Not really, but that is what oppoents of school choice would have you believe. Hat Tip to Coyote Blog for the subject of this rant.
Many times, I think, in this blog, I have advocated for a complete choice in education for parents and kids. The basis of my belief is that only through pure competition for education dollars will schools responde to the needs of their students. I have long illustrated my tendency by looking at the university system in the United States as proof that parents and children can find the school they want and serves their needs and wants. (and unfortuneatly that decision is often undermined by what they can afford).
I believe, and I think most people will agree, that the American university marketplace is the most effective educational system in the world. Between public and private, large and small, niche and generalists, east vs. west, north vs. south, specialities and excellences on every campus, we as a nation can find a higher edcuation institution to fit our needs. Schools compete for the tuition dollars of each student, rewarded when they woo students successfully and in doing so make every institution a little better.
Every year, parents and prospective students look at their educational wants and desires, the economics of their situation and other factors and determine, for themselves, what is the best college for them. If the model works for higher education, why can't that same system of choice work for elementary and secondary education?
The most common response and one found in the comments to the Coyote Blog post is
"some day we are going to have to get along and see ourselves are participating in the society. Walling ourselves off into camps where everyone can agree with each other does nothing to further dialog. "
This is the concept of a shared educational experience, that if all kids are in the same classroom, they will have a shared understanding and thus build a better society. But this is a fallacy because the shared educational experiecne is neither shared nor educational. Modern public schools are failing for the very reason that they are no longer providing an education. They fail because we as a society have no means of enforcing accountibility. If you want an example, look at how hard it is to fire a teacher for incompetence. You can barely get a teacher fired for child molestation let along for being a poor teacher.
But when the education money follows the student, from school to school, you get some accountibility. However, for that system to work, you have to give parents the absolute right to choose the school setting for their kids. Of course, educrats and the labor unions would fight such a right tooth and nail. But here is an example of what can happen with market accountibility:
New Zealand had an education system that was failing as well. It was failing about 30 percent of its children – especially those in lower socio-economic areas. We had put more and more money into education for 20 years, and achieved worse and worse results.
It cost us twice as much to get a poorer result than we did 20 years previously with much less money. So we decided to rethink what we were doing here as well. The first thing we did was to identify where the dollars were going that we were pouring into education. We hired international consultants (because we didn’t trust our own departments to do it), and they reported that for every dollar we were spending on education, 70 cents was being swallowed up by administration. Once we heard this, we immediately eliminated all of the Boards of Education in the country. Every single school came under the control of a board of trustees elected by the parents of the children at that school, and by nobody else. We gave schools a block of money based on the number of students that went to them, with no strings attached. At the same time, we told the parents that they had an absolute right to choose where their children would go to school. It is absolutely obnoxious to me that anybody would tell parents that they must send their children to a bad school. We converted 4,500 schools to this new system all on the same day.
But we went even further: We made it possible for privately owned schools to be funded in exactly the same way as publicly owned schools, giving parents the ability to spend their education dollars wherever they chose. Again, everybody predicted that there would be a major exodus of students from the public to the private schools, because the private schools showed an academic advantage of 14 to 15 percent. It didn’t happen, however, because the differential between schools disappeared in about 18-24 months. Why? Because all of a sudden teachers realized that if they lost their students, they would lose their funding; and if they lost their funding, they would lose their jobs. Eighty-five percent of our students went to public schools at the beginning of this process. That fell to only about 84 percent over the first year or so of our reforms. But three years later, 87 percent of the students were going to public schools. More importantly, we moved from being about 14 or 15 percent below our international peers to being about 14 or 15 percent above our international peers in terms of educational attainment. (Emphasis added).
See this link for the whole speech dealing with massive government reform in New Zealand.
Of course, in this country we have problems with federalism, namely Congress can't just outlaw school boards, but a state can. A state with a goverment with enough backbone can undertake exactly what happened in New Zealand. But the facts remain true in New Zealand as they would here, consumer choice and accountibility to the consumer produce results--period. If the product is bad, the product goes away.
This post stuck in a Beltway BackUp.
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