7 Essential Policies for a Competitive Education Industry

Published June 1, 2001

1 State and local public funding of K-12 instruction must be entirely child based so that parents’ school choices exclusively decide each school’s share of state and local government funding.

2 Each child’s share of state and local K-12 instruction spending is the same, whether the child attends government-owned, private nonprofit, or private for-profit schools.

3 There must be no restrictions on private spending on K-12 instruction. Families must have the right to use private funds to help buy more instruction than the public funds will buy.

4 Child-based state and local public funding of K-12 must begin at the current K-12 funding level.

5 As required by existing federal law, federal K-12 funding must provide supplemental public support to special needs children on a case-by-case basis.

6 There must be a minimum enrollment to qualify an educator to receive public funding to educate children. This will deter fraud and extremist schools, and stop families from earning income by educating their own children.

7 There must be a way to verify the enrollment of each school.


Source: John Merrifield, The School Choice Wars (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press Inc., 2001), pages 193-194.