Perhaps because it’s what most Americans grew up with, we tend to assume that “public education” must mean public entities building and controlling schools, and students going wherever they are assigned by their home address. It’s a system that has failed us for decades, yet many people can imagine nothing else. Thankfully, public education doesn’t have to be this way.

In today’s New York Daily News, Fordham University professor Bruce Cooper introduces a simple but powerful way to reinvent public education: Attach funding to children, not schools and districts, enabling parents to choose their children’s schools and forcing schools to compete for students.

Unfortunately, Professor Cooper’s proposal would only let kids take their new “backpack[s] of education funding” to different public schools. But there is no compelling educational reason for such a restriction. Instead, we should give parents maximum educational freedom by letting them send their children to any schools they want—public or private—with their new money packs attached. Do that, and we might finally have a system of public education worth keeping around for decades.