Government schools are no longer focused on education. They have become political indoctrination centers. Government controlled education was the very first form of government welfare. Sunday school or Monday school – neither is a government function. We must get government our of our schools. All schools should be privatized and related taxes reduced or repealed.

Everyone pays for schools -- rich and poor. The poor pay a great deal of property taxes (for schools) through their rent. If schools were private, property taxes (and other taxes) could be reduced enough so that the poor could afford to pay for private schooling. Private schools would cost about half what public schools cost. Even more could be saved if government regulations were eliminated.

Traditionally the poor have been the strongest advocates of school choice programs. Private schools would force educators to teach well or go out of business. Troublemakers that disrupted classes and made learning difficult would be excluded until their behavior improved.

Private schools would specialize to help students at any level of learning ability. One private institution specializes in students who are about to drop out of public schools. It boasts an 85% graduation rate. None of these students were likely to graduate otherwise.

Even when attendance was not mandatory, history shows that most children would attend school. In the early 1800s a survey in Boston found that 90% of school-age children were enrolled, even though attendance was not compulsory and public schooling was not wide spread. At that time, the U.S. was considered the most literate nation in the world! We learned more when we weren't forced to do so!

I worked in Iran in the seventies (before the revolution). There was no public schooling available to Iranian children. My secretary, an Iranian woman, thought of educating her child like she thought of providing for food for her table. It was one of the necessities of life. All Iranian families sent their children to private schools. In very poor families the oldest child was sent to school and then taught the younger ones.

I am certain that if the schools in Montana were privatized the same attitude about the necessity of an education would prevail. Of course we will not reach perfection – not all kids will attend. But a private school system in Montana (and America) would be far, FAR, FAR better than the current public school system.

Some people are concerned about the wages of the teachers in a private system. They fear that in a private system wages would be much less. Teachers with less effectiveness probably would not get paid as much. But like any profession, those that are good at what they do will be in demand and will be paid more.

Instead of being limited to union-scale wages, teachers will have unlimited potential. Teachers could own and operate the schools they work in. The exceptional teachers could spend time developing materials to be used in their schools and market them throughout the nation.

Economist, Milton Friedman, probably has the most compelling reasons for privatizing our schools. He indicates that two world "revolutions" have caused the need for rapid changes in our educational system.

The first is the technological revolution. The technological revolution has developed more effective and efficient methods of communication, transportation, and transmission of data. This revolution has made it possible for a company located anywhere in the world to use resources located anywhere in the world, to produce a product anywhere in the world, to be sold anywhere in the world. The possibility for labor and capital anywhere to cooperate with labor and capital anywhere else has had dramatic effects.

The second revolution has multiplied the effects of the technological revolution. The political revolution has opened borders of closed nations, and also changed economies from socialism to capitalism. Less advanced nations have a large supply of relatively low-wage labor to cooperate with capital from the advanced countries. The capital from the advanced countries is in the form of physical capital, but perhaps more important, capital in the form of human capital – of skills, knowledge, techniques, and training.

Friedman indicates:

The political revolution greatly reinforced the technological revolution in two different ways. First, it added greatly to the pool of low-wage, yet not necessarily unskilled labor that could be tapped for cooperation with labor and capital from the advanced countries.

From behind the iron curtain and from China we now have an additional 1.5 billion low-wage people available to work.

Friedman continues:

Second, the political revolution discredited the idea of central planning. It led everywhere to greater confidence in market mechanisms as opposed to central control by government. And that in turn fostered international trade and cooperation.

The twin revolutions have produced higher wages and incomes for almost all classes in the underdeveloped countries. The effect has been somewhat different in the advanced countries. The greatly increased ratio of low-cost wages to capital has raised the wages of highly skilled labor and return on physical capital but has put downward pressure on the wages of low-skilled labor. The result has been a sharp widening in the differential between the wages of highly skilled and low-skilled labor in the United States and other advanced countries.

If the widening of the wage differential is allowed to proceed unchecked, it threatens to create within our own country a social problem of major proportions.

A group of unskilled people in our population will move into Third World conditions while at the same time, another group will become increasingly well of. Such separation of wage-earners is a recipe for disaster. The pressure on the government to avoid it by protectionist and isolationist measures will be irresistible.

Friedman continues:

So far, our education system has been adding to the tendency to stratification. Yet it is the only major force in sight capable of offsetting that tendency. Innate intelligence undoubtedly plays a role in determining the opportunities open to individuals. Yet it is by no means the only human quality that is important as numerous examples demonstrate.

Unfortunately, our current educational system does little to enable either low-IQ or high-IQ individuals to make the most of other qualities. Yet that is the way to offset the tendency to stratification. A greatly improved educational system can do more than anything else to limit the harm to our social stability from a permanent and large underclass.

There is enormous room for improvement in our educational system. Hardly any activity in the United States is technically more backward. We essentially teach children in the same way we did 200 years ago: one teacher in front of a bunch of kids in a closed room. The availability of computers has changed the situation, but not fundamentally. Computers are being added to public schools, but they are typically not being used in an imaginative and innovative way.

I believe that the only way to make improvement in our educational system is through privatization . . . .

Friedman's observations seem to me to be right on the mark. We cannot afford to leave the education of our children in the hands of the current establishment. They must be placed in a much more responsive educational system that will rapidly change with the coming changes in the world economy. The only way this will be possible is in smaller private schools.

Montana suffers from being one of the states with the lowest average wages in the nation. We look to the "new economy" to help bring higher paying jobs to Montana. Many of our young people leave Montana because there are not enough high paying jobs for them. Privatizing our schools is probably the best solution for many of these problems.

High skilled technology companies can be located anywhere. Why not Montana? If we create a positive business environment, one with low/no taxes, these kinds of businesses will be attracted to Montana and will generate the high-wage jobs we are looking for.

We can enter the "new economy" with the skills to which Friedman refers. Those young people who would love to stay in Montana could find new, better paying jobs here once they are equipped with a modern, technology based education.

We must make bold moves to respond to the rapid changes now taking place around us. Now is the time; Montana is the place.