09:26 – Barbara headed down to Winston-Salem this morning to run errands and meet with the guy who’s doing the cleanup and painting at the house. Colin and I are working on science kit stuff.
It probably sounds odd given that our business is selling science kits to homeschoolers, but yesterday I found myself again thinking how nice it would be if homeschooling disappeared entirely. And that could be accomplished with the stroke of a pen: just extend school vouchers to cover the children of any citizen, allowing those parents to send their children to any school they pleased, public or private, religious or secular. Set the amount of those vouchers at, say, 2/3 of what the local public schools actually spend per student, and allow them to be cashed by any person or organization that a parent or parents have chosen to educate their children. And deduct the amount of that voucher, dollar for dollar, from the funds provided to public schools. Any parents who chose to send their kids to public schools would be supporting those public schools financially with their vouchers. If, as I suspect, only the loser children of loser parents ended up attending public schools, so be it. At least they wouldn’t interfere with other children’s educations, as they do now. And the public schools would waste away as their funding disappeared. The good teachers, and there are many, would be employed by private schools, which would spring up like weeds to accommodate parents’ priorities. The bad public school teachers, which is to say most of them, would find themselves unemployed and unemployable, which is as it should be.
Not that I’m worried about our business, because we’ll never see universal school vouchers. Teachers simply won’t let it happen. They as a group are clients of the progs, happily voting for them in return for salaries that are at least two or three times what they should be, not to mention medical, retirement, and other benefits that are even more excessive. Thrown open to private competition, public schools and their staffs would be crushed, and they know it.