JOE DEHN FOR CONGRESS

The incentives for producing a good result at a reasonable cost are all wrong in a system where government controls everything, including paying for it. It sounds good at first – everybody gets the service "for free". But that just means that everybody pays, more and more every year, and nobody is really in control.

More money (higher taxes) is not the answer. That has been tried, over and over again. That's how we got where we are today, with government schools that cost more to operate per student than private schools and produce results that should be embarrassing to all involved. And it's not the fault of any one group. There are many good teachers in public schools, but they can't do their best in a system that is over-regulated. Advances in technology should be leading to both more effective teaching and lower total costs – instead they have mostly been turned by this dysfunctional system into a series of expensive boondoggles that only profit certain favored companies and leave schools with equipment that is obsolete almost as soon as it is installed.

The current K-12 educational system is fundamentally flawed because it is based on what is essentially a socialist model. It is failing to meet our expectations for the same reason that agriculture and manufacturing kept failing to meet expectations in the old Soviet Union. Minor "reforms" or better "planning" will not yield the improvement we really need. The whole system needs to be replaced by one based on a free-market model.

These problems started at the local level, and were made worse by state governments, even before the federal government got involved in a big way. Mostly they need to be addressed at the state and local level. But the federal government can at least try to avoid making the problems worse. To that end, here are some steps Congress can take:

• Get the federal government out of the business of financing and subsidizing schools at all levels. "Free" money is never free – it just encourages state and local educational bureaucracies to spend money less efficiently than if they were responsible for raising it. And, more important for the long term, subsidizing failure makes it harder for alternative providers who could produce better results to develop and grow.
• Abolish the Department of Education. This bureaucracy educates nobody, and just makes it more difficult for meaningful changes to be accomplished at the state or local level.
• Get the federal government out of the business of providing or guaranteeing student loans. Through these programs the federal government has, very much in the manner of a drug pusher, gotten both college students and colleges hooked on borrowing that leads to poor choices.
• End all federal sponsorship/endorsement of curricula, standards, and text books. These can be better developed and promulgated by private groups, such as professional societies, and by businesses, left free to try different approaches and spur each other on through competition to produce the best product – or more realistically, many different products meeting the needs of different children and families.