By "demolish" I was referring to the entire government education bureaucracy. As you suggested, the real estate and any other valuable property should be sold and, in some cases, be repurposed into private schools.

Sowell appears to support DeVos and the various ruses sadly are not really Private education but instead a shift in when public funding goes. That has done little toward educating with Private schools, which should be the real objective.

It's unnecessary to "demolish" anything, School premises can be sold or leased to anyone, most likely they'd be of interest to educational entities, many of such being new Private companies/associations formed and funded by parents realizing their newfound need to take full responsibility for their offspring and finding no further tax bills for public education.

I revere the founding fathers and I am amazed at their wisdom, however, they only considered a narrow slice of society to be capable of absorbing education or being able to manage on their own or to vote. For their time, they were very socially liberal and I do not judge them by today's standards. It is because of them that we have developed into a largely classless society and have become inclusive. In Jefferson's world anyone worthy of receiving an education either had the means to pay for it or had family or other benefactors that would see to it. Perhaps left to develop on its own, communities will see the value of universal education and voluntarily chip in for the less fortunate but I think Mrs Devos is going to need vouchers.

Rather than adding to the confusion, it might be enlightening to read what Mr. Jefferson had to say about the goals of public education:
To give every citizen the information he needs tor the transaction of his own business; To enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts and accounts, in writing; To improve, by reading, his morals and faculties; To understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and to discharge with competence to functions confided to him by either; To know his rights, to exercise with order and justice those he retains, to choose with discretion the fiduciary of those he delegates; and to notice their conduct with diligence, with candor, and judgement; And in general, to observe with intelligence and faithfulness all the social relations under which he shall be placed.
Mr. Jefferson suggests that the schools focus on reading, writing, arithmetic, geometry and on the "outlines of history" and geography in order to achieve these objectives.
Perhaps Mrs. Devos can re-start us toward these goals, by elimination of the Federal control of education and related bureaucracy./

God bless Mr. Sowell. May he continue to come out of retirement from time to time to comment on things that need commenting on.

Close. Eliminate ALL income taxes. Income taxation is the new and approved slavery (it allows the lawful stealing of a person's work product w/o his/her concent -- that is slavery). FairTax ends that and makes taxation transparent, fair and controlled by the people on a day to day basis.

Excellent.........thank you. BT On both posts.

"... I think that the best education is community driven and it starts with parents."

A great big YES !!!! BT

(edited) I forgot something. The condition of the school buildings themselves. My grandfather said the ones I attended were built in the 1910s and 20s. By the time I got there, they were a mess. Holes in the walls with asbestos hanging out, broken desks, broken doors, broken windows, broken heating. A teacher once told me I wasn't allowed to wear my coat to class even though it was snowing on my desk. They were afraid students were smuggling in weapons in their winter coats (as a matter of fact, I was carrying a knife [couldn't sneak the gun out of the house] all year round, coat or no coat). I told her to stuff it.
All but the main door were chained shut because of students sneaking out and intruders sneaking in. God help us if there had ever been a serious fire.
Then the vermin. Ah, the vermin. Cockroaches and rats. The biggest rats I ever saw. One day, in my English lit class, a girl who was sitting next to a heating grate screamed her head off. Something big was moving across the grate. We thought it was a cat, until we saw the tail. Huge rat.
There were bats in the ventilator system. I can't help but wonder what we were breathing. I know bat caves are toxic to humans.
Your tax dollars at work, folks!

If you examined the free-market revolution that New Zealand implemented back in the 80s you'd see that your idea of getting it all over with has merit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogerno...
I visited during this period and later. The improvement in customer service alone was astounding.
Make changes slowly and the bureaucrats will disrupt everything to hang on to power. (The recent irrational demonstrations against Trump's presidency are one example.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTmfw...

