A few points:

> Nope. I have seen that the public schools in California are failing. My friends who are in the public schools say that schools are overfunded and the teachers are incompotent. As I have said before, I see the government as playing a limited role in our lives. I definitely don't think they should interfere with private education, and I think it's unjust for them to make the rest of us pay for public.

I am a product of education in California (4th generation SoCal native, thank you very much). I have been to the following schools:

2 Public elementary schools
2 Private elementary schools
1 Public middle school
1 Homeschool program run through the district (was there for part of middle school and did my last semester of high school there)
1 Charter High School (basically a public school that has its own board and is much more free with its curriculum)

And I'm currently attending a largely state funded community college (I pay a whole $11 per credit unit, which means that my tuition for any given semester is under $200).

I think I've got a pretty good idea of what the educational system in the state is like. Are public schools absolutely failing? NO. Definitely not.

Could they be doing better? Definitely yes. The fact of the matter is it varies (as Sam and others mentioned) from school to school. Even more importantly, it varies from teacher to teacher and (here's the big one) from student to student.


> I think public schools are a good thing, but that they should be funded privately.

IF THEY ARE FUNDED PRIVATELY THEN THEY ARE NOT PUBLIC. BY DEFINITION.

> In order to accomplish that, we would need to phase out the current system, of course. Children's not getting education is a tragedy, but the government's redistrubting income they way they are now is wrong and has not solved the problem.

What? How on earth would we accomplish this? You present two mutually exclusive plans:

1) We should have public schools, and also private schools which the government should give money to parents for.
2) We should not pay for any of this.

Actually, maybe they're not mutually exclusive. You don't want us to pay for them via taxes. Okay, present a way for the government to pay for education or vouchers or anything else without levying taxes. Bake sales?

> Well, that's my two cents. What do you bet no one's going to agree with me?
>
> Mark"The Radical!"N

Perhaps, rather than branding yourself as the "cool outcast", you should wonder why even the most conservative people on this forum refuse to agree with you. You pretty much refuse to answer the argument as to why something like a national defense or police are a good use of tax money (despite the fact that you seem to be opposed to taxation regardless of its use) but education is not. You complicate the issue by going off on tangents about income taxes and how California wants to make home schools illegal.

If you were to even be coming from a standpoint like "We need to make public education better through vouchers," rather than "We need to abolish public education," you'd probably have a lot more people agreeing with you.

Stephen