It would mean that children who come from families who already have money would be able to command the attention of the most talented teachers, as well as already having good nutrition, appropriate clothes, varied and enriching leisure activities in safe settings, cutting edge technology, and lessons in "extra" subjects such as music. To make education entirely market-driven would guarantee that only those who could pay would get the bulk of the talent. Because of income discrepencies among school districts, we already have enough of that now.

Again, I wish to hell they taught economics in schools.

Equalizing mediocrity is no solution to providing excellence.

Think about any commodity you can imagine. Food. Clothing. Houses. Cars. Phones. Computers. Anything.

There are expensive ones, cheap ones, and ones in the middle. And for most of these, the average American has a choice across the entire range of income levels, because it is in the interest of those who provide a service or product to sell as much of it to as many people as possible, and to have them be happy with the sale.

Some car makers sell Rolls Royces, and make a living at it. Others sell cars to the rest of us, and make a pretty good living at it, too. Oddly, a Rolls-Royce doesn't do all that much better a job of getting you to where you want to go than a Saturn does.

I couldn't afford to go to the finest universities in the world. Some people can. Is that "fair?" If everybody can't attend Harvard or Yale, does that mean that nobody should be able to? Does it mean that someone going to a state school is going to end up with a crappy education? Or that someone paying top dollar for education is going to wind up a genius?

For every promising poor person who can't afford Ivy League and had to settle for a state school, I can point you to two idiots who graduated from the finest schools in the land. Hell, look at our politicians. Some of the smartest and most successful people I know don't even have college degrees.

If schooling was part of the free market, there would be a broad variety of solutions and choices. Perhaps brilliant teachers could syndicate their work to online schools. Perhaps other creative methods would develop. Certainly there would, for a change, be some competition. A bureaucratic monopoly is not about finding solutions, but maintaining the monopoly. It's why Ma Bell as a monopoly would never have come up with the communications solutions we have now, or why IBM was not the first to come up with a personal computer.

Egalitarianism as a political philosophy results in low quality for everyone. There are countless examples across the entire spectrum of human needs. A free market with free choice will eventually make the best possible products available to as many people as possible. I have an inexpensive cell phone in my pocket because years ago, rich people bought phones that weren't inexpensive. There are many examples of this, too.

But then, to the educational bureaucracy, this whole issue has never been about educating children, but about political power. Free markets work. The reason some organizations and people are so hostile towards them is that there is very little political power to be had in a free market.