In the event you did not hear, she was confirmed!!!!!!!!!!!! yippy

I was a ghetto rat, and know first-hand about the abysmal schools therein. Let's see, where to begin.
I attended Detroit Public Schools in the 70s. In every school I attended, there was a teacher who was a paedophile. Everybody in the schools knew it; nobody did anything about it. If someone made a stink loud enough to rock the boat, the cops weren't called. The offending teacher was just moved to another school. The union protected them.
There were never enough books. We had to share them. The taxpayer money was also supposed to supply us kids with pencils, paper and equipment. Note the "supposed to" in there. At each level of administration, as federal money passed from Washington to the schools, everybody took their cut. There was nothing left by the time the school principals took their final cut. For example, in my high school biology class, 45 kids had to make do with 3 antiquated microscopes.
Since Detroit's population has dropped a lot I'm sure this no longer applies, but in the 70s, overcrowding was massive. The classes were intended to hold 25-30 kids each. Ours were 45+. The desks were crammed in so tight that you had to climb over the rows to get in or out.
I don't know if it was burnout or they just didn't give a damn, but teacher apathy was standard. We got bare-bones-minimum education. Just enough to pass the federally-mandated tests. Sometimes they spent the whole school year teaching us the literal tests. I don't know if the same tests were administered every year or they somehow fraudulently obtained copies, but they were exact matches. Some teachers didn't even show up for class. My high school history teacher used to blow in at the beginning of class, hand us quiz papers that were multiple choice, true or false and matching questions, then blow right back out. She never collected them again for grading.
Since funding depended solely on the number of students moving up from grade to grade and graduating, nobody got left back. I graduated with three people who couldn't read.
You didn't graduate from Detroit Public Schools, you survived them. It was jungle law. The object of your education was to obtain the necessary skills to avoid being beaten, shot, stabbed, or raped.
Since parent apathy was as prevalent as teacher apathy, I don't know if local parent-driven school systems will work in every community. But perhaps if it is no longer a federal juggernaut, things will change for the better.

A GI Bill paid-for college course in basic logic may have helped some, though I can't see even that helping the bulk of libtards see the light.
I must confess that I felt all puffed up with self-importance when I verbally announced that one of my selected courses would be "Phi-lo-so-phy 101." Like woooo lookie me, baby!
Oh, well, having lived through it, I hold the opinion that real maturity does not set in until age 30, the citizen termination age of Logan's Run but by then I was already a conservative..
Still, I was 30 when I came to that conclusion.

At least you could THINK. That activity is becoming rarer.

It was WHEN I finally reasoned out on my own (and I never heard of Ayn Rand until I put AS1 into my Netflix DVD queue) that socialism amounted to slow death that I disowned it.
Up until then like any libtard, I operated under the delusion that I was on a road to a to each according to their needs Candy Mountain.
Liberalism may be a mental disorder, to quote Michael Savage, but some of its sucked-in victims can and do find a way to heal themselves.

There should be a separation between state and education as there should be between state and anything it can mandate. If the state is involved in education it will always teach the children that socialism, communism, tyranny of any name is actually freedom and institute slavery to the state by raising up the slaves who will demand it. Don't let fear that if you abolish the department immediately and remove their ability to tax for education that education itself will disappear, it will right itself almost immediately if you leave the money (property) of the individual with the individual they will make the best choices for their children.

So what does the perfect education system look like?

The Federal Government has zero place in education according to the Constitution. The Department of Education should be closed down permanently and no Federal funds should be going to education in any way shape or form. Why? Because effective management of anything does not come at arm's length - and particularly in government.

States have the Constitutional authority to involve themselves in education, but if they get involved they should limit themselves to the funding - not the policy or standards.

Personally, I think that the best education is community driven and it starts with parents. Parents have to have a hand in examining the curriculum and then determining how they want their children to be educated - and then pay for it. That's the problem with the public education system we have - parents have little or no say in the matter from either a curriculum or an expense perspective.

I support giving parents lots of options - from internet-based learning (Khan Academy is excellent for hard sciences) to parochial schools to charter schools and home schooling. The only caution I would give is that part of an education is in the social graces that can only be taught in a group setting. I know many home schoolers who are technically very astute, but are socially not just awkward, but infantile. I don't think any true learning comes without practice, and many of the social skills require a LOT of practice.

If a representative is bought and paid for by unions he or she has to do their bidding. Once the votes are counted we will know who they are ;-)

Do they allow witnesses testify at confirmation hearings? If so, he should be invited.

If the only choices were dying as fodder in a foreign war or socialism, I can understand why you might have thought you preferred socialism as you get to die a longer slower death although the socialists do not make that long term plan clear. Fortunately those are not the only choices.

mediocrity is what the government run schools strive to accomplish. It would be wonderful if Mr. Sowell could/would address the congress.

I once called myself a socialist but I was angry young man twisted all up by the Vietnam War, the protest movement and getting drafted.
Supply clerk me did not go to Vietnam but bitter feelings expressed by fellow Marines (some having been there) only reinforced my opinion that servicemen and the young adults of America were all getting screwed.
Looking back, we WERE all getting screwed. I'm just no longer a socialist. Why? I concluded during the late 70s that those who sought socialism were only screwing themselves.
Incompetent Jimmy Carter (who I voted for before I voted for Reagan)) and genocidal maniac Pol Pot were influences. Reagan's speeches too.

That's my Plan B.

Re: “The problem is that we have a huge structure to demolish and it would be nice to do so in the least disruptive way possible.” The existence of entrenched educational bureaucrats, strong teachers unions and violent student “activists” guarantees that ending government control of education will be extremely disruptive. Look at the statist opposition amassed against charter schools and school choice. Look at the mud being thrown at Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Education. I favor going the disruptive route and getting rid of the whole mess as quickly as possible.