School vouchers or, even better, tutor vouchers are the way to go.
If students actually had a choice in how education funding was allocated, they would spend it directly on higher teacher salaries to pay for the additional teacher labor hours necessary to receive individual one-on-one instruction.
They wouldn't spend it on proprietary learning materials, large classrooms, large facilities, large administrative offices, and large campuses.
Get rid of the "smart classrooms" and allow students to pay directly for instruction with a student\teacher ratio of 1.
I have no children, but I want to have an educated population.
When you take my tax dollars and give them to parents as vouchers, you reduce or eliminate my democratic right to influence how we educate the next generation.
Why should only the children and parents have a say in that process?
I'm not saying an elected school board provides perfect oversight, as the iPad debacle shows, but at least it has more public oversight than washing our hands of the problem and delegating all responsibility and economic power to the parents.
Also, there are any number of college students who use their money to go to schools with "proprietary learning materials, large classrooms, large facilities, large administrative offices, and large campuses", so no reason to believe that things will be different for primary and secondary schools.
And there is plenty of evidence to believe that parents are attracted by schools which advertise "smart classrooms", and tout (incorrectlu, IMO) how they use computers to teach more effectively than a teacher does.
If students actually had a choice in how education funding was allocated, they would spend it directly on higher teacher salaries to pay for the additional teacher labor hours necessary to receive individual one-on-one instruction.
They wouldn't spend it on proprietary learning materials, large classrooms, large facilities, large administrative offices, and large campuses.
Get rid of the "smart classrooms" and allow students to pay directly for instruction with a student\teacher ratio of 1.