Incredibly low-priced private schools

I am not going to respond to your second point... I think that is a point of debate that you're making out to be far more black-and-white than it really is.

There is further complexity than you are admitting in your last two examples. There is a broad-reaching social impact that schooling, or lack thereof, has. This is true locally as well as globally, as seen by what the Wahhabi schools produce. Would I oppose the Amish exemption? No, because the vast majority of students in this nation have access to basic education. Would I oppose a private school system that was teaching violent fundamentalism at the expense of basic education, if that system was the only option serving a large area of my country? You bet I would, and that goes for government or private systems.

Again: this is a complicated issue -- and no one should pretend otherwise. It is a false dichotomy to declare that our options are "state sponsored indoctrination" and forcible assimilation, or a free-market utopia where parents pick what school works best for them. A non-trivial number of people would pick the degree mill school given the choice: I am trying to figure out how we disincentive that option in an areas that don't have the social infrastructure to stigmatize that decision.

According to the U.S. Census, U.S. public schools spent $9,138 per student in 2006. This varies from $14,884 in New York to $5,437 in Utah:

http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/ed...

According to the council for private education, the average private school tuition in the U.S. for 2007-2008 was $8,549 at all levels, and $6,733 at elementary level. Non-religious schools were significantly more expensive than religiously-affiliated schools:

http://www.capenet.org/facts.html

It would be hard to directly compare spending because one school might offer more than another. For example, a private school in Orange County, California, may provide laptops to all students, expensive science labs, and fancy football fields (and would have to pay a lot for land), while a public school in rural Nevada may not have any of that stuff. That wouldn't prove that private education was more expensive or less efficient, just that the people in one region wanted different things and were willing to pay more for those things.

The public schools I grew up with in the American midwest (all lower middle class) were uniformly good but this was 50 years ago when such schools were widely funded by local sources (e.g., property taxes from the community), did not have to account to the distant bureaucracies or have to focus on prepping kids to meet minimum proficiency tests by which educational results could be measured with mirrors, and did not have to deal with unions whose goals seem to be as much about promoting the interests of their members via ever-expansive forms of public funding as they are about helping kids learn. The public high schools I attended in California in the late 1960s were also good, and it was naturally expected in that day that the vast majority of the kids would not only graduate but would also be literate and reasonably taught once they did so - there too, all funding was purely local.

The key is to have the schools, whether public or private, in the hands of people who care really care about what the kids learn and that means local people who know them and know their families. This element has largely been lost in modern America's public schools, and it is a real tragedy.

It is nice to see the resourcefulness of parents who seek to overcome the resulting mess but this is a struggle that is often just plain desperate in light of the overwhelming problems that now beset the public schools. This piece reminds us that there is always hope where people really care.