Charters Vouchers and Parochial Schools Putting Local Public Schools Out of Business in Kansas City. It's a race to the…what?

It was bound to happen. Lost taxpayer funding for public schools is shifting that system over to a fickle, for profit market based educational model. From there, the smaller schools will be absorbed by the larger national corporate businesses, and prices will rise according to investor expectations.

That in turn will result in K-12 savings accounts, segregated school populations and an unregulated curriculum that will leave us who-knows-where in the global market place. Without standardized testing or a baseline curriculum nationwide for all of our different systems, competitiveness worldwide will be a total unknown, leaving the nations economy up in the air. Oh, and it's happening now:

AP: Kansas City (is) on the brink of bankruptcy and considering another bold move: closing nearly half its schools to stay afloat. And to this day, the district continues to lose students. In the late 1960s enrollment peaked at 75,000, dropped to 35,000 a decade ago and now sits at just under 18,000.

Only about half of Kansas City's elementary school students and about 40 percent of middle and high school students now attend the city's public schools. Many of the other students have left for publicly funded charter schools, private and parochial schools and the suburbs.

And while the public continues to ignore the fact that private school costs will soon match public schools, as larger numbers of students enroll and costly infrastructure in built, the problem of funding will not go away. As long as free market bubbles are allowed to burst, devastating state economies, budgets will not be able to support education and our competitive place in the world. In fact, after a decade and a half of trimming costs, schools are cutting through the bone to make ends meet:

FoxNews: A small but growing number of school districts across the country are moving to a four-day week, in a shift they hope will help close gaping budget holes and stave off teacher layoffs, but that critics fear could hurt students' education. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers , was critical of the shift. "The budgetary pressure makes doing more reform more difficult," she said in a statement.

Of the nearly 15,000-plus districts nationwide, more than 100 in at least 17 states
currently use the four-day system, according to data culled from the Education Commission of the States. Dozens of other districts are contemplating making the change in the next year — a shift that is apt to create new challenges for working parents as well as thousands of school employees.

Get ready for the cost of child care and K-12 savings accounts. If all of this is supposed to make life easier for parents, giving them the freedom and liberties promised by tea party patriots, then maybe this will wake people up.