From Karl Priest, state coordinator of Exodus Mandate-West Virginia, which promotes Christian education and home schooling....

WEST Virginians recently learned that the 2007 Regional Spelling Bee was won by a Christian school student and the state Geography Bee was won by a home-schooled student.

Christian school students perform higher than public school students on standardized achievement tests such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

The NAEP is known as the "Nation's Report Card," and has been given to representative samples of students for decades. The 2006 Nation's Report Card revealed some embarrassing statistics comparing Christian schools and public schools.

Some public school supporters have tried to tweak the results so public schools do not look so bad. That is what is likely to be seen in media reports.

What the testing actually showed was that students in Christian schools had (I quote) "a higher average score than their counterparts in public schools."

Also, home-schooled children easily top public school students in terms of achievement. Homes-schooled students score almost 10 percent higher than the average public high school student on the ACT.

Patrick Henry College, near the District of Columbia, has about 85 percent home-schooled students. It has twice defeated Oxford University in debating. Over 700 colleges and universities admit home-schooled students.

Previously, big wins in national academic competitions spurred some people to complain that children educated in home schools and Christian schools have an "unfair advantage."

They do have an advantage: They do not go to public schools.

West Virginia spends over $8,000 per student per year. That comes to over $200,000 for a class of 25 students.

Nationally over $10,000 is spent per student, and school spending has tripled over the last 30 years.

It costs a lot less to educate a student for a year in a home school or even a Christian school, and those schools are not dependent on tax-funded resources.

Free economics are always more efficient and unleash the God-given, creative potential of individuals. The more the government controls any enterprise, the less effective it becomes.

Private education can be accomplished with existing resources and save the taxpayer money.

It's time for a paradigm shift from our dependence on public schools. We cannot tinker with the system and make it work.

Public schools are in serious trouble. The system is broken at the foundations, and it is futile to try to reform it.

Winning a local skirmish takes considerable sacrifice of time and effort, and then the small policy change cannot be monitored unless a parent makes a living policing public schools.

The problem is not with a particular version of state-sponsored education, but with the very idea of it.

State education has been a major instrument in the hands of secular humanists in de-Christianizing American society. Parents should give up the delusion of public school reform and put their energies into creating more opportunities for giving children an education away from public schools.

The reasons for abandoning public schools were apparent by the mid-1990's. What we lacked was an organized movement to carry it out.

The Exodus Mandate plan (www.exodusmandate-wv.org/) is the only one with a chance of sustainable success. It will result in a resurgence of values that will dramatically benefit our culture. Graduates of non-public education could reverse this nation's moral decline.

Our goal is the development of a new system of education that is open to the public, but not controlled by unions or politicians. We want to raise respectable and contributing members of society who uphold the basic freedoms and moral standards upon which America was established.