The Separation of School and State

Sep 26, 2026 · Prepared by @Dave

The Separation

Start with a distinction most debates skip past: “public education” and “public schools” are not the same thing. Public education is a goal — that every child, regardless of family income, gets a real shot at literacy, numeracy, and the habits of a functioning citizen. Public schools are one particular institutional arrangement for delivering that goal: government-owned buildings, government-employed staff, and a funding stream that follows the institution rather than the child.

We have quietly let the second thing swallow the first. “I support public education” gets treated as identical to “I support the public school system exactly as currently structured,” and any deviation from that structure gets read as an attack on the underlying goal. It isn’t. You can believe every child deserves a good education and still ask whether this particular delivery mechanism is the best one left standing.

And the numbers make that a fair question to ask. In Missouri, current per-pupil spending now runs about $14,241 a year, and total spending — including debt service and capital costs — is closer to $17,327, against a national average of roughly $16,526.¹ Multiply either figure by a 13-year K-12 career and you are well past $185,000 to $225,000 per child moving through the system. That is not a criticism of teachers, who are generally underpaid relative to the credentialing the state demands of them. It is an observation about the system wrapped around them: a lot of money is changing hands, and the people paying the bill — parents and taxpayers — have strikingly little say over how it is spent once it leaves their pocket.

That’s the actual problem, stated plainly: control and funding have come apart. Imagine if grocery stores worked the way school districts do. You’d pay taxes into a common pool, and a local “grocery board” — elected, but by a fraction of the neighborhood, and accountable in practice to a district administrator most people couldn’t name — would decide which grocery store your family is assigned to, what food it stocks, and what nutritional philosophy governs the menu, all within standards set from above by a state grocery administration that decides which foods qualify as nutritious enough to sell in the first place. Want to shop somewhere else? You can, but you’re paying twice: once through your taxes for the store you didn’t choose, and again out of pocket for the one you did. Nobody would defend that arrangement for groceries. We defend it for education only because we’ve never seriously entertained the alternative.

That is the separation this piece is arguing for — not the separation of children from education, but the separation of the goal of public education from the monopoly of public schools as its only legitimate vehicle. Public education can survive, even thrive, without the current arrangement being the only lawful way to deliver it.

The Divorce

Here is where most readers sort themselves into one of two camps, and it is worth being honest about that split before going any further.

The first camp believes the current system, whatever its flaws, is fundamentally sound and worth defending as-is: fully fund it, staff it well, elect better board members, and the institution will do what it was built to do. If that is where you land, this piece will not persuade you, and that’s fine — reasonable people can look at the same institution and reach different conclusions about whether it is worth saving or replacing.

The second camp has run out of patience with that answer. They have watched curriculum fights, budget fights, and culture fights repeat themselves in district after district, year after year, with no end in sight — and not all of them have a child currently sitting in a classroom. Some are taxpaying neighbors with no kids in the system at all, present or past, who simply want confidence that the money taken from them is being well spent. Whatever brought them here, they are ready to at least hear out an alternative that does not depend on winning every one of those fights forever.

This piece is written for the second camp. It is not an argument that public schools should be abolished, and it is not an argument that every family should be forced into some new arrangement. It is an argument that families who want a different vehicle for the same underlying goal — their child’s education — should be allowed to have one, without being required to pay for two educations at once in order to get it. Call it an amicable divorce: not the end of public education, but the end of public schools’ exclusive custody over it.

Child Support

If the goal is public education rather than public schools specifically, the funding principle that follows is simple: fund students, not systems. It’s worth being precise about who is who in that sentence: the student is the product of this system — the person it exists to educate — and the parent is the customer, the one who has to judge whether that product is worth what’s being paid for it. Money should be attached to the child and travel with them to whatever school — public, private, parochial, or otherwise — the parent judges best, rather than being attached to a building and a bureaucracy the family may or may not have chosen.

That idea only works, though, if three conditions are met first, and it is worth naming them plainly rather than assuming them away:

1. Transparent. Taxpayers, generally, are owed a plain account of where education money goes and what outcomes it buys in aggregate — the same accounting rigor we’d demand of any institution handling public funds at this scale. But once that money is disbursed to a specific family, a second, narrower standard takes over: it’s now a parent’s own money, spent on a specific product for their child, and the transparency owed shifts from a system’s public accounting to taxpayers, to an ordinary merchant’s accounting to its customer — real terms, a real price, and a plain account of what they’re getting for it, before they hand it over.
2. Fair. The mechanism cannot become a subsidy that only wealthier families can use in practice. If it does not genuinely open doors for families who cannot currently afford an alternative, it has failed at its core purpose.
3. Desirable. There have to be real, quality options for parents to choose between. A voucher is worthless if there is nowhere better for a family to spend it; growing the supply of good options matters as much as funding the demand for them.

