Businessman Bob Luddy has created a system of North Carolina private schools that cost less than the current public school system. We should strive to optimize public schools as efficiently as he has.
Luddy is the libertarian owner of CaptiveAire, The United States’ largest kitchen ventilation system manufacturer. When speaking with employees of his company, Luddy realized many of them didn’t possess basic skills in math and science.
Because these employees weren’t equipped by their education, advancing through the company’s ranks was extremely difficult.
Luddy decided the North Carolina public school system failed to prepare its students for the workforce, so he tried to convince school board officials to do something about the quality of public education.
While these bureaucrats were happy to listen to Luddy’s ideas, no one in the state government actually planned to do anything he suggested. He realized he couldn’t get into the existing establishment when he ran for a school board position and lost in 1997.
After creating a successful charter school, Franklin Academy, Luddy decided the restrictions imposed on public schools would soon be extended to charter schools. These restrictions include mandates to have sports teams, bus transportation and other costs that can be easily avoided.
Realizing charter schools wouldn’t be sustainably low-cost either, Luddy founded a system of inexpensive private schools named Thales Academy. It costs $5300 each year for elementary school and $6000 for middle and high school. Thales Academy is nonprofit.
Compared to the $9,300 spent per student in North Carolina’s public schools, Luddy’s system seems like a breath of fresh air.
We’re currently wasting money in our school systems on meaningless statistics like student-to-teacher ratios and ridiculous sporting areas tacked onto every new elementary school.
All fourth graders don’t need immediate access to a hundred sports activities at the cost of their education and our tax dollars.
By creating a network of small schools that minimize superfluous cost, Luddy has managed to maximize the efficiency of education. For example, let’s look at class sizes. Most North Carolina elementary schools randomly assign students of the same age to a class and try to keep that class size down to 15 for every teacher.
Luddy’s plan, however, sorts students into classes of 25 but makes sure that each class has nearly the same grasp on whatever is being taught. This keeps costs much lower than traditional schooling and streamlines the learning for every child.
This is the future of public education, or, at the very least, the beginning of its end. Luddy’s elegant, libertarian school design costs 57 percent of traditional public education per student. We are wasting tax dollars on a bad education.
dylmoore@umail.iu.edu
