Here is why I say that. For historical and socioeconomic reasons, when examining results in education, one must disaggregate ethnicities, lest one measure racial composition more than achievement.

Thus, for example, the 2007 National Assessment of Education Progress shows Utah's white eighth-graders rank 38th in the nation in math, 39th in writing and 41st in reading. That is, Utah's white kids rank at the lowest 20 percent mark of their peers in a country which is itself 25th out of 30 industrial countries. Taken together, this suggests that Utah's white children are in the bottom 5 percent internationally.

How do we do for minorities? According to the Utah State Office of Education, 49 percent of Utah's Latino and African-American children do not receive a high school diploma and 42 percent just drop out, so they are even worse off. Collectively, I think it fair to call these results "weak."

Here is why Utah's public schools will likely worsen: For 15 years costs have been expanding at 7.9 percent annually. Our schools' current enrollment of 540,000 kids will swell to 700,000 in 10 years, another 30 percent increase. In real terms, the cost of Utah's public education system will double over 10 years. Therefore, simply to stay even we must double tax revenues or class sizes.

Welcome to the next 10 years of Utah politics: parents opposed to doubling class sizes fighting taxpayers opposed to doubling tax rates.

So Utah's public schools are weak and will probably worsen due to demographic pressures. Of course, I am not blaming children. I am blaming adults whose concern for their children is so minimal, or whose grasp of the global economy is so weak, that they can say, "Being in the bottom 20 percent of the nation and bottom 5 percent of the modern world is good enough for my kids!"

Most respectfully, I do not know what to make of adults who, when presented with an innovative plan to give options to Utah families, a plan heavily slanted toward low-income families, a plan which even its own detractors estimated would be limited to 0.3 percent of students and would not even be paid for out of the schools' budget, collectively said, "Innovation? No way! Let's just stick with what we have."

Nor do I know what to make of Utah's governor, who as a candidate told me that "my main purpose in running for governor is to bring vouchers to Utah," and "I want to be 'the Voucher Governor,'" and "I want my legacy to be vouchers," but who then sat out what became the most divisive political battle in Utah's living memory nursing an 80 percent-plus approval rating.

Albert Einstein purportedly defined insanity as "doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." I did misspeak: Referendum 1 was not "an IQ test." It was (by Einstein's definition) an insanity test. I hope Utah's parents are not expecting results different from those in the national and international rankings cited above. And it's all going downhill from there to the tune of empty bromides about "commitment to our public schools" which stimulate blind loyalty instead of critical examination.

I wish this situation would "deeply offend" Tribune readers, and Utah's voters, as much as the imagery I have employed trying to awaken them to it.

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* PATRICK M. BYRNE is CEO and chairman of Internet retailer Overstock.com. He contributed $2.6 million to the campaign to approve Referendum 1, the private school voucher law passed by the Utah Legislature that was rejected by voters statewide on Nov. 6.