An Essay on The Free Market and Education:

Being the son of a single mother who is a teacher I often hear about how there are certain colleagues and peers who do not shape up. To be specific, most of the complaints are that these teachers do not care about the success of the students and are lazy/unmotivated to teach. Over the years, I have been party to many a conversation on issues like this but it was only recently that I began looking for a solution. In this essay, I am going to hopefully explain/ persuade people of why having the government in charge of education hasn't achieved the results most were hoping for and why the free market, as in virtually every case, is the solution everyone wants but for some reason people are afraid to articulate.
I'd like to begin by explaining the failures of government education. For decades the federal government has been in charge of the education for the children of the U.S. For having such a monopoly on the market of education, one might expect that students would be showing gradual improvements in test scores and in overall academic performance. Unfortunately, the opposite is true as standardized test scores have flat lined:
http://educationbythenumbers.org/…/high-school-test-scores…/
The reason this is happening is because whenever a monopoly is established in any market and is either sponsored by or created by the State there is no competition. Where there is no competition, there is no incentive to ever improve or innovate new methods of doing things. The widespread distaste and rejection of Common Core only further corroborates my claims:
http://blogs.edweek.org/…/why_the_common_core_will_be_decla…
So then people are probably wondering, if government education has failed miserably, then what is the solution? The solution is to allow the free market to works its wonders and mitigate any outliers. Allow me to make my case. Referring back to the conversations I've had about complaints over unmotivated teachers, there is a reason why these teachers are allowed to continue teaching. If these individuals are professors all they need to do is teach long enough to get tenure and then they are impossible to fire. The same largely goes for other public school employees. The existence of forced, involuntary teacher unions also contributes to the inability of bad teachers to be fired. I want to emphasize the involuntary nature of teachers unions in there present form so as not to mislead people. Just so to be clear; teacher unions are not bad, its just when they are involuntary and a prerequisite for being hired to a position. In the free market, teachers would be free to form their own voluntary unions and negotiate with their employers on job details. After all, the employer needs the teachers in order to have a business at all, so the idea that the employers would just reject and veto the concerns of the teachers is largely ridiculous.
When we have a free market in education, those teachers that actually care about teaching and are dedicated to seeing their students thrive will be rewarded for their efforts. If you are a good teacher, you have nothing to worry about. Bad teachers on the other hand will actually face termination for failing to live up to the standards of whomever employs them. Its amazing what facing the loss of ones job can do for motivation. Those who do not step up to the plate are let go and are free to find something better to do with their talents and energy.
In conclusion, for all of the above reasons, I believe that more teachers should be in favor of the free market, and should be much more skeptical and cautious when evaluating the results of 40 years of exclusive government education. I should give credit to the teachers who inspired these ideas within me. Those teachers include Mark Oppe, Sherri Lynn Wall, Stefan Molyneux, Steven Shannon, Destiny Neade, Kevin Coughlin, Lars Hansen, Sean McKenzie, Jeff Hamlin, Ben Johnson, Heather Johnson, Mary Peterburs, Natalie Luther, and Karen Lavryk-Stern. Anyone who would like to give feedback/criticism is free to do so. I always appreciate being corrected when I have made an error. Thank you for your time and consideration.