This is exactly what needs to happen: people responding, as they do and overwhelmingly will, to what they perceive to be the higher authority and the best interests of their children. Given that the law shackles them to whatever the government deems to define as education, at least they can finally abandon the stinking ship of government schools.
The best model is private education, privately funded. To promote attendance at quality private institutiions, private donors can offer scholarships coupled with either a universal tax credit or tax deduction to the scholarship contributor. This provides the correct incentives on both the giving and the receiving sides, and not incidentally, on the services delivery side.
As I have long maintained and argued numerous times, the end of compulsory attendance laws would be a real solutiion?superior to either a futile hope that the government school culprits, including the train wreck of education schools, will reform themselves such that children are educated. Who cares if they are ‘schooled’ in the government education sense?
Note also that the end of compulsory schooling is not necessarily the end of public schools (tax funded, or funded via some hybrid method). Parents could have their children continue to attend and pay the tax fee associated with that attendance. BUT?if people are free to simply stop showing up, before very long there will have to be be an implosion and collapse of bad schools, or provision of a real education, in accord with the interests of the education clientele (these would be the students and parents, to be clear, not the teachers and administrators).
Those who fade out of public schools will coalesce around alternatives?that would be the reason for exit, and is entirely likley to be guided by self-interest. I cannot but believe in addition that some tax reform/relief would necessarily follow. Citizens will simply not tolerate en masse paying for a system they do not use, unless a radical, incredible metamorphosis of public schools takes place. In a public choice world, some people will still want to get elected, meaning taxes will have to drop.
Is the transition going to be rough? Yup. Public schools should be viewed as a resource malinvestment?propped up by the incorrect signals of continued flow of tax dollar payments exacted by force?like to the analysis Hayek offers of the ‘boom’ phase of the business cycle. The retreat from these malinvested resources (no, not ‘education’ in general, just most government education specifically) is going to be painful, particulalrly to some, but not as damaging as continuing. It is entirely possible that good public schools will survive, on what becomes essentially voluntary payments, while taxpayers demand relief from the burden of funding the schools they have abandoned.
Public schools don’t need reform. The practical details of marginal change are irrelevant. Public schools are standing in the way of education. At this intolerable point, education in the U.S. requires nothing short of revolution.
