I do agree that public schools have been turned into these concentration camps of indoctrination with less focus on producing the brilliant minds of tomorrow but more focused on following a rigid state mandated curriculum with teachers at the helm who could care less. I read one statistic that it takes $250,000 and two years to fire a poor teacher. Teachers need to be held academically and ethically accountable for their classrooms. No parent in their right mind would send a child to a school where the child’s teacher was producing sub par students but it happens every day, due to teachers unions, the 600 some page “tenured teacher” contract that makes getting rid of teachers more of a hassle than it takes to keep them.

We need to be proactive in our own communities to foster the proper relationships with teachers and students and looser restrictions regarding the hiring and firing of teachers. If the teachers are made accountable, so will the students.

Eliminating public school would reduce property taxes enough so that many lower middle class families could afford private schooling. Children from poor families would get schooling through three mechanisms: loans, grants from charities, and reduced tuition charges. Government involvement would be more hindrance than help.

You’re right that technological advances raise the bar on what it takes to be moderately competent in the economy, but it also provides enough ridiculously cheap tools to gain that competency.

For $500/year ($0 if you have access to a reasonably modern library), anyone with determination can go from being completely illiterate to the equivalent of a high school diploma in virtually any subject. Such a person would probably even be *better off* than a traditionally-schooled person because he was forced to become adept at *seeking* information instead of simply being spoon-fed it.

Now obviously there would still be advantages in having an environment dedicated to learning with some sort of mentors available, but it would be more akin to a “study hall” environment than the current paradigm. This thinking is all well out of the mainstream and I don’t expect it to be implemented on a wide scale any time soon, but I hope that future generations will look back on our current model as being inefficient and woefully outdated.

Here’s an excellent discussion on a related topic.

tl;dr: I think privately funded education is much more practical than it used to be; we just need a major paradigm-shift first.

One way or another the public is going to have to finance education unless you subscribe to the idea that a permanent uneducated underclass is a good thing. While that worked okay up until the industrial revolution, it’s not really a winner in a complex world economy.

Be it by vouchers, tax credits or direct payments as we do now, politics will influence those schools and pick winners and losers.

Conservatives should not fight for more influence over public school education. Conservatives should join with libertarians and fight for the abolishment of public schools. With public schools gone, there will be many more private schools and a greater likelihood of finding schools with eduational goals that match our own.