Donald Boudreaux has a brilliant column today that shows just how wrong-headed is our approach to education:
Suppose that groceries were supplied in the same way as K-12 education. Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties. Nearly half of those tax revenues would then be spent by government officials to build and operate supermarkets. Each family would be assigned to a particular supermarket according to its home address. And each family would get its weekly allotment of groceries—”for free”—from its neighborhood public supermarket.
No family would be permitted to get groceries from a public supermarket outside of its district. Fortunately, though, thanks to a Supreme Court decision, families would be free to shop at private supermarkets that charge directly for the groceries they offer. Private-supermarket families, however, would receive no reductions in their property taxes.
Every first-time visitor to America from the undeveloped world, or from former communist countries, for that matter, marvels at our supermarkets. Free enterprise and a free market built that system. Anyone who spent any time in the old Soviet Union and saw what passed for supermarkets there would easily understand the comparison with monopolistic, state-run public schools.
With the news that nearly half of the population of the Democratically controlled city of Detroit is functionally illiterate, any reasonable person would think that maybe new approaches are called for. But not the teacher unions and the Democratic officeholders who depend on their contributions in an unholy alliance that only harms children.
