We have had animated discussions on this blog about whether the market model works for public education, whether parents should be smart shoppers, when business practices make sense (and don’t).
I just read an interesting piece on salon.com that covers some of the same grounds but offers some useful insights about why the market model does not work for public education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The article rightly points out that democratic process is essential for public decisions. But it doesn’t explain why the democratic process is subverted by the charter school movement. As I explain here http://therepublicon.blogspot.com/2012/07/why-school-choice-has-failed-to-improve.html , what is going on is the kind of market failure called the ‘principle-agent problem’.
What happens is that the ‘agents’—in this case government officials—start serving themselves, and those who are giving them money for favor, instead of serving the ‘principles’—the parents and students who are supposed to be served. The truth is that when there is only one buyer, the government, you can’t have a competitive market. The whole Friedman idea is fundamentally flawed because of this.
You can only control the process democratically, as the Salon piece says. But the problem is that the ‘privatization as solution’ propaganda puts up a smoke screen that covers the corruption and failure that is going on. And the corrupted officials have every interest in keeping on blowing smoke.
Would you say public school board members and teachers might also be agents with their own interests which might conflict with the principles, that is the students. I don’t see that this is a charter school issue.
You’re right that there can be principle-agent problems in many other situations, including with school boards and teachers. It’s an interesting question why in this case the principles (governments) are making bad decisions. One factor here is money. The money going to the charter schools has potential for corruption, because politicians collect money for their campaigns. The power to dole out contracts to run schools is a new source of potential corruption that they didn’t have before. In the case of teachers, their salary is paid by the state, not the parents, and bribery of teachers is rare, so far as I know.
Sometimes school boards fail, and getting democratic process to work properly is still a work in progress, but, as Krugman says, at least the function of these is out in the open.
I do think a part of the problem here is that school-choice-as-solution puts up a smoke screen, as I said. People as so entranced by the idea that competition will make “no child left behind” that they are not looking at results and holding officials accountable.
So I would say, yes, principle-agent problems are a factor here. But as I said, I don’t think that principle-agent problems are by any means the only thing going on here.
Partly the persistence of failure is a matter of the public not catching up with the fact that school choice is not working. This is an “information” problem. But it is also a matter of ideology. There has been such an unrelenting attack on all government functions for thirty years, that people are not asking what can government do better than private markets, and looking closely at that.
But finally I think the problem is that education is so hard to evaluate because of the long time involved—a generation. That’s why professional judgement, by teachers, principals, and superintendents need to be in the lead, and not political schemes. I’m thinking after your critique that a lot of the problem is that those creating charter schools are looking more at short-term profit than at helping children.
So in the end, I think that because of the long time horizon that government is more suited to running this function. That is similar for the pay-off for infrastructure and basic research. The government can be committed to the next generation, and private business almost never is, by its very nature.
I was really thinking that the principle agent problem is arguably worse with the education system without charter schools then with charter schools. Local school boards are charged to get good value for money by the citizens of the school district and the state. Local school board officials might have a private interest of being reelected. Local teachers unions can further this private goal of the school board “agents” by providing campaign contributions and organized votes in the low turn out local elections. Charter schools might actually improve the situation by giving the local school board members other sources of campaign contributions, so the local teachers union is not the only game in town. Of course I am assuming that the local teachers union is working in the interests of teachers, which is not the same as working in the interest of the students.
I can’t help but think about the role choice seems to play in post secondary education. Would you say that choice does not work for for university students? My own son was able to choose between a top liberal arts college, a top college specialized science and technology, the honors program at the state flagship university, and a top private research university. What argument would you make that he was worse off by having a variety of institutions as options? If he was not made worse off by choosing from a variety of institutions as a high school graduate, why would he be worse off the year before?
Colleges and universities create their own community. Local public schools are the hub of their neighborhood. If you value neighborhoods and communities, then you protect the local public school and make it work for everyone. If you want your child to jump into the free market at the age of 3 or 4 or 5 and become a commodity, then go for a charter school.
Just keep on going down this road, and pretty soon all schools will be private. When taxpayers get wind of the fact that they are funding other other people’s religious education, not to mention the yacht armadas of junk-bond moguls and Redcoat software mongers, they will revolt like you never saw before — and then all the “teaching economists” out there will get to find out just how much education really costs without taxpayers picking up the tab.
if that happens, people who don’t have school-age children will object to paying anything at all for education.
That would give birth to a free market system that only its mother (Friedman) could love.
