There is a reason so many politicians can’t solve the financial crisis. They are not smart enough and for that matter neither is the publicly schooled public who elected them. However, there is a way to solve both problems at the same time. Privatize education.

In the Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, they wrote a list of ways to bring about communism. Their “Top 10” list included “Free education for all children in public schools” as Number 10. It is time to teach the Communist Manifesto and stop living it. Imagine the investment capital flooding into the government coffers when the sale takes place and again every year when the corporation is taxed on its profits.

School districts could sell or lease schools to private educational upstarts. Competition is the key ingredient in defining and determining quality. Centralized planning has proven a disaster though it is doubtful that high school students – most born after the collapse of the Soviet Union- would know. It is individuals making personal decisions en masse that move the market in the direction it needs to go.

Let’s do the math. A 400-student elementary school would generate $4 million in annual sales. How many people would quickly invest in a business that instantly began with million dollar sales? Finding investors would be simple. Keeping clients would be a bit more difficult. That is the essence of competition.

Schools would have to find their niche. The math school, the technology school, the special needs school. Every school would do what it took to be successful and school success would be defined by the number of students who return satisfied that last year’s education was worthwhile. Sure, schools would fail, but unlike government-run schools they would be allowed to fail gracefully and swiftly. They would not linger in failure from one generation to the next.

Profit is the sterling-silver word caked in mud as if profit from a child is heathen, dirty and untouchable. Profit motivates hard work and customer service. This would eliminate the half-day parent-teacher conferences where contractual language bargained to unions allow every parent to be inconvenienced so that one teacher will still get to leave at 3 PM every day of the year. Profit motivation would add those days back to teaching and learning.

The opposite of profit-driven schools is not non-profit schools but non-efficient schools. Spending other people’s money rather than their own, the schools bungle through projects that are more whim than cost-effective, customer-driven, value-added programs.

Regardless of what the local teacher union president says in the newspaper, a guaranteed income and job security for life never made anyone a better teacher. Quality comes from incentive. If President-elect Obama can choose Sidwell Friends school because it is the “right fit” for his children, why can he not see that it is competition that helped create the right fit?

It is time to allow students and parents to make their own choice about their right fit. And their decision should be "Private."