Education Spending and Family Choice

Education should be a market, and the protected public-school bureaucracy should be abolished. I don't think a child's future should be organized around preserving jobs, administrative structures, and union influence. Those things have value only if they serve the person being educated. When their preservation becomes the purpose, the arrangement has it backward. Let providers earn the confidence of families by offering a better education, and let families leave when the offer fails. The importance of education is a reason to demand that accountability, not an excuse to avoid it.

Reading, mathematics, science, and the development of a capable mind do not belong to a bureaucracy by nature. We have mistaken an arrangement for providing education for education itself, then made protecting the arrangement a test of whether someone cares about children. I reject that premise in the manifesto. Tutors, courses, small schools, learning communities, and resources used at home can do educational work. Their right to do it should not depend on whether their success preserves the institutions they might replace.

The question is what follows when a provider fails. A complaint can produce a meeting, an explanation of policy, and a promise to review the matter, while leaving the provider's claim on the child's next year essentially intact. The parent has been heard without acquiring any power. Exit changes that relationship: the child can leave and the business can follow. A provider then has something at stake in making its response useful rather than merely procedurally complete.

That possibility changes what the provider stands to lose. A clear account of a reading gap becomes something it has a reason to address: change the explanation, improve the instruction, or watch families leave. Other providers have a reason to offer a better answer because meeting that need can earn them business. No individual choice guarantees a good result. The mechanism matters because it lets a failed arrangement lose its claim on the next year of a child's life.

Look at the flat-screen television. What once seemed like an expensive luxury became vastly more accessible as companies competed to make something people wanted at a price they could pay. The particular economics of education differ, but the expectation shouldn't be alien: better tools, a better experience, and less wasted cost over time. Why should we accept an educational system in which improvement is always described as needing more money for the same arrangement? Providers should have a reason to find better ways of helping a child learn.

For that choice to carry force, families need usable alternatives and usable evidence. A provider should show the work, explain what progress means, and make leaving possible. If every option is unaffordable or a polished advertisement conceals weak teaching, the word “choice” does little. Open competition needs scrutiny from families, access to different offers, and the freedom to act on what learning reveals. Those are practical requirements of the argument, not reasons to grant the existing system permanent ownership of the child.

I am building TheHomeschoolingCompany because I think we can offer families something better: an education that takes their child's goals, interests, and starting point seriously. That belief gives me a reason to build, not a right to your business. If our instruction fails, my explanation of our good intentions should not obligate you to stay. A market argument that exempts my own company would be the same protectionism with a more flattering beneficiary.

The purpose of this freedom is partly to permit failure to have consequences before it consumes another generation. Some educational ideas will disappoint, some will serve a particular child remarkably well, and some may reveal that an expensive convention was never necessary. We cannot discover those differences while guaranteeing the same providers their place regardless of what happens to the learner. Let the jobs follow the useful work. Children have already supplied quite enough years of their lives to arrangements that reverse that order.