Let parents decide education funding

Editor:

As a “budget hawk,” I write to disagree with Etlan resident Robert Legge and the new U.S. Department of Education’s requests to continue to rely on taxes to finance local government schools. What we should do is transform government at every level — especially local education — by returning the teaching profession to a private, not public, enterprise.

Let’s remake each classroom into a business in and of itself, the laws of supply and demand. Parents and teachers can negotiate the costs of services rendered and the size of each classroom based on the teacher’s skill and ability to teach and manage a classroom with fuller parental direction, not just what the local school board dictates or some distant bureaucrat in Washington, D.C. says you must do for a few more dollars.

Current state education spending should not be given to local government but should instead be loaned interest free to individual parents to direct to the individual teachers they hire. All costs and choice of classroom space, curriculum, textbooks, school meals, after school services, athletic fields, insurance, pensions and health care, income taxes, janitorial or administrative assistance get factored into the tuition price.

This change would do more to restore our economy right now than anything else proposed in Washington or Richmond, because it simultaneously reduces the size and cost of local and state government while maintaining and growing jobs and increasing the potential prosperity for quality teachers not administrators.

Benjamin Franklin rightly warned us 222 years ago that “the more people are discontented with the oppression of taxes, the greater the need the prince (for example the federal government, Commonwealth Compensation Board, Madison County Board of Supervisors or Madison County School Board and so on) has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance, (“for the sake of the children”) and enable him to plunder at pleasure. … There is scare a king…who would not, if he could…get first all the people’s money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants forever.”

Roger Schweikert
Madison Mills