I’ve long advocated that we begin a phased approach to completely shutting down the public education system. John Stossel, in a recent column on Townhall.com, seems to agree that some drastic changes need to be made. He asks, “why do we entrust something as important as our children’s education to a government monopoly?” And suggests: “Instead of pouring more money into the failed government monopoly, let’s free parents to control their own education money. Competition is a lot smarter than bureaucrats.”

According to Stossel, the late Albert Shanker, once president of the American Federation of Teachers, said, “It’s time to admit that the public education system operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybody’s role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It’s no surprise that our school system doesn’t improve. It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy.”

There should be no doubt in most people’s minds that public education is failing to properly educate its students. We’ve all heard about the lack of discipline, the lack of parent involvement and the lack of competent teachers, but there are other concerns that are important to parents (at least to those involved). When governments run schools they can’t resist the temptation to indoctrinate instead of educate. Our schools today seem to be doing more and more indoctrinating that conflicts with the values of parents and communities. And there is the religion thing. Public schools have to strive to be religion neutral, and sometimes appear to be anti-religion. In a private education system parents would be able to enroll their children in a school that is compatible with their beliefs and values.

Many people seem to want to keep trying to fix public education by feeding it more money. I say that it is not fixable. What we need to do is shut it down and turn entirely to private education. Yes, that would be a rather drastic course of action that could produce chaos if not done carefully. I believe that we can minimize the chaos by implementing a phased approach:

1. Eliminate the US Department of Education and terminate all federal government involvement in education — no standards, no anything. (The DoE has only existed since 1979. Jimmy Carter considers it one of his great achievements. That should be argument enough to abandon it.) Return all the money that the fed now spends on education to the states. Phase this out after a few years.

2. Allocate all state education funds, including the returned federal money, to vouchers. Give the vouchers directly to parents of students with the lone stipulation that the money be spent on education. Phase this out after a few years. Terminate state government involvement in education — no standards, no anything.

3. Continue the operation of local school districts for a few years, gradually phasing out their dependence on local tax receipts and phasing in their dependence on voucher money from parents. Put the school properties up for sale to private enterprises during this process. (If a school is privatized early in the process, the local school district may have to subsidize the private school for a couple of years.) Encourage the establishment of completely new schools in the local districts to compete with the privatized public schools. When two or more schools of the same level, say two middle schools, exist in the same community, ensure that they are sold to different private enterprises to ensure competition.

4. Gradually eliminate the taxes being collected to support the school district. Abolish the local school districts. Terminate all local government involvement in education — no standards, no anything.

5. Encourage the establishment of privately funded foundations to provide scholarships for children whose parents can’t afford to pay the tuition. Solicit generous individuals who would be willing to sponsor a child through school, or would be willing to contribute fractional support (their tax bill should be lower by now).

6. Eventually eliminate the vouchers and the taxes and rely completely on tuition payments, either directly from parents or from scholarships. Rely on competition in the marketplace to keep the standards high and the tuition affordable.

This is meant to be a top-level summary of an approach to privatizing the public school system. Obviously there are a lot of details that would have to be filled in. I believe that it is doable and that it will produce a better education system than the one we have now. Some will argue that those children whose parents don’t encourage them and don’t actively supervise their education will not be well served in this system. I say perhaps not, but they should be better served than by the system we have now.