Full disclosure is good for this conversation.

Personally I went to a public school because my parents didnt have the case to send me to a private school and they were both working full time so home schooling wasnt an option. And I am hardly the only person who had that situation--public schools are as much a babysitter while mom and dad are working as they are schooling our kids.

I also dont like homeschooling because despite some regulation to keep it in a curriculum, it allows Bible based schooling--when this is combined with the "right" kind of nutjob parents we construct a child with some seriously flawed concepts--the future David Koresh is most likely homeschooled. Note also that homeschooled kids are often homeschooled by controlling and even abusive parents who would rather their children not mix with other kids lest they be "exposed" to outside ideas about things. Simply put homeschooling at the very least shelters kids from being exposed to other kids on a regular basis and from the outside world too in many cases. I realize SOME homeschooled kids are quite book smart--one of my good friends is such a person--but she is also incredibly paranoid and even fearful when we go out among normal people--a trip to the mall or a sporting event is enough to send her into hysterics.......book smart but antisocial isnt a good development plan in my opinion.

As to your theory that a private school spends less on a kid and gets more, again your facts are skewed. A private school can be a lot more selective about who attends their school--so the trouble kids, the kids who are slower, the kids who are acadmically challenged are all not there--a school populated by smart well behaved kids and you wonder why they do so good.....hmmmmmm. Did you know Trucon that private schools are under no obligation to honor a childs IEP (a medically approved plan for schooling kids with ADD, Aspergers, etc)? In short they are an ELITE school by design and in the end you would have smart kids in private schools with good funding now further funded with our tax dollars while kids without these advantages are filtered down to poor quality schools which will be more like prisons--and with the smarter kids gone there will no advantage of help from smarter schoolmates--our dumber kids will get dumber.

Lastly Truecon we learned a lesson with the last two wars--when you let private contractors run the show their mission is to make MORE money, not do it for less. The cost per soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan went up to nearly 1 million dollars per soldier under the Haliburton/KBR leadership--but what do they care, we pay the bill. I have no reason to believe that handing our schools to the private sector would be any different--FOR PROFIT means just that.