Stan, U.S. public education has always been a real market.  Unfortunately, it gets manipulated too much and suffers from institutional decay.  If functions surpisingly well in some ways, in higher education and research, and surprisingly poorly in others, K-12.  That those with the means overcome the impediments is a story as old as our founding as this Encarta article describes.

Public education is a relatively new phenomenon in the U.S.  Public elementary schools only started catching on with Horace Mann's reforms in Massachusetts in the 1850s, and public high schools barely existed, with the exception of Boston Latin, until the early 1900s.  Public universities grew out of the Morrill (Land Grant College) Act of 1862, although 573 mostly private colleges existed in 1870.  Only 10% of U.S. teenagers aged 14-17 were enrolled in high school in 1900, but attendance became universal with compulsory attendance laws passed by every state by 1918.  The real story is that public education in the U.S. was made universal and mandatory for all children up to age 16 regardless of ability to pay.

I live in the same D.C. neighborhood as the young lady mentioned in this morning's Washington Post article. When my kids faced going to Deal Junior High and Wilson High School, we chose to spend the equivalent of college costs to send them to Maret, one of many excellent private schools nearby.  We were concerned about safety, but the main reason my wife and I made that decision was that the Wilson honors program at the time had only 44 slots.  No matter how qualified our kids were, even if they pulled straight A's, they would face a lottery among approximately 150 students to get into that program.  We didn't like the odds, and we had the means to go elsewhere.

The real crime is that poor people, who can't afford any alternative to public education, pay taxes to the D.C. government, which has up until recently perpetuated a bureaucracy that has diverted all the funding into their salaries and a special education industry that consumes 15% of the entire D.C. education budget for 4% of the children.  This bureaucracy gamed the federal education subsidy so well that our kids were listed as enrolled at Deal for nearly two years after they entered Maret to pad the numbers sent to the U.S. Department of Education.  We had to threaten D.C. school officials before they stopped using our kids to commit fraud.  Oh, did I mention that D.C. spends about $14,000 per pupil, one of the highest amounts in the country.

I tutor twice a week at Marie Reed Learning Center, on of the poorest elementary schools in D.C.  I see very committed teachers and administrators struggling to educate their pupils, but the social ills that accompany those kids are enough to turn you into a social worker.  Two years ago, a church friend and I spent an afternoon talking to a sixth-grader who was talking suicide because he couldn't take the daily struggle for safety and survival he and his younger sister couldn't escape while living in a shelter with their drug dependent mother.  I regularly have children fall asleep as I read to them over lunch.  When I ask why they're so tired, I've heard, "We didn't get back home from my Mom's second job of the day on three different buses until 1 a.m." Or, "My Mom didn't come home last night." I asked one kid I was tutoring in math why he wasn't trying to learn, and he told me, "My dad doesn't want me to." The little third grade girl I tutored recently in math knew the math quite well, but she had just arrived from Myanmar and was struggling with the language, as do at least a third of the students at Marie Reed.  These are the kids left behind by No Child Left Behind.  They don't pass the tests, so teachers too often teach to the test, and the kids still don't understand, so I frequently hear fears from teachers and counselors that Marie Reed might be forced to shut down by No Child Left Behind.  The one language specialist helping these kids at Marie Reed last year got reassigned to design more tests.  I go through a box of pencils every week because the school and the kids don't have them.  I carefully guard one piece of chalk.  I've asked for a chalkboard eraser for over a year without finding one.  I do my own printing and xeroxing. I've seen a few kids really benefit from my tutoring, and that keeps me going despite all the other impediments. 

Recently, I was very heartened to hear and meet the new D.C. School Superintendent, Michelle Rhee.  She's taking on the bureacracy with the full support of Mayor Adrian Fenty.  She understands she has to fire people and to insist on the best teachers and on safe and well-maintained schools.  I strongly recommend viewing her remarks.  It's a stark reminder that it's one thing to talk about the strength of markets, and it's quite another thing to build the institutional framework upon which their function really depends.  Markets have always been open to manipulation for private gain, and it's a constant struggle to put them right.  A hundred years ago, we had to overcome John D. Rockefeller's control of oil and of the railroads, and now we have to fight for our K-12 schools.  Get involved with your local school.  It's quite an education.