Education of our children is one of the most important
issues facing us today. But despite its successes,
Pennsylvania's educational system is falling short in too
many areas, primarily because our government schools are
virtually a monopoly -- over 90% of all children in
Pennsylvania attend one -- and like any monopoly, the
result is higher costs, poorer service, and lack of choice.
There are several things we can do to improve education.
But increased state funding is not an answer because money
is not the problem. A recent study by Standard & Poors
show that one-third of the best performing schools receive
less than the average funding, while the one-third worst
receive MORE than the average funding. Obviously there are
problems with our schools that cannot be solved by simply
throwing more money at them, and great successes that
aren't tied to funding. As Governor, I would work to
uncover and exploit those successes and remove the
failures.
The "privatization" plans, such as what is being attempted
in Philadelphia are also not the answer. What they are
doing is merely outsourcing their government monopoly, not
offering true choice. The result is that the children and
teachers are still trapped in the same system. We need to
open up education to a wider, more-diverse variety of
choices, curriculums, and approaches. Homeschooling,
charter schools, community schools, cyber schools, and
apprentice programs should all be encouraged, not with
state funding or state mandates, but by cutting back on the
over-regulation of the education monopoly which exists
today.
One of the best ways to eliminate this monopoly is to
introduce competition, and the ideal way to do that is to
bring parents back into the equation. Specifically,
parents should be given the power to send their child to
any government school, not just the one in their
neighborhood, and the funding which would have gone to
their local school would follow the child to the school of
their choice instead. That way good schools would gain
more students and more funding, while bad schools would
fail; or at the very least, the bad schools will be put on
notice by their decreasing enrollment that they should put
their house in order or soon be closed down. In this
manner, competition would work to improve education without
spending any additional tax dollars.
Unfortunately, the two old parties are trying to take
education in an entirely different direction. Under HB
2200, parents can ultimately be thrown in jail for the
crime of choosing a government school outside their
neighborhood, jailed for the crime of wanting a better
education for their children. Libertarians believe in
empowering parents, not jailing them. So I fully support HB 2560 which allows homeschoolers far
greater latitude to decide how to educate their kids.
The funding of our schools should also be changed on a
fundamental level. Although I favor complete separation of
school and state, my oath to uphold the constitution takes
precedence, and Article 3, Section 14 of the Pennsylvania
Constitution states that The General Assembly shall
provide for the maintenance and support of a thorough and
efficient system of public education to serve the needs of
the Commonwealth. Being constrained to work within that
context, I believe that the best solution is that the law
should allow for as much local control of the schools as
possible. But today virtually everything is decided by an
unelected Board of Education in Harrisburg. They decide
what gets taught, what doesn't get taught, who teaches, who
doesn't, who must go to school, which school, for how long,
and a host of other things that are best decided by
parents, not by bureaucrats.
Worst of all, a barrage of regulations and unfunded
mandates continually emanates from Harrisburg. This must
stop. As Governor, I promise to veto every single unfunded
mandate, not just for schools, but in any other area of
government as well. These unfunded mandates are a large
part of the reason that local property taxes continue to
rise. Rather than burden the local schools with these
mandates, the Legislature should take the responsibility to
fund them, especially one of the largest unfunded mandates,
special education.
By eliminating these unfunded mandates, introducing
competition, allowing more parental control, reducing
over-regulation, and returning our educational system to
its constitutional bounds with more local control, our
children can receive the education they deserve at the best
possible price.
However, this solution of increased competition only
maintains the status quo of publicly-funded education while
keeping the sources of those funds essentially the same.
But there are ways to reduce, even eliminate reliance on
the traditional source of education funding, such as the
property tax.
One method of reducing the cost of education is to
privatize the educational system. How much of a reduction
in cost will that bring? To come up with hard numbers, I
pulled out the Yellow Pages and called all the private
schools in my local Abington area: the Catholic schools,
other religious schools, Montessori's, community schools,
Abington Friends school, etc. and asked what they charged
per year. I heard numbers ranging from the $3,000's
through about $6,000, with exclusive schools like the
Friends topping out at over $10,000. Then I took the
Abington school district budget of $67 million and divided
it by the 6,600 students, yielding a cost of over $10,000 a
child.
The upshot: If we privatized the schools, we could cut
property taxes in half overnight.
School boards already have the option of outsourcing
education to local, less-expensive private schools, but
usually reserve that power only for troubled kids. Instead
of outsourcing education to less-expensive neighborhood
schools, they prefer instead to run their own schools, and
at a much higher cost. Part of the reason for this is the
prohibition in the state constitution against spending tax
dollars on sectarian schools (Article 3, Section 15),
precluding them from outsourcing the education to the least
expensive schools, the Catholic schools.
There are other problems associated with outsourcing
of education which would make me wary of attempting to use
them, and the biggest is what I call the Political Golden
Rule: "He who provides the gold makes the rules". For this
reason, I fear vouchers, over and above the constitutional
prohibition which severely restricts their possible uses.
Because along with the state funds would come the mandates
and rules, and within a few short years the private schools
would not be their own masters anymore.
Which leads me to the best solution, the one which not
only reduces the cost of education, but also gives the
framework to eliminate the onerous, unhumanitarian property
tax. I call it the Great Offer: "You will never have to
pay the property tax again, provided that you pay for your
own child's education."
Most people to whom I've made the Great Offer have
welcomed it with open arms. People who already send their
kids to private schools love it since they won't be paying
twice for their kids' educations (once out of their own
pocket, once out of their taxes). Childless couples,
singles, and seniors welcome the Great Offer because they
won't be forced to pay for a service they do not directly
use.
Even those who are sending their children to government
schools welcome it because it means an overall reduction in
the amount of money they have to pay for education. They
aren't forced to buy into the Taj Mahals of public
education, but rather can shop around for the best bargain,
just as they would when buying a car or house. Since a
normal education (i.e., non-Friends School-style) costs
half as much as the government schools, they spend less.
The cost is made even lower by allowing for more
non-traditional alternatives, such as homeschooling,
apprentice programs, cyber schooling, and other educational
opportunities as-yet unheard of.
Sweetening the deal even more, the dollars that parents
would pay to educate their kids would not be "laundered"
through the bureaucracy -- because for every dollar spent
in taxes, a large percentage of that dollar is swallowed by
the huge bureaucracy of government, leaving only a small
fraction to reach its intended goal of educating our kids.
With parents spending that dollar directly on education,
they get more education for the dollar, more bang for the
buck.
Best of all, when parents pay for their own kid's
educations, they can see the light at the end of a very
expensive tunnel. Certainly educating their own kids is
expensive in its own right, perhaps even requiring a second
mortgage. But once that loan was paid off, they'd be DONE
with it. That's much better than the alternative they face
today, which is having to pay the property tax not only
when they're 40 years old, but also at 50, at 60, 70, 80,
90, on and on forever, not to mention higher and higher
assessments with every passing year.
So the Great Offer promises an end to spiraling property
taxes, an end to expensive government education, an end to
the lack of diversity and choice. In the process, our
kids get a better education, and too often we forget that
the kids are what education is really all about.
