 10 kids and teach them for 180 days a year for $100,000 and do a better job than the public schools are doing now?”

What about the children left behind in the public schools? As the parents who care take their kids out of the failing schools the only kids left behind will be the special needs kids or kids from families that are content to sit on their asses and watch Oprah while the world goes by. The public schools will go from bad to worse as the stabilizing influence of the good kids is removed from the at risk children.

All that is very true but you must consider that under my proposal, when a child is removed from government schools only 75% of the money goes with the child. The other 25% is left so that the schools can offer higher teacher salaries and therefore attract better teacher or hire more teachers and facilitators and therefore greatly reduce the student to teacher ratio. This reduced ratio will provide the additional attention that the at risk kids needed in the first place.

In conclusion, children leaving the shackles of government indoctrination centers labeled schools will find better opportunities in the private sector. Children left in the care of the government will have smaller classes and better teachers. So everyone wins.