Education

My analyses and proposals also hold interesting implications and opportunities for expanding the public school system. First, the system could be expanded to provide more vocational education for adults. Such programs would facilitate my proposal to offer training for experienced workers and would also create good jobs in the public sector.

Second, as mentioned in my discussion of child-care, one mechanism for providing affordable child-care would be to extend the public school system to include preschool programs for younger children.^[16] This suggestion would also serve to create new jobs in the public sector.

Together these two programs would also link people's lives more thoroughly to the public school system. And public support for the schools might increase as schools expanded their service capacity and became a focus for family and community services.

Finally, the principle of using social policy to reinforce desirable activity could be applied to stem the tide of parents' transferring their children from public to private schools. A particularly troubling aspect of this trend is that many parents who have opted out of the public school system are precisely the concerned activists who, had they stayed, would have expressed their dissatisfactions to teachers and school administrators, and thereby would have instigated changes and improvements.^[17] One way to encourage par-

ents to keep their children in the public schools would be to give students who attend public schools some degree of preferential treatment with respect to public financial aid for postsecondary education.