Our Nation Needs School Vouchers Let's face it: public schools are failing. SAT scores have steadily declined since 1960. Results from other tests of public high school students conducted by independent research groups show a serious decline in the quality of public education in recent decades. A national voucher system would be a good start to restoring competition and parental choice in education. Accompanying the steady decline in the quality of education has been a significant increase in the cost of public schools. Spending per student in public schools has increased more than 400% in real terms since World War II. Much of the increased spending went to funding a bloated and expensive administrative bureaucracy, not to putting more teachers in classrooms. The number of administrative employees in the public school system is now almost equal to the number of teachers. The decline in academic quality in our increasingly high-cost public schools indicates that something is fundamentally wrong with the current system. Public education suffers from problems of inefficiency, declining quality, and rising costs that result when an organization is protected from competition. Insulated from competition, public schools face no pressure to operate efficiently or provide a high-quality educational product. Indeed, operating efficiently undermines the public education bureaucracy's agenda, because efficiency would lead to reduced funding. Perverse incentives are in place to ensure the failure of public schools: the worse the public education, the more money and resources will be spent. allocated to try to solve the education "problem". Providing an inferior product will result... middle of paper... resources would be redirected from inefficient and failing schools to more effective and successful schools. In other words, the competitive forces unleashed by a voucher program would give us better schools in the United States for less. Nothing is more important than our children's education. There is no surer way to ensure that our children continue to receive an increasingly substandard education than to continue to insulate public schools from the same market forces that would promote higher quality education at lower prices. Our country has achieved the highest standard of living in the history of the world by encouraging and promoting competition and choice in the marketplace, not by limiting the choices available to consumers. A voucher system would be a good start to restoring competition and parental choice in education.