Stimulating classroom material

No, I'm not talking about sex-ed courses. I'm talking about doing something that would actually have an impact on the classroom, a positive one. First, let's start with what's wrong with our current primary education system: It is a disaster, mitigated only partially in some communities by parents concerned about the education of their children, who are active in their homes and in their schools. How do I draw this conclusion, well, the first is a nice editorial from IBD on the efficiency of our education system (read it now). The second is the much-complained-about-by-liberals fact that children who go to "rich" public schools do better than those who go to "poor" schools. This is not because the "rich" schools are unfairly advantaged, but rather, that all public schools are an embarrassment and a failure to their students, and only kids who go to "rich" schools have enough parents who do not have to work full time jobs that can volunteer at their local schools and help Johhny at home, too.

I say we damn the entire public education system as the failure it is and re-introduce the idea of school choice to the equation. Sure, we can still fund the kiddies education from the public purse, and each kid gets the same amount. Then let the schools duke it out. We'll quickly find that some models of education are far more successful than others (hint, those are the schools with lots of kids at them) and which ones are ineffectual (they'll look like less-crowded versions of today's schools).