Article III, Section 14, of the Pennsylvania Constitution mandates 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.” There is no way that requirement is being met by the current system – not even close! Costs and the heavy burden on taxpayers continue to spiral ever upward out of control while students’ reading and math abilities actually decline year after year. It should be obvious by now that more money, more fiddling with the “funding formula,” and more nibbling around the edges is not going to fix this colossal mess. Major change is required. This is so for maybe other states as well.
- Poor Education — There is no greater threat to our future than poorly educated and even mis-educated citizens. Reading and math scores are dropping. Those are indeed important measures, but what about history, science, understanding the free market economic system, understanding of our representative republic, the US Constitution and other important dimensions of a good basic education? You can be sure that schools are even less competent at teaching those subjects than they are with reading and math for which they know students are tested!
- High Cost — For public schools, the average cost per pupil per year was $23,000 in 2024, while the average for private schools was $13,000.
- Lack of School Choice — Parents and their children are locked-in to one specific school based on their address unless they are able and willing to pay school taxes plus the additional cost to educate their children elsewhere.
- Unresponsive to Parents — Parents complain that one-size-fits-all schools are not responsive to their concerns and worry that their children are being indoctrinated with “woke ideologies.”
Such awful performance is exactly what you should expect from a monopoly (and a government-run monopoly is the worst kind of monopoly). The free market economic system can provide the best quality education at the lowest price, just as it does for so many other goods and services. Many people fail to understand these things because they are economically illiterate. Why? Because the schools never taught them about the free market economic system and how it works!
It should nevertheless at least be obvious that step one certainly must be to stop doing what doesn’t work. Get all governments completely out of education. Then put parents into the drivers’ seat; give them full school choice. All schools will be fairly funded because they will earn the tuition parents pay them when they decide to send their children there. Schools will be responsive to parents. This is the direction in which a number of other states are moving. How do we transition from where we are to good schools? Click here for Fulfilling Pennsylvania’s Education Mandate.