The real problem with public education in the U.S. is that the students are given free reign to define their own culture within the school, and that culture rarely (if ever) naturally values education.

The most effective educational reform I have seen is the recent implementation of anti-bullying programs around the nation, but even this is just an attack on a symptom rather than the root cause.

We need to dismantle the cultures naturally formed by students within our public schools, and replace them with an enforced social structure that causes the students themselves to value education.

This means positively rewarding students for academic performance with rewards that are not only meaningful to the achievers but desirable to the underachievers. One such obvious reward would be paying students cash for achievement, funded by public tax dollars.

It also means improved enforcement of school rules by hiring people whose exclusive job is to police the students, rather than expecting teachers to police the students when they already have their hands full just trying to teach.

This is why private (typically religious) schools tend to produce more better-educated students. It's not the fact that these schools are religiously-based that makes them better; it's the fact that they are typically run with a high level of discipline and enforcement (strict school dress codes or uniforms, assigned seating, etc) relative to public schools.

These are the changes I would make to the U.S. Constitution.

NATURAL RIGHT TO RELIGIOUS CHOICE: A person's lack of religious or spiritual beliefs constitutes a set of beliefs, and those beliefs are to be treated equally under the law alongside any other set of religious beliefs. Furthermore, all branches of government, and all state governments, are to treat all religious beliefs as opinions, not facts, with no more or less weight given to any specific set of beliefs. The federal Government and state governments shall be strictly secular institutions, neither endorsing nor discriminating against any set of religious beliefs. Furthermore, the federal Government and state governments shall actively protect a person's right to hold and practice any set of religious beliefs, so long as those beliefs and practices do not infringe upon the rights of others.

NATURAL RIGHT TO EQUAL TREATMENT: Every human being possesses the natural right to be treated equally and respectfully (by both institutions and other individuals) regardless of his or her opinions or physical traits. No branch of Government, and no state government, shall enact any law or issue any verdict that either explicitly or consequentially grants or denies rights exclusively to a subset of citizens where that subset is defined by personal opinions (including, but not limited to, religious beliefs, political views, and sexual orientation) or physical characteristics (including, but not limited to, race, ethnicity, physical appearance, gender, physical disability, and mental disability). Furthermore, the federal Government and state governments shall actively protect a person's right to not be denied rights or priveleges based on the person's opinions or physical characteristics.

NATURAL RIGHT TO CHOOSE LIFE OR DEATH: Every human being possesses the natural right to choose to live or to die and to solicit assistance in implementing such a choice. No branch of Government, and no state government, shall enact any law or issue any verdict that infriniges upon the natural rights of a person to terminate or protect his or her own life, or to assist in terminating or protecting the life of another person at that person's request. Furthermore, the federal Government and state governments shall actively protect a person's ability to exercise these natural rights, so long as it does not infringe upon the rights of others.

NATURAL RIGHT TO BE LEFT ALONE: No branch of Government, and no state government, shall enact any law or issue any verdict that infringes upon the natural right of a person to not be disturbed by others upon making such a request or posting such a notice. Furthermore, the federal and state governments shall actively protect a person's ability to exercise this natural right, so long as it does not infringe on the rights of others.

RIGHT TO PROPORTIONATE REPRESENTATION: The highest and primary goal of the Government, and of all state governments, shall be to fairly and accurately represent the will of the citizenry without disproportionately representing the interests of a powerful few. This shall be accomplished in two ways: (1) granting each person an equal voice in the electoral process, and (2) establishing rules that prevent public servants from being motivated to serve specific interests disproportionately. No branch of government, and no state government, shall deny a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen's opinions or physical characteristics. Nor shall any branch of government, nor any state government, weigh votes differently based on individuals' opinions or physical characteristics. Nor shall any federal or state public servant, elected or appointed, accept a gift of any economic value while serving in office for any reason.

Privacy can be broken into two forms: personal-space privacy and informational privacy. Personal-space privacy is a natural right. You should be able to go to the bathroom or change clothes without having anyone watch you. Informational privacy is an artificial notion, and it harms society. Information about how you have interacted with the world and choices you have made should always be completely accessible to anyone else in the world.

Every human being has a natural obligation to be responsible for him/herself. Nothing harms society more than people who dismiss responsibility for their own actions, or worse yet, try to pin that responsibility on others.

Since most people will not naturally take responsibility for themselves, the government's primary role should be to hold individuals responsible for their actions. The government can do this through a combination of fair legislation and consistent enforcement.

Most societal issues are easily solved by this approach. The only difficult cases occur when it is not clear with whom responsibility should lie, or when multiple parties hold conflicting responsibilities.

All software should be simple and painless to install and use. There's no good reason to make it more difficult to use than it has to be, even if your target users are smart. If your program cannot be easily used without having to invest longer than about 30 seconds reading something, then you haven't done your job right.

There's a huge difference between making a program try to outsmart its user and automating mundane tasks. Microsoft Word pisses people off by trying to guess what you want and getting it wrong. But Word also makes it painless to quickly search-and-replace all occurrences of a phrase throughout a document. Software should always automate, but it should never try to be smart.

All software should be responsive. There's no excuse for making a user sit and wait 30 seconds after they've clicked something for the software to finally come back and tell them anything useful. Adobe Photoshop is a great example of how to do this right: some processor-intensive operations will just have to take a while, so put up some kind of responsive and accurate status indicator to let the user know that the program is actually working on it and to give them an idea of how much has been done and how much is left to go. Don't just stick up an hourglass and then let your entire application UI appear hung while processing. Ditto for disk access or any other time-consuming operation.

Source code should be cleanly organized so that it's feasible for a human being to easily maintain it and visually verify its correctness. There are no validation tools in existence that can guarantee a program is bug-free, so we have to rely on human visual code inspection for quality. So make your code readable and understandable. If you have to do something clever or hacky to optimize performance, add comments liberally to explain it to a newcomer.

Form should follow function. This is true in all types of software development, from video games to web pages.

There's nothing wrong with demanding compensation for your hard work. But you should also always keep your users in mind, and give them every freedom that doesn't directly conflict with your right to be compensated. And if it really wasn't much trouble for you to write the software, or you did it sheerly for the love and learning of doing it, you should really release the source code and use some kind of GPL/BSD-styled open-source license to guarantee that your source code will remain available in the future for the benefit of humankind.