It's a political problem. The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are unions. You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and the dropping of SAT scores, and they're inversely proportional. The problems are unions in schools. The problem is bureaucracy. I'm one of those people who believes the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system.
I have a 17-year-old daughter who went to a private school for a few years before high school. This private school is the best school I've seen in my life. It was judged one of the 100 best schools in America. It was phenomenal. The tuition was $5500 a year, which is a lot of money for most parents. But the teachers were paid less than public school teachers --- so it's not about money at the teacher level. I asked the state treasurer that year what California pays on average to send kids to school, and I believe it was $4400. While there are not many parents who could come up with $5500 a year, there are many who could come up with $1000 a year.
If we gave vouchers to parents for $4400, schools would be starting right and left. People would get out of college and say, "Let's start a school." You could have a track at Stanford within the MBA program on how to be the business-person of a school. And the MBA would get together with somebody else, and they'd start schools. And you'd have these young, idealistic people starting schools working for pennies.