A new idea for education funding

This is a brief idea I came up with in a thread at Fark.com, concerning how to fund education. Their was an argument about having property tax pay for it, since single people without children paid for those with children, including illegal aliens. Here is my thought:

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How about mandatory education insurance? Rates would be based on pre-existing conditions (children), and the likelihood you will have more children. If the rate is higher than you can pay, the government covers the difference. People with large families would generally have a greater portion of their paycheck taken out than those with no children, but if the cost would push the family into poverty they would still be covered. At the other extreme, people who decide to get their tubes snipped would have very low rates.

You could then use your education insurance card to pay for the schooling of your choice at any accredited school, though the amount paid would be limited to the full tuition for a public school. You could even extend this payment to home-schooling, though there would have to be mandatory testing of some kind to qualify, so parents didn't use all the money for beer and pretzels.

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I'm going to have to do more thinking on this, and I may write up a more in-depth proposal.