By Matt Friedeman
January 13, 2006

(AgapePress) - How about this for a contemporary Christian rock song: "Give public schools what they need. In the name of heaven, choice!" Add a screaming lead with a solid bass line, and you'll have a winner.

In recent decades, one of the major trends of education has been parents waking up to the public school system and recognizing that something is wrong, really wrong. Consequently, many have been removing their children from government schools and opting for private and homeschool alternatives. Now comes an Alabama-based group urging believers to embrace government education and improve it as best as they can.

Redeem the Vote! is even enlisting the help of Christian musicians to try and persuade believers to spend more money on public education.

Bad plan.

If you want public schools to improve, stir a good dose of free enterprise into the mix. Monopolies -- which is what public education is today -- don't work, plain and simple. They grow fat and sloppy, and in this case enamored with teacher benefits instead of academic accomplishment. Let private and homeschool possibilities compete on a level playing field with them and they will change, undoubtedly for the better.

An ABC special report called "Stupid in America" indicates what educational reformers have been preaching for decades -- the longer they spend in government schools, the worse students perform academically. John Stossel reports that ABC gave identical tests to high school students in New Jersey and Belgium; of course, the Belgians throttled the Americans. At age 10, interestingly enough, students from 25 countries take the same test and American kids place well above the international average. By age 15, Americans perform at well below the international average, even worse than in much poorer countries.

American schools, by comparison, are not helping our children.

And instead of pushing for more money -- which has never been shown to improve a broken system and instead tends to merely deliver a bigger and more broken one -- why not try something that has a proven track record in this country? Like ... competition.

Senator (and former education secretary) Lamar Alexander once predicted that sometime in the future puzzled graduate students would ask: "Now, please explain it one more time. Exactly why was it that America kept in place for so long a system that froze our schools in a time warp and denied to children of middle- and low-income families the same opportunity to choose the best schools for their children that fortunate families, like the children of presidents, senators, and U.S. representatives, enjoyed?"

Alexander would go on to say that higher education in this country has gotten it right, with choice and a system of competition that has produced world-class institutions at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Public education, and the gatekeepers of its poor-to-mediocre ways -- the National Educational Association -- protect the status quo while somehow leaving room for certain evangelicals to root for the government approach.

If Christian rock stars want a pedagogical cause, school-choice is a good one. Overwhelming majorities of blacks, whites, and Hispanics are for it. Or, if you want to be as inconsequential as many modern Christian songs -- root for more money and more kids for the status quo.