<You think schooling should be available the way health care is in this country?

Health care in this country--which still manages to be the best on the planet--hasn't been free market for years. It was free market when I was a kid, and you went to the doctor, and wrote a check, even for broken arms. Insurance was for emergencies and hospital stays. Now, market forces have been almost completely stripped from the process, and the prices have gone out of sight as any economist could have predicted. A graph in Consumer Reports on health costs was quite telling. It rose slowly over the years until the advent of Medicare, and then shot skyward. The break in the curve was right there. Currently, almost 400 billion dollars A YEAR are pumped into our medical industry free of any market forces whatsoever. And people wonder why an aspirin costs ten bucks in a hospital.

Health care will be socialized in a very few years. The pressure from the Left is constant, and Americans are now almost completely trained to believe it shouldn't cost them anything for health care, just like they believe schools should be "free." If you could hear some people bitch about paying a twenty dollar deductible on a five hundred dollar paid bill...

So parents must have jobs for children to receive educational benefits.

Hello? Parents need jobs to EAT, which falls a little higher on the priority rating than education. Also for housing, books, bandaids, clothes, and about two hundred other little items to keep the kids living in the style they would like to. Why school is the one necessity of life that needs to be supplied by the state confuses me.

There is no plausible reason that education could not be provided by the marketplace with high quality and low cost like almost everything else provided by the private competitive sector in this country.

We don't have that many real choices. We have a large menu of options, but some are yucky, some are too expensive, some give us hives, and some are only served in the back room by invitation.

Choices appear when the free market is given free reign. If you want choice at low cost, you have to let the system work.

Every child deserves a chance, Tom. Where do the poor go, and who really pays for it? Do we institutionalize the class system, wherein the poor go to one set of schools and everyone else aspires to escape from that fate?

The obvious answer in a private schooling system would be to have a subsidy program for the poor that assists with tuition, and they can go to the same schools as anyone else. This is what the voucher system attempts to do, which is sought after by the poor and stomped on by rich liberals and education bureaucrats.

The poor shop at the same grocery stores I do, and buy the same steaks and the same milk. Maybe not as much steak, but just as good. They just use government stamps instead of cash. There are no "poor people" grocery stores with bad food.

Re: choice and vouchers. First -- sorry, no taxes of mine go to teaching religion. Amen. ;)

Let's not start grousing about the places our taxes are going that we don't approve of, or we'll both be here all night.

Second -- just a couple of days ago, I was part of a conversation concerning cyberschools. The mother, who had homeschooled, went on about how great it is that they get a new computer and all the supplies that the public schools have to pay for, but her child still gets to use school facilities and participate in music programs, etc., because she's "enrolled" in the public schools. This doesn't take into account that the schools must alter their busy schedules to fit in a child who only appears for things she wishes to participate in. (In the meantime, the cyberschool has only sent them part of the computer, so they come to the library, but the school's login procedures have run afoul of the library system's firewall. This, however, is not perceived as a problem by the consumer.) I asked how the people using the cyberschool expect the public schools to pay a for-profit company for its product and still pay for building upkeep, facilities and staff for all the "extras" that her child enjoys. She admitted this was a problem, but asserted it wasn't her problem.

I assume this homeschooler has not been exempted from school taxes, any more than the thousands of people who have no kids. One would assume a little access to the school facility would be appropriate. I don't quite follow the funding problem and the movement of money in the situation you are talking about, and wouldn't mind getting more info before I comment more. Again, I don't think this would be an issue in a private school system.

The question of transfer of funds away from maintenance of facilities and upgrades for equipment explains the fears of the public schools faced with vouchers. How can you compete with virtual schools and schools that don't have to meet the same facility standards when your money is being rerouted to those organizations?

The critical point that gets missed in this statement is that "virtual schools and schools that don't have to meet the same facility standards" may, for that exact reason, be able to deliver a quality education for far less money. If your goal is to actually make education available to the largest number of people at the cheapest price, one would think this would be welcome.

Why is it automatically assumed by all concerned that everyone will desert the existing system if an alternative becomes available? For God's sake, what does this tell you? I constantly hear from opponents to vouchers and school privatization is that if such choices became available, the students would desert the public schools like rats from a sinking ship. Does this sound like someone more concerned about the best education for a kid, or about preserving a particular bureaucratic system that isn't filling the needs of the customer?

It may be that the classroom full of kids may go the way of the one-room schoolhouse.* Creative destruction is a bitch. It may be that the teacher of the future will be a tutor who goes from house to house. Who knows? Anything could happen. Markets don't follow five-year plans very well.

The Post Office is protected by a law that imprisons anyone who competes with it in First Class mail. Despite this seemingly insurmountable barrier, the market found a way around it with e-mail and other services. Federal Express was not invented at the Post Office either.

Homeschooling, which is growing rapidly, and other radical education alternatives may do an end run around the education bureacracy. That too would be interesting. Vouchers may become a non-issue in another twenty years.

*Which somehow managed to educate a large number of people who made this country what it was.