Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties.  A huge chunk of these tax receipts would then be spent by government officials on building and operating supermarkets.  County residents, depending upon their specific residential addresses, would be assigned to a particular supermarket.  Each family could then get its weekly allotment of groceries for “free.”  (Department of Supermarket officials would no doubt be charged with the responsibility for determining the amounts and kinds of groceries that families of different types and sizes are entitled to receive.)

Except in rare circumstances, no family would be allowed to patronize a “public” supermarket outside of its district.

Residents of wealthier counties – such as Fairfax County, VA and Somerset County, NJ – would obviously have better-stocked and more attractive supermarkets than would residents of poorer counties.  Indeed, the quality of public supermarkets would play a major role in determining people’s choices of neighborhoods in which to live.

Of course, thanks to a long-ago U.S. Supreme Court decision, families would be free to shop at private supermarkets that charge directly for the groceries they offer; such private-supermarket families, though, would get no discount on their property-tax bills.

When the quality of supermarkets is recognized by nearly everyone to be dismal, calls for “supermarket choice” would be rejected by a coalition of greedy government-supermarket workers and ideologically benighted collectivists as attempts to cheat supermarket customers out of good supermarket service – indeed, as attempts to deny ordinary families the food that they need for their very survival.  Such ‘choice,’ it would be alleged, will drain precious resources from the public supermarkets whose (admittedly) poor performance testifies to the fact that these supermarkets are underfunded.

And the small handful of people who call for total separation between supermarket and state would be criticized by nearly everyone as being, at best, delusional and – it would be thought more realistically – more likely misanthropic devils who are indifferent to the malnutrition and starvation that would sweep the land if only private market forces governed the provision and patronizing of supermarket.  (Some indignant observers would even wonder aloud at the insensitivity of referring to grocery shoppers as “customers”; surely the relationship between suppliers of life-giving foods and the people who need these foods is not so crass as to be properly discussed as being ‘commercial.’)

….

Does anyone believe that such a system for supplying groceries would work well, or even one-tenth as well as the current private, competitive system that we currently rely upon for supplying grocery-retailing services?  To those of you who might think so, pardon me but you’re nuts.

To those of you who understand that such a system for supplying grocery-retailing services would be a catastrophe, why might you continue to count yourself in the ranks of those who believe that government schooling (especially the way it is currently funded and supplied) is the system that we should continue to use?

It sounds like Boudreaux is making the case for the complete eradication of the public school system in favor of a private model.   If we were to develop a system from scratch — say, in a charter city — something like this may in fact be preferable.  But I think the major issue — alluded to in the second bolded paragraph above — is the lack of real choice in the current public school model, particularly with regard to students stuck attending perpetually miserable schools.

It would be difficult to convince well-off families whose children attend excellent public schools that we need a private system in place.  Their response  would essentially be, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”  And they’d pretty much be right from their individual perspective.

The reality is that the system as a whole isn’t broken; the system has pockets that are broken.  Introducing small measures of choice into these pockets through a voucher system is a more targeted way of dealing with the problem.

But the appeal behind voucher programs is not necessarily one of statistics; it’s one of common sense and basic fairness.  If a poor, disadvantaged child is stuck in a city with horrible schools, I don’t see why we can’t give this student the option to allocate the taxes his or her family pays toward a private school of their choice.  One policy leaves students stuck in a poor-performing public school system, the other option gives them a choice to attend a better performing school.  One of these options is a lot more fair.

Now many argue that you have the choice to send your child to any school you want.  This is false because you have to pay twice for the education.  Your money is taken from you to pay for something you don’t want, and only then do you have the freedom to spend additional funds on education that you actually prefer.  In no way is this a real choice.

The entire population does not need vouchers, nor should it be given that option.  Districts with great schools should be left alone.  For example, I grew up in a town with an excellent public school system, which was actually the primary reason my family settled there.  We chose to pay the high taxes in order to attend those schools, and most families made a similar choice in choosing to settle in such a high taxed township.  Relatively well-off families have this luxury of mobility, so voucher programs in such places would be misplaced. But urban districts with long histories of underperforming schools are a perfect place to provide poorer families with a little choice in their children’s education. These families can’t just pack up and move to an expensive town with great schools.  The least we can do is let them choose how to spend their own money on education.

One of the hidden deals negotiated in the budget showdown earlier this month was the renewal and expansion of D.C.’s school voucher program.  This is a positive development. For older posts on education and vouchers, click here and here.