This is the test any serious version of this proposal has to pass. Not “does it defund public schools” — that framing assumes the current arrangement is the baseline to be protected — but “does it get more children into a good education, verifiably, without pricing out the families who need the option most.”

The Plan

A change this size should not happen overnight, and it shouldn’t be pretended that it can. A phase-in over three years is more honest about the logistics involved, and it gives districts, families, and alternative providers time to actually build capacity rather than lurching from one system to a half-built other one.

Year One is a study year: an independent audit of actual per-pupil cost (not the headline figure, the real one, debt service and all), a survey of existing alternative-education capacity in the state, and the legislative groundwork — statutory language, oversight structure, an accreditation or verification mechanism for participating schools — so that Year Two does not begin from a standing start.

Year Two opens the door on a limited basis: a means-tested pilot, available first to lower- and middle-income families for whom the existing system is least able to offer any real alternative. The grant amount should track the actual cost of a private education rather than an arbitrary round number — Missouri’s statewide average private-school tuition currently runs about $11,335 a year (elementary averaging $11,055, high school $14,203)², and the pilot grant should be benchmarked to that figure rather than set below it, or the “desirable” condition from the last section fails before it starts.

Year Three widens eligibility based on what Year Two actually showed — not a fixed ideological target, but a genuine evaluation of whether the pilot delivered on transparency, fairness, and access to real alternatives. If it didn’t, the honest response is to fix it or stop, not to expand it anyway.

There are open questions this plan does not pretend to resolve on its own: how a verification or accreditation system avoids becoming its own captured bureaucracy, how rural areas with genuinely thin alternative-school markets are served, and how the transition affects a public system that will, at least initially, still be carrying most of the state’s fixed costs. Those are real design problems, not reasons to avoid starting the conversation.

Amicable Joint Custody

The deepest case for this isn’t financial, though the financial case is real. It’s that we have asked one government-run institution to be the single vessel for a values pluralism that Americans have never actually agreed on. Families disagree, sincerely and often permanently, about gun rights, about bathroom and locker-room policy, about the role religion should play in a child’s upbringing, about how to teach contested history. Forcing all of those families into one building with one policy on each question doesn’t resolve the disagreement — it just guarantees that every school-board meeting becomes the next battleground where somebody’s values lose.

Go back to the grocery store. Nobody expects one store to stock only the cereal the majority of families want, or only what the grocery administration approves; we solved that problem by having more than one store. Education is a stickier problem than breakfast cereal, but the underlying logic isn’t different: pluralism is easier to live with when people aren’t forced to share one building and one policy for every contested question. Let there be more than one store.

This is, in the end, a small-r republican argument, not a partisan one. Madison wrote in Federalist No. 45 that the powers reserved to the states “extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people.”³ Few things concern a family’s life and liberty more directly than how their child is raised and educated. A system that hands one government monopoly the final word on that question, for every family, regardless of what they believe, is not a neutral default — it is a choice, and it is one we are free to make differently.

If any state should be first to test that choice, it should be one with the least invested in defending the status quo. Missouri ranks 36th nationally in K-12 funding and 37th in overall spending¹ — a state that isn’t even winning by the current system’s own scorecard has the least to lose, and arguably the most to gain, by being the one to try something different. Missouri doesn’t need to wait for Washington, or for every other state to go first. It can simply go.

Notes

1. Missouri current per-pupil spending ($14,241) and total per-pupil spending ($17,327) are FY2024 figures; the national average ($16,526) is the FY2023 figure. Missouri’s rank among states (36th in K-12 funding, 37th in overall spending) is from the same source. Source: Education Data Initiative, “U.S. Public Education Spending Statistics”.
2. Missouri’s average private-school tuition ($11,335 statewide; $11,055 elementary; $14,203 high school) reflects the 2026–27 school year. Source: Private School Review, “Missouri Private Schools By Tuition Cost”.
3. James Madison, Federalist No. 45. Source: The Avalon Project, Yale Law School.

Comment or email federalist1@restoringamericanfederalism.com and let’s all discuss this.

American Federalism, a definition.

“The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.” (Emphasis added) James Madison, Federalist 45