Diane-it seems to me that your argument that local schools create a sense of community and helps neighborhoods is probably correct, but another way to understand what you are saying that students should be required to attend the neighborhood school because it benefits other people in the neighborhood, not because it benefits the students. I think we need to be very careful when we require person A to do something that is not in their best interest because it will help person B.
I am a bit confused about the “commodity” reference in your comment. Does that only apply to younger children or do you mean that because my son made a choice about where to attend college he became a commodity? That does not really make sense to me.
Jon- unfortunately I know the cost of education: almost all of my salary goes to the University of Chicago. 🙂 There is no reason that education subsidies are incomparable with choice. I teach at a state university that subsidizes the students education, yet not a single student is required to attend the university. I also think you would find a much more nuanced understanding of the external returns to education that rightfully justify public subsidies among business people. Especially if they have studied economics.
The original article is here —
Elizabeth Stokes • How Turning the Public School System into a Market Undermines Democracy
The author makes two points that I think need to be made more often.
1) the private-market model of public education forces schools to increase their efforts at marketing their schools rather than focusing on instruction and learning. I’m seeing this in my small district in Washington State (where charters are illegal). Even though we don’t have charters to compete with, as schools in our district are being designated as “schools of choice” we’re being forced to spend a lot of time thinking about how to market our school to the students we want. And, unfortunately, if we want to stay open, the students we want are the students who will perform well on tests. It’s not as bad as in NYC or DC, but it’s increasingly moving that direction.
2) The movement toward private choice over public choice disempowers the public. I think this is a huge point people often overlook. Democracy is eroded when we’re deprived of opportunities to make difficult public choices.
I would argue that we should make difficult public choices when required (how many resources should we devote to fire and police protection, how many to national defense) and we should not when it is not required (we dont need to make a difficult compromise about an entree that everyone eats at a restaurant or method of transportation all people use to get to work). What we need to think about is if K-12 is more like local fire protection where we are all going to get the same level of protection or more like post secondary education where students benefit from choosing institutions that help them realize their different, individual potentials.
How good can any market model work when the inequality between the wealthy and the rest of the the population in this country is as great as it is? Unemployment is still too high. The compensation between the CEO and the employees is greater in the US than just about any other country. So why should we assume that this approach can work with our schools?
This is hard to answer without knowing what you mean by “good”. What would tell you if the market is working well? What would tell you if the maker was working badly?
That is the question.
What is the purpose of an accounting system?
And how can we tell if the one we choose is good?
Well, I suppose we could wait for all the things we care about to die off — country, civilization, the human race, the planet earth — then reckon the goodness of our guidebook in proportion inversely to the time of extinction. That would give us the most objective quantitative measure of all possible measures.
And it looks like the measure of choice in many quarters.
But I reckon we should look for others, first.
NB. I am thinking of priority ranking system here, where small numbers are best.
Maybe it really is the teachers’ fault.
I don’t blame my own teachers, as they evidently left indelible marks on my mind about the fundamental difference between a system of government and a mere economic system, and which must be the master if democracy is to preserve itself. They taught in ways I can never forget that public education is the right of every equal citizen, a right every bit as fundamental to the success of democracy as the right to vote, since the People cannot rule and rule wisely without it.
But something has definitely gone wrong when so many people have evidently failed to learn that lesson.
So it must be the teachers that came after …
Or maybe it’s TV …
There are signs that increasing numbers of people are finally “getting it”. Look at this guest column in the Delaware County Times (outside Philadelphia):
Guest Column: Pennsylvania’s Approach To Public Education Is Full of Sound and Fury But Signifies Nothing
Guest Column: Pennsylvania’s Approach To Public Education Is Full of Sound and Fury But Signifies Nothing
sorry…http://www.delcotimes.com/articles/2012/07/27/opinion/doc5012c885d4775068793938.txt?viewmode=fullstory
I am curious about how people view higher education. It is a mix of public and private institutions that must compete for students. Is it subverting democracy? Should we require university students to attend public universities in their home states or regions?
Our elementary and secondary education have also been a mixture of public and private, just like higher education. But what has changed, as I note in my blog post, is the idea that you can improve public institutions by the quasi-private elements, such as vouchers and school choice—the ideas of Milton Friedman and Chubb & Moe. The issue is not having both public and private institutions competing, which we’ve always had, but the introduction of quasi-private elements into public institutions. The argument was that these quasi-private elements, by introducing competitive elements into public institutions, would greatly improve them.
This has not proven to be the case. I was trying to analyze the failure. You are mixing apples and oranges. Or rather, we had both apples and oranges (public and private) in the past. The problem is the hybrid apple-orange, which isn’t working.
