Glenn Reynolds: Home Schooling Will Increasingly Threaten Government Education

In a USA Today op-ed Tuesday, Glenn Reynolds, author of the popular blog Instapundit, reported that government schools are seeing ever higher competition from private and online schools and homeschooling. He writes:

Americans across the country—but especially in large, urban school systems—are voting with their feet and abandoning traditional public schools, to the point that teachers are facing layoffs. Some are going to charter schools, which are still public but are run more flexibly. Some are leaving for private schools. But many others are going another step beyond traditional education, and switching to online school or even pure homeschooling.

In his upcoming book, The K-12 Implosion, Reynolds predicts that government schools are going to see an enormous outflow of students in the coming years. As the brightest students opt for alternative education options, the “notoriously inadequate” government schools will become “even more notoriously inadequate” and government “funding—which is computed on a per-pupil basis—[will dry] up.”

Reynolds does not predict that this “implosion” will cause the end of government schools but, rather, that government schools will need to change and adapt in order to prevent their obsolescence. In the meantime, any weakening in government control over education is a positive change and an encouragement for abolitionists to continue pushing for the end of government education.

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