GET GOVERNMENT OUT OF SCHOOLS' BUSINESS TEACHERS SHOULD OWN SCHOOLS, OFFER THEIR SERVICES TO FAMILIES.

Byline: Charles D. Van Eaton Local View

LIKE so many other large urban districts, the Los Angeles Unified School District is a monster that devours its own children. All throughout the system, every player points the finger of blame at everyone else.

Left out of the process - indeed, held hostage by the process - are the real children and their parents and guardians.

There is a solution.

Teachers should be allowed to own their own schools, and sell their services to the parents and guardians of their true ``customers.''

Those parents who want to employ teachers should be given vouchers which the recipient ``private'' schools would redeem at the old district office for hard cash.

The teacher-owned schools would use part of the proceeds to pay rent for current buildings or to find their own space if the district is not willing to negotiate in good faith. The rest of the voucher proceeds would be used for school operations, including ``teacher-owner'' compensation.

There are some teachers who would prefer to stay in the old government- owned system and operate under the current ``blame-everyone-else'' culture. However, to change the system and get rid of the self-serving corruption that now defines it, it's only necessary for some teachers to move into this new paradigm. Once begun, what is now a school system would gradually become a system of schools - and the two are qualitatively different.

One of the constant and thoughtless arguments against vouchers and the system of parental choice that flows from vouchers is the silly idea that if parents were empowered to choose the schools their children attend, and if teachers are permitted to create new schools, parents may choose schools run by persons other than ``education professionals.''

The fundamental problem with this argument is that as the system is presently structured, teachers can scarcely be called professionals. Only when parents are given the power to choose the schools their children will attend, and teachers and others are given the right to own and operate their own schools, will teaching return to being what it once was - a pure profession in which service providers were compensated in direct relation to their professional competence as measured by parents on behalf of their own children.

Modern government schooling is relatively new in American history. It has existed only since 1852 and started with the Massachusetts Legislature's establishment of what became know as ``common schools.''

The idea that government should mandate and fully control the manner in which children should learn, and government should be both the provider and producer of educations services, eventually spread to the rest of the country.

Did this mark the beginning of measurable improvement in the average citizen's level of education?

In the 230 years of American history, reading, writing and arithmetic, the subjects upon which all others are dependent, were taught at home. Schooling at higher levels was available at private academies and colleges such as the Boston Latin School, Harvard, The College of William and Mary, etc., but primary learning took place at home and, sometimes and in some places, by contract with private teachers (then known as schoolmasters) who often worked out of their own homes.

Did it work? Was America a literate and numerically competent society before government entered the picture?

In 1776, Tom Payne wrote ``Common Sense'' and sold 150,000 copies. That's equivalent to selling 18 million copies of a book today.

Between 1813 and 1823, Walter Scott sold 5 million copies of his novels in the United States. That's the equivalent of 60 million copies today.

In 1818, Noah Webster estimated that more than 5 million copies of his Spelling Book had been sold in a country with a population below 20 million, and every purchase decision was made freely by an individual or family because there was no government-run education system that controlled textbook selection.

In 1812, Pierre Du Pont de Nemours published ``Education in the United States,'' and marveled that fewer than four in every thousand could not read and do numbers well. (Compare that with the recent U.S. Education Department report that nearly 50 percent of American adults are functionally illiterate.)

Without compulsory schooling, how were families able to develop these skills in their children and what role was played by professional teachers? Families made their own educational decisions, and invented the materials used for instruction.

Formal schooling services outside the home, if parents wanted it to prepare their children for the advanced academies and colleges, could be had from schoolmasters for a tuition fee.

Many of these schoolmasters moved from community to community holding school for a few months each in different towns. In some cases, townships, the most basic unit of government in early America, would provide a place for these itinerant schoolmasters. The final responsibility for assuring that children acquired reading, writing and numerical skills rested with families.

Just as these teachers had to meet the test of parental choice and approval, so also the pupils sent to them had to meet the schoolmaster's test of readiness because for the first 200 years of our history most schoolmasters wouldn't accept children who couldn't read and do numbers.

In this setting, teachers had to demonstrate to their ``customers'' that they were worth hiring, and ``parent-customers'' had to demonstrate to teachers that they would participate in their child's learning.

Whether one is talking about teaching, practicing medicine or doing anything that requires higher learning, such is the essence of what it means to be a professional.

As states and communities are moving to rethink the way education services are going to be structured and financed, we are confronted with a great mystery.

We had a perfectly literate country before the advent of government schooling in 1852. What on earth has happened since? Why aren't we a literate society in the present well-schooled era?

Why indeed? Maybe one of the reasons is a misunderstanding of what it mean to be a professional educator, and the equally mistaken assumption that professionalism and ``customer'' compulsion can coexist.

Parental choice combined with giving teachers the right to create and own their own schools will not just empower parents, it will empower and fully professionalize teachers.

What really stands in the way is a politicized bureaucracy which has come to exist for its own purposes, and a core of teachers who have essentially given up and decided to play the game. Not until that is brought to an end - even if change begins only at the margin - will teaching truly become a professional activity.

I cannot think of a better place to begin this return - revolution if you please - to first principles than Los Angeles.