There is another metric you might use. Rather then asking if choice improves the institutions, you might ask if choice allows students to go to an institution that better suites their needs. Even if no institution changes, the students gain from a better match.
I am not really sure why these are quasi-public. If everyone in my town inherited enough money to send their child to the local private high school, the public schools would lose state funding due to the state budgeting rule. If everyone in my town was given an education voucher and chose to enroll their student in the private high school, the public school would lose funding due to the drop in students. Wouldn’t the outcome be the same, even though one is funded privately and the other publicly?
Would you also privatize public parks and public beaches and public transit and everything else?
Like if we were all billionaires we would all live on our private islands and do nothing in common.
Of course I was not making an argument about parks, beaches, or mass transit, but we could talk about those things instead of education if you would prefer that to what I was talking about.
Let’s just do mass transit. I don’t want to call it public transportation because typically the riders must pay a fee in order to ride so it is what we economists refer to as an excludable good, not a public good. There is certainly an argument to subsidize riding mass transit as I benefit from your riding because of lower pollution, lower fuel use, because I get to use the parking spot that you don’t use, etc.. This is actually the example I always use when teaching about positive externalities. As long as the subsidy is right and perhaps mixed with some regulation, I think private ownership of the bus company would be fine. My electricity, phone, and Internet services are all provided by privately owned companies, and it works reasonably well. I don’t think the bus company would be very different.
I am just adding a little something here because I am currently on a privately owned mass transit vehicle: Megabus. They provide power and wifi for all passengers. Seems pretty good.
Were you traveling on a public highway or a private road?
The majority of the trip was on the interstate highway system. For most of it, the anyone was allowed to use the road if they were in a sufficiently powerful vehicle. If, for example, your income is too low to be willing or able to own a car and your main method of transportation is a bicycle (I ride so I am sensitive to this), you are not allowed to use the road.
I was trying hard to sleep so I may have not noticed, but it is possible that we used part of the system that is a toll road. Here you are not allowed to use the road if you do not have a sufficiently powerful vehicle and are unwilling or unable to pay to use the road. This sounds like a market transaction, so you might consider these stretches of the interstate highway system as private roads.
Finally we ended up on the campus of the University of Florida. I am not sure about U of F, but on my campus the public is prohibited from using the roads on campus at some times of the day (particular staff members are given special permission), but allowed to use it at other times of the day. It seems to me that if the public can be prohibited from using the road (obviously I don’t mean things like detours, road construction, etc., but I am sure you read these comments generously), you might well consider it a private road.
It would help me to understand how you think about this public private distinction in education if you would let me know how you think about these roads.
I don’t think you really want to start a subthread on phone service stories.
I know we all look forward to the day when American parents are paying TEA-Mobile by the megabit-minute for the educatering of their children — sorry, no roll-over — all of it totally automated and outsourced to your friendly global CyberChurch deep in the heart of China or Calcutta. But hey, you can’t get any more efficient than that.
Well, not all American parents —
In the future only the über-wealthy will have normal lives.
Actually this is Dr. Ravitch’s sub topic. I was commenting on educational policy when she asked me about other public policies. I don’t know why she changed the subject, but it is her blog, so I thought I would answer her question. In general different public policy questions require different solutions, but I thought I would stay in character and give a straight economic analysis of at least one of the new topics she suggested.
By the way, university education, especially in the sciences, is “outsourced” in a sense today. In my department and many others, the majority of faculty have been trained here, but were born abroad. We don’t connect to the foreign teacher through the Internet, we have brought the foreign teacher here to teach.
What teachers? Who needs teachers? What part of “totally automated” did you not understand?
Please press the [#] key if you wish to hear the message repeated.
Actually if children could learn as or more electively with an automated system, that would be a good thing. It would free.teachers up to do other valuable work.
On Higher Education —
A high school education had traditionally been reckoned as the minimum education required for a citizen to be function as a citizen in a democracy, that is, to qualify as one of the rulers in a republic where the People rule. That is why the right — indeed the compulsory duty — to become educated to this level had long been regarded on a par with the franchise itself. That was the conventional rationale for universal free public education up through attaining the age of majority.
In the 1950s and 1960s — the Atomic Age, Sputnik, and all that, you know — this began to change, and ever more forward-looking people were beginning to agree that the minimum level of education for a full-fledged citizen of the future would need to be ramped up into what had previously been the college years.
And so California had already initiated a K-13 type program where qualified students would get their first year in college or other post-secondary education at State expense.
