Petitioning to make all schools private

Robyn Miller is proud to call herself a "school Sakharov" - as in Andrei Sakharov, the former Soviet physicist who boldly denounced his own government.

"He had been on the inside, and so he was able to tell the world the truth about what the system was really like," explains the former public-school teacher who lives in Billings, Mont.

The system Ms. Miller is eager to expose is not a communist dictatorship. In fact, many would call it as American and wholesome as apple pie. It is the United States public-school system, which, according to Miller, wastes money, destroys children, and "causes nothing but misery."

As a young teacher, Miller says she watched the second- and third-grade children in her care "being run through a conveyor belt and warehoused" by a centralized and highly institutional form of education. When her own children started school, she says it broke her heart to see how quickly their initial energy and enthusiasm turned to boredom and alienation.

Miller now home-schools all four of her children, and she is one of several thousand Americans who have signed their names to the petition produced by the Fresno, Calif.-based Separation of School & State Alliance (SS&SA), which calls for a complete end to government involvement in education funding, attendance, and content. She is joined by, among others, US Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, Colorado state Sen. John Andrews, award-winning teacher John Paul Gatto, and an eclectic mix of fundamentalist Christian, Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim clergy.

The drive to completely separate the school system from the state may represent only a fringe element of US public opinion (the group's aim is to collect 1 million signatures by 2001, but so far it has only 8,700). Some observers call the movement simply an extreme extension of the current enthusiasm for applying free-market principles to education.

But others say the fact that the six-year-old SS&SA exists at all is a telling commentary on the depth of public discontent with the nation's schools. They suggest that, in addition to the burgeoning number of home-schoolers and the drive to return more schooling to the care of churches, the SS&SA is a sign that the common school system is unraveling.

"I'm not sure that a strong voice calling for a complete pullout [of the government from education] resonates with a lot of folks," says Mary Fulton, policy analyst for the Education Commission of the States, in Denver.

With the growth of vouchers and charter schools in the past few years diffusing some of the parental discontent, she says, "there are now fewer people who want to completely dismantle the school system."

But on the other hand, Ms. Fulton says, "many Americans want to see [the public schools] improve dramatically and are ready to try alternatives."

Pockets of extreme disaffection are found in various corners. Some Christian groups urge parents to "rescue" their children by pulling them from secular state-run schools. Exodus 2000 in Columbia, S.C., Exodus Project in St. Paul, Minn., and Rescue 2010, headquartered in Irvine, Calif., are all aimed at expediting the flow of students from the public-school system into church-run schools.

Page: 1 | 2