School Chart

This is a great graph to think about next time you hear “we need more money for education”.  Lets pretend that instead of discussing education, we compare it to something we are all familiar with: television sets.  The equivalent of the graph above would be this TV set selling for ab0ut $550 today – not a very good deal:

The good thing is that many people are starting to wake up and realize we are getting a really bad deal in spending on education.  Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark,  is helping to shake things up:

In fact, the highest performing public school in all of Essex County, New Jersey — a county that has both pockets of poverty and great affluence — is a Newark charter school with a student population that is nearly entirely minority and with a significant percentage near or below the poverty line.

In America now, I can confidently say that it is no longer a question of CAN we educate all of our children at equal and high levels — it is a question of WILL we.

This is not a philosophical debate. I have no loyalty to charter schools, traditional public schools, magnet schools, small school models, publicly funded scholarships (vouchers) or private schools. I have loyalty to results. The important question should not be one of philosophy or political perspective, it should be: What is working to empower poor and minority children to have the same educational opportunities in America as those who are more affluent? We should embrace those successful school models, learn from them, infuse that understanding into all of our reform efforts and no longer tolerate any institution that fails to live up to our common community standards of excellence.

Unfortunately, Cory Booker is one of the few democrats willing to say this.  The democratic party is still owned by the teachers unions, as shown by Obama’s recent decision to shut down a successfull voucher program in DC.  President Obama himself went to a private school, his kids go to a private school, and yet he does not want others to have the same opportunities as he did?

This article explains how the “rubber room” works in NYC.  It’s a fascinating story and would be hilarious if it was not also true. Amazingly, at the end of the day nobody is happy, including the teachers:

The city pays millions more for substitute teachers and employees to replace them and to lease rubber-room space.

Meanwhile, the 757 – paid from $42,500 to $93,400 a year – bring in lounge chairs to recline, talk on their cellphones and watch movies on portable DVD players, according to interviews with more than 50 employees.

David Pakter, 62, has been in a rubber room for a year for buying a plant for his school and giving students watches he’d made, he said.

The DOE would not discuss ongoing investigations.

Pakter, a former “teacher of the year” honored at City Hall during Rudy Giuliani’s mayoral tenure, just bought a new Jaguar with his $90,000 salary for “doing absolutely nothing.”

“It’s a present from [Schools Chancellor] Joel Klein,” Pakter said. “I want to teach, they won’t let me teach, but they’ll pay me enough to buy a car. Can someone explain this to me?”

Another rubber-room attendant said she was unaware of the reason she’d been assigned there for more than a month. Yet another, an Army reservist who spent almost 3 1/2 years in a rubber room before he retired, begged to be able to go to Iraq instead of staying in DOE Siberia.

Next time we hear that we need to spend even more money on education, we should really ask ourselves if, after 40 years and double the spending on education with no results, we really think that spending another 5% is going to make a real difference this time around?  Why are we being forced to buy a 1970′s TV for $550?  We need to find a way to spend the money better.  Corey Booker recognizes this issue better than most politicians.

Currently, Washington DC spends about 25K per student per year for a public school education.  If you want a good example of how well that money is spent, consider that at the beginning of last year some students at the public schools did not even have textbooks. To me this inefficiency is just incredible — I mean, how difficult could it be it to plan and order the right amount of textbooks for your students?

Conversely, money spent through the voucher program is all about efficiency. This program is amazing in that not only does it give kids a better education, but it actually saves the city money.  Of course the teachers’ unions are not happy about the program, because private school teachers are not in unions, and money given to private schools endangers the jobs of public school teachers as well as the wealth and power of the union.  The voucher program  is likely to be squeezed out of existence in 2010 as a result of the political influence of teachers’ unions. Update: as of right now the program will be killed off after the current students graduate, so no new students will be allowed into the program going forward.

Here is a quick video that features students and parents asking Obama why he is canceling the program:

What I also find very interesting is where public school teachers themselves are sending their OWN children to school.  This graph shows data from 2004, representing where public school teachers from Chicago and Washtington DC  sent their own children:

What this tells us is that in both Chicago and Washington DC, the public school teachers pay to send their own kids to private schools at a much greater proportion than the general public.  Here’s a good way to think about this:  would you buy a Toyota if you knew that the factory workers who get substantial discounts to buy Toyotas still choose to buy a Honda instead?