President-elect Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle chose to place their children in a private Washington D.C. school, which is understandable considering security issues and the failed D.C. public schools. The important question is, what will the new president do to reform the public education system, which has been a national disgrace for a very long time?

Mandatory, public-funded education of our children became a gross failure of good intentions. Particularly, when the academic social and political Left (progressives, reformers, socialists, or whatever you want to call them) infected the education establishment and unionized, with tenure.

What was once a well-educated society in America, has been dumbed-down by public education factories of ignorance, many of which have become warehouses of violence. Emphasis on core academics, such as math, reading and science, were replaced by irresponsible experimentation, outcome-based education, social promotion and grade inflation. Educators simply robbed students of their education, replaced essential education with social and political indoctrination, and graduated high school students who were functionally illiterate.

Though President Bush made an attempt at education reform with the "No child left behind" program," there is no indication that it has made a significant difference. Certainly not in California, the nation's money pit of miseduction. Sadly, even if he wanted to, the new president will find it difficult, if not impossible, to reform education because the failure is deeply-rooted by generations of poorly educated students, many of whom became poorly educated or unqualified teachers, and some of whom became unqualified college instructors, university professors, education administrators and school board members. It's simply a matter of the poorly educated attempting to teach the uneducated. That's why we are having such difficulty in the job market and competing in the marketplace, and that's why we are either exporting jobs or importing qualified workers.

Real education should not be limited to the intellectual, privileged few. And it will not be restored to America until the government monopoly on education is broken, along with the selfish interests of powerful teacher unions, who have thrown up the barriers to vouchers and choice. Education must be privatized to gain excellence in education by competition, at half the price. Maybe this could become the upside of a down economy and budget deficits.