The failures of the public school system are many: students are barely keeping up with baseline academic expectations, many have simply stopped showing up at all, and the resources allocated to districts to address both of these problems (totaling in the hundreds of billions of dollars) apparently have disappeared.
Worse still, our public schools have all but stopped trying to fulfill their primary purpose: training students to be engaged, responsible citizens capable of self-government.
The abysmal literacy and mathematic proficiency rates in many public school districts are, of course, a part of this larger issue. But so, too, are the behavioral problems that have become commonplace in the classroom. A survey by the National Center for Education Statistics, for example, found that 46% of public schools in the United States have experienced an increase in violence and disruption…
