Toward a Medicaid Model of Public Education

Over the past several years, education reformers (as well as parents) have come to ask fundamental questions about the nature of our public school system. Why, for example, despite the ever-increasing amount of tax dollars spent per pupil in grades K-12, have increases in test scores virtually flat lined since the 1970s? Why has improvement in the quality of K-12 education not kept pace with technological and scientific development? Why have public schools failed to properly prepare so many students for entering the workplace?

One answer is that public schools lack any incentive to produce results, innovate, to be efficient, and to make the kinds of difficult changes that private schools operating in a competitive market must make to survive. If a private school is performing poorly, or they find the curriculum lacking, parents can enroll their children somewhere else. Currently, the high property taxes that fund public schools insure that many parents are not able to afford to have that choice.

Read the entire column at Rock River Times