There are, no doubt, several viable means by which this could be done, but one straightforward way is simply by auctioning off schools and their corresponding properties to the highest bidders. Sold schools would either continue under private ownership, or the properties would be used for noneducational purposes. If the schools became private schools, competition in a free market would ensure a drive toward improved education and decreased prices. If some of the properties were deployed for noneducational purposes, the resultant increase in demand for education in that area would motivate profit-seeking educational entrepreneurs to meet the demand with other venues. Either way, the market would soon teem with private schools, teachers, and tutors competing to supply the educational service demanded by millions of families whose only earlier alternative was the abysmally bad government school system. Such a transition would necessarily take some time, and the government would have to provide fair notice and appropriate grace periods to enable government-dependent families to adjust to the free market. For instance, the government could enact a law declaring that, effective immediately, the government would begin auctioning off school properties, with transference of ownership to occur at the end of a five-year grace period. This would enable all teachers, tutors, and educational entrepreneurs to ramp up their businesses. And it would give all parents substantial time to assume full responsibility for the education of their children. The enactment of such a policy would be followed by an explosion of private schools and tutoring services, some large-scale, others small; some in private homes (as Marva Collins began), some in multistory buildings; some religious, some secular; some profit-driven, some not. The teeming diversity of schools and the high level of educational results would soon rival those of America in the centuries before the imposition of government schooling. We who recognize the vital nature of education to the lives of individuals and to the health of a society must demand the privatization of government-run schools and work toward the establishment of a fully private market in education. The time to advocate this change is now. —Andrew Bernstein
Posted on: Tue, 21 Oct 2014 11:05:00 +0000