It was Governor Ronald Reagan who put an end to that — and the Great Dumbing Down of America has been killing the beast of education ever since.
Edit — “for a citizen to function”
“Teaching Economist&rdquo —
You are spinning airy-fairy nonsense that has no basis in reality. You obviously know nothing about teaching, economics, or the order of long-term dedication and foresight that it takes to a nation to build and sustain the “brand” of educational system that a democracy, not a plutocratic oligarchy demands.
You might try educating yourself by listening to people who actually know what they are talking about — who are acquainted with the realities of teaching, who have followed where the money really goes in different types of education “markets”, and who know that civilized society is not a fire-sale.
Or, you could just take your restaurant voucher and buy yourself a nice $5 dinner at the private club of your choice.
Well, I have only been teaching economics for thirty years at the university level. I guess there is hope that I will finally learn something about teaching during my fourth decade.
I am always interested in learning, so perhaps you could tell me some specific instances where I have strayed away from reality, and displayed a complete lack of understanding about teaching and economics. It would be a great help in my continuing education.
I am referring to the remarks you made here and here.
Those two remarks strike me as being completely detached, each in its own peculiar way, from reality — from the real conditions that face developing citizens and from the fundamentals of what education in a democratic society is supposed to be about.
Of course, a lot of economic mythology, er, theory is like that, so I suppose you can’t be blamed too much for getting dyed in that wool.
I guess I am still confused about what I said that is wrong in those comments. What about them seem detached from reality?
First, let me say that this is an important conversation. I appreciate teaching economist’s contribution, because his Chicago background—where Friedman taught—is key to the conversation. Friedman’s Chicago school free market analysis is precisely what has broken down, and we need to pinpoint why, to make the case why to replace the idea that quasi-privatization is the key to strengthening our schools. It’s not.
Teaching economist, I think you have been defending school choice and not acknowledging that it has failed to have the transforming power that was hoped for. You can’t defend what doesn’t work as working. The question I and others are posing, is: why it hasn’t worked? Where was Friedman’s analysis in fact wrong, and fundamentally wrong? That is really the question.
As I said, I think that education can only be evaluated long term, over a generation, is one key problem. Private and quasi-private incentives are more short term. Education is a classic example of a ‘positive externality,’ because educating my neighbor’s child means that he won’t be a thief but a productive member of society, and his productivity I will benefit from in twenty years. The point Diane makes, that we require all of those without children to pay for education is key here: taxing is justified because of the general social benefit. And by the way even conservative economist Hayek agreed with such arguments.
As to the question why choice works in college, and what is different. That is an important question. Personally, I think it is because basic education, up to age 15, has a much more common curriculum than is justified afterwards. I think that there should be more specialization, diversity and choice after age 15, as Germany and Singapore have done. I have advocated for this in the Phi Delta Kappan, Ed. Week, and I will some more. In my view changing our system to better meet diverse needs after age 15 is one of the keys to making our system work for poor children, not high stakes testing and school choice.
I think the importance of the social network of children and parents in the neighborhood school, particularly in elementary school, is an important point which Diane highlights. There are also principle-agent problems, and the shorter-term focus of private incentives.
But if we are going to move this analysis forward, I think the first thing to acknowledge is the problem: why hasn’t school choice worked? Will you acknowledge that, teaching economist?
Let me start out by saying that my only connection to the University of Chicago is that I write them tuition checks. I have never been a student or taught there. I have just been teaching and thinking about economics for 30 years, so the basic idea that being able to choose typically benefits the individual making the choice seems pretty reasonable and might sound like the Chicago school.
Before anyone else says it, there are many situations where we want to give up the right to choose. Being able to make commitments through contracts is extremely valuable to me precisely because it credibly limits my choices. But the bias in the discipline is that individual choice often results in what is best for the individual.
As I have said in several posts, education certainly creates external benefits that justify our all contributing to everyone’s education. This is standard stuff that I teach every semester. For some reason many posters here seem to equate the idea of subsidizing education with publicly run schools with geographically designated attendance requirements. That is simply not true, so the positive externality argument is not an argument against choice.
Several posters have made an argument that if some students leave a school it will result in other people being made worse off (the neighborhood argument and the school filled with the children of uncaring/dysfunctional families argument). I acknowledge that the people making this argument are likely to be correct that if students of type A leave the local schools other students or community members will be made worse off. I get very nervous, however, when the state says that students of type A are required to sacrifice part of their future to help people of type B. I don’t find that argument persuasive.
