With the first day of school

just around the corner, I think it's a perfect time to unveil what I like

to call the Ultimate School Voucher Plan. It is, without a doubt, the

fairest way to give every single child an opportunity for a first-class

education while leaving the all-important choice of where to get that

education up to the parents.

Here's how it works. The Fayette

County School System has a 2002-03 budget of just under $141 million and

is expecting approximately 20,500 students this fall. For the sake of

round numbers, let's say that if you add all of the Fayette County students

in private schools or home schools, you have 22,000 children eligible

to use the public schools and have a slice of the $141 million pie. That

averages out to just over $6,400 per student (a positive mark for the

Fayette school board, as many urban school districts spend much more than

that per capita).

Given these figures, how do

you implement the Ultimate School Voucher Plan? It's quite simple. You

give a $6,400 voucher to every student in the school district. No exceptions.

No special consideration for income, race, gender or anything else. Every

student has the same shot, and every parent gets to choose whether to

find a private school or send his or her voucher right back into the public

school.

has fulfilled its stated obligation of providing every student with an

education. And the public school system, whether it has 20,000 students

or 10,000, will have the same amount of funding per capita as it did before.

Meanwhile, it is highly likely that every private school within driving

distance will be filled to capacity and some parents would have money

left over, since many private schools now do a fine job using about half

the money per student as the public schools, with no government assistance.

Putting money back in taxpayers' pockets what a novel idea.

If you really want to be fair

about it, take it one step further. Take all of the money budgeted for

education in Georgia from the state and every school district and put

it in one pot. Then utilize the Ultimate School Voucher Plan statewide.

The long lamented gap between school districts in metropolitan areas and

those in poorer rural areas would quickly close, as private school competition

would enter markets that previously had no chance because the parents

had no financial means to support it. And the public schools would be

on a level playing field statewide, at a per capita budget close to what

is now in Fayette.

Over the next several years

of the plan, one of two things would happen. Either the public schools

would rise to meet the challenge of competition in the marketplace, resulting

in improved performance everywhere and lower costs, or the public schools

would go out of business. Either way, every student would still have a

number of fine schools to choose from and an Ultimate School Voucher to

shop with.

If you're thinking that this

plan sounds like it's from outer space, that is because you've been programmed

suck the life out of the public school system, financially and otherwise,

and leave a group of poor students stuck in a hopeless situation with

no way out. That is a lie.

First of all, no proposed school

voucher I've ever heard of in any district in the United States covers

as much as half of what that district is spending per student. Do the

math: If 20,000 students are spending $100 million ($5,000 per student)

and 10,000 of them each get at $3,000 voucher and go to private schools

(at a total cost of $30 million), the remaining 10,000 now have $70 million,

or $7,000 per student. That program would actually be a windfall for the

remaining students, and one is left to wonder in what type of school the

anti-voucher crowd learned basic math and economics.

The Establishment Clause argument

doesn't fly here, either. Using a government voucher to send your child

to a parochial school does not violate that statute any more than using

a portion of one's Social Security check to support a church or religious

practice.

You see, the reason the Ultimate

School Voucher Plan will never be implemented is that the voucher issue

is not about economics or the Constitution. It's about control the government's

wish to control how your tax dollars are spent and your right to educate

your child as you see fit, or as you believe God would have you do it.

Are some school systems, like

Fayette's, doing a much better job that others? Sure they are. Is the

government school system in this country as a whole doing the job? Not

need and deserve anytime in the near future? Not a chance.

Liberals insist that they are

the group that promotes choice, but nothing could be further from the

truth. They do not support choice regarding your right to bear arms. They

do not support choice regarding your health care. They do not support

choice regarding how you would fund your retirement. The only issue on

which liberals wholeheartedly agree on the right to choose, it seems,

is when it comes to killing your unborn children.

So you will likely hear more

in the coming months, especially during election season, about how school

vouchers would do irreparable damage to the nation's education system,

and politicians like Gov. Roy Barnes will placate the teachers' unions

with their loud rhetoric, none of which is based on logic or fact.

Meanwhile, millions of parents

will continue to sacrifice and dig deep into their own pockets to provide

educational alternatives for their children, taking comfort in the ever-widening

gap in quality between schools with limitless government funds and those

doing a far better job with much less. They will also continue to watch

the largest portion of their hard-earned tax dollars fall into the coffers

of a system that many of them stopped believing in a long time ago a system

that in most of the country is riddled with idiotic overregulation, intolerable

bureaucracies and insane political correctness.

It's the American way.