On a plane the other night a guy told me his wife worked for the Cicero Illinois public schools. Her school was severely overcrowded. She taught first grade and had 40 six year olds in her class.

40 kids. One teacher. Scary.

Cicero has been well known for government corruption since the days of Al Capone, the Mob Boss whose built his headquarters there. Today the folks who award government contracts in Cicero still have summer villas in Italy, while Latino families who have any aspirations for their kids move to a different school district before their children hit high school.

QUESTION: Who’s more guilty of squandering money:

1. The guy who buys a $40,000 Lexus when a $12,000 Hyundai would do

2. The guy who saves $4000 by sending his kids to the Cicero public school instead of private school

Guy #2 is the Worst Fool by far. If he even has a prayer of paying the $5,000, he’s stupid not to invest it. STUPID. Geez dude, do you love your kids???

Hardly anything is more easy to rationalize than saving money on education. Laura and I home school 3 of our kids. We send our 4th to a costly private school. Plus we pay taxes, so we’re also paying the administration and the overhead of our local school district that we don’t use.

It would be s-o-o-o-o-o easy to cut expenses. It sure was tempting when we were totally broke. We WERE totally broke when we started teaching them 10 years ago, by the way. We did it anyway.

This week I spoke at a conference in Atlanta. Afterward, a woman who’d just lost her job approached me. She was deliberating over whether to join Renaissance Club. She’s holding on to her money t-i-g-h-t. That 40 bucks is precious to her.

“My father has a construction business and I’m thinking this would help him. But his business is really slow right now too. I think I just need to wait until later when I have more money.”

“How much is a small contracting job if he sells it?”

“A really small one might be 400 bucks. A big one could be way bigger, of course.”

“How long does it take from first phone call to awarding a bid?”

“Could take a couple of months, but he could do a small job the next day.”

“So if you could make his phone ring, you could get your forty bucks back this week, right?”

“Yeah, I suppose that’s right.”

“Ma’am, I guarantee you this – if you give Google your money with no help from me, and you don’t get no customers, they ain’t giving your money back. But if you do this the way I teach you, your dad will get new business he wouldn’t have gotten. Spend the forty bucks, get serious about educating yourself, and by the end of 30 days you’ll KNOW whether you’re getting value from me or not.

“Not only that . . . if you learn this craft WELL – if you know how to buy traffic for $1 and sell it for $2 – I wouldn’t trade that skill for a Wharton MBA. This is your Street MBA.”

She reached into her purse, got out her credit card, and signed up.

A lot of other people at the seminar opted for the Public School education instead. Now they’re going to go home, they’re going to get on LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter (cuz that stuff’s free). They’re going to start Linking and Liking and Tweeting.

Six months from now most of them will have n-o-t-h-i-n-g to show for it but a bunch of so-called “friends.”

Others are going to buy clicks from Google. They’ll pay all kinds of stupidity tax and never know why. They’ll just think Pay Per Click doesn’t work and they’ll go away disappointed.

In the end, 5% of the people who went to that conference will achieve what they actually went there for. The rest – well, I hope they enjoyed the free luncheon and the Entrepreneur of the Year awards banquet.

Mob bosses in Cicero Illinois are stealing the future from thousands of kids and that’s wrong.

But what’s even more wrong is the parents who ‘get’ what’s going on and let it happen anyway.

If someone can teach you what you need to know and you’re not paying them to teach you, then shame on you. Pick up the phone and end the stupidity right now. Stop stealing from YOUR future. Stop shaving pennies with your education.

I can hear the cynics now: “Yeah, but Perry’s biased. of course he’s saying that. He sells books and stuff. He’s just trying to get your money.”

Yes, I AM trying to get your money. That’s my job. Why would you want a teacher who’s afraid to do his job? Anyone who gets a marketing education from somebody who doesn’t want their money is in for an inferior ‘public school’ education.

They’ll get the Little Rabbit Fu Fu version of marketing. The one where “friends” play patty-cake with “friends” all day long, and “build relationships” and burble about how relieved they are to have finally had their Starbucks this morning.

Who’s more greedy?

1. GOOGLE

2. PERRY

Who cares more about whether your business succeeds or fails?

Who offers a ballsier guarantee?

To the cynic I say, if you spend more than $1000 a month on Google traffic and you haven’t been through the Bobsled run yet, you’re just cheating yourself.

To the cynic I say, if your business sells over $1 million per year and you haven’t at least applied to Roundtable, you’re cheating yourself.

Many, many peoples’ kids will get a shabby education from the public schools.

But it doesn’t have to be your kids.

Many, many people will pay business stupidity tax.

But it doesn’t have to be you.

Decide what you want. Find out the price. And pay the price.

Perry Marshall