Talking Points;

1) The first Public School act in Michigan was in 1871, it was enforced after 1900.  People got along fine without public schools.  Many presidents never went to school, and most never went to Public Schools.

2) The essence of Home schooling is not schooling at all. It's really education. These children soon become self motivated and extremely successful since they have the time and opportunity to reflect, and noodle stuff out on thieir own. Young people need time, and the opportunity to ask questions from  a host of adults so that they can form long term individualized goals, to sift out what is important from what is just noise in their lives.

3)  Prolonged schooling does not cause economic success, but rather correlates with being smarter, having a better family background, having the money to go to school, etc. It might be that kids who finish high school, and college would do better in life if they didn’t spend the time and money.  

4) The public schools are designed to produce uniformity; they are the last assembly line of the industrial age. In the future, being and thinking like everyone else will be a liability as technology and the economy demand ever greater specialization and individualization, skills that the public schools discourage.  The blunt truth is that employers pay high wages for uncommon skills, not for years soldiering on in pursuit of “education”.

5) True training for jobs is available anywhere else but at the public schools. One can gain the credentials for maybe a thousand skills like Microsoft certified systems engineer, stock broker or airconditioning repairman,  at the Sylvan Learning centers.  Most are in areas in which the test taker can qualify only by studying on his own. There are no courses offered anywhere for these skills, or if they are, they are given by and paid for by private companes, often manufacturers.  Kids need time to qualify for these tests, and going to school interferes with and distracts them from  trying to improve themselves for their own good.

6) Goals for "public education" should be limited to supporting learning reading writing, and arithmetic, setting the groundwork for self education in any field that the student wishes.  Other muddled goals of the public schools such as uncalculating citizenship, moral or other religious values, prevention of crime, integration, preparation for careers, day care centers for kids while the parents work, etc. are either chimerical, or too subject to ideology to be invoked in justifying public expenditures.

7) I will work for unrestricted vouchers for all students until age 16, and nothing thereafter. The vouchers could be used in an open market of schools, including home schooling, private academies, parochial and religious schools, and public schools.  The charter school cap should be lifted immediately, as a transition.  The only involvement of the state would be annual testing  of students until age 14.  The tests would be for accomplishment only, and be given each year, culminating in testing of reading/understanding the state and federal constitutions and simple mathematics like addition and subtraction.  Failure would mandate repeat testing at the failed level; a student failing more than three successive tests at that  level would no longer receive the annual voucher.  The state has no interest in failure, no matter what the cause.

Any child (and there will be plenty of home schooled ones) who can pass the highest level of testing can use the remaining funds allocated to his account for higher academic education or self training in any field of interest.