Now to get to a direct discussion of choice in schools. The primary benefit of choice is that a family can select a school that most nearly fits the needs of the family and the children. A secondary effect of choice would be that in response to families choosing schools, the schools would change their practices to be more appealing to the families. Many here focus on the secondary effect. What about the primary one? Here is an example that came up in my office just yesterday. A staff member and her husband live in a nearby town but both work in in this town. Because of their work schedules, having the daughter go to school in the town where they work would be much better for the family, but because they are assigned a school district based on where they own a house, they currently have no idea how to pick up the child after school. In this case choice in schools would improve the families situation even without improving the schools.
As for why the secondary effect of school choice is hard to see, I suspect it is because we dont really know very much about what makes a good school. Some posters here even argue that it is, in principle, impossible to measure learning. If they are right that we will not be able to ever figure out what makes a great school or even recognize a great school when we have one, there will be no secondary effect from choice in terms of student learning.
I am actually more optimistic. I think we will figure out what makes a great school and finally we will see choice have this secondary effect. If I can offer another analogy, I believe people choosing schools today are in much the same situation as I was when I began to drive. My first two cars were a Corvair and a Vega. It was not that I wanted to choose crappy inexpensive cars, it was that no one had figured out how to make good inexpensive cars yet. Once some firms did figure it out, the others were forced to try and keep up. Even FIAT seems to be making a reliable car, something that is no doubt shocking to my high school friend who never drove his FIAT anywhere without the shop manual.
I should also add that when you are talking about why choice works in colleges (and I assume High School because of your use of age 15), you are thinking about what I called the primary benefit from choice: matching the institution to the variety of diverse needs of students. You say this aspect of choice is important for older students and unimportant for younger ones.mis this why you put the emphasis on what I call the secondary effect of choice when talking about it not working?
I think it would be usefull to distinguish between these two aspects of choice in the discussion.
Anyone with a working long-term memory knows where this agenda to “Starve Public Schools Out Of Existence” came from.
Good thing there’s internet search for the rest of us —
• Richard DeVos Advocates “Stealth” Strategy Against Public Education
• Blackwater In-Law DeVos Outlines “Stealth” Plot Against Public Education
• Strategy for Privatizing Public Schools Spelled Out by Dick DeVos in 2002 Heritage Foundation Speech
Teaching Economist, you are ducking my question. Yes, it is plausible that if parents can choose they will create competition and both get a better school for their child and that the competition will improve the schools. That’s why I and I believe Diane also originally supported the idea of Chubb and Moe, who advocated it.
BUT IT HASN’T WORKED OUT THAT WAY
Sorry to shout but you don’t seem to hear the question. Your just repeating that school choice will work is a failure for you as an economist. You’re supposed to deal with the real world. And in the real world for over ten years it shows no signs of turning our education system around for the better. On the contrary, as documented here there is one scandal after another, and no overall lifting of quality compared to the previous years, without the proliferation of charters.
Why? That is a serious problem of political-economy, and repeating free market orthodoxy does nothing to answer the question. I have made a few efforts using economic concepts, and Paul Krugman and the article linked here at the top have made more. Do you have anything to contribute?
I didn’t think I was ducking the question. I argued that
1) the primary effect of school choice works by allowing students to go to schools that meet the diverse needs of students. I think we both agree that choice “works” in that respect, and is very important at least for students of a sufficient age. Am I wrong in thinking that is the reason why you said choice works in college?
2) I think you make the argument that for younger students, this aspect of choice is unimportant because there are a uniform set of needs. Let’s go ahead and assume that this is true.
3) the argument that choice is helpful for younger students then must depend on choice driving institutional improvement. For that to work, there must be better and worse institutions to choose from, the people choosing must be able to identify the better institutions, and the people must choose them.
My explanation for why choice has not driven poor schools to improve is that we do not know how to reliably make good schools or, apparently, even identify good schools when we accidentally do put them together.
When households are only getting to choosing between Pacers, Corvairs, and Vegas, choice car quality did not improve. What is needed is a Corrola.
Will we find a Corrola for education? Can we find an institution that can be reliably duplicated and do a better job at educating children then the existing institutions. If the answer is no, then choice will never, even in principle, have this secondary effect of improved institutional quality and the benefits of choice are only felt by those over the age of 15. If the answer is yes, there is an unknown institution out there that will be superior to the existing schools, we need to think about the best way to discover it.
Schools don’t get better by competing. Schools are communities. They are akin to families. Families don’t compete.
Diane, I mentioned the plausibility of Chubb and Moe to excuse myself, and I think you for making the mistake of supporting the Chubb and Moe idea early on. I’ve learned from Pink and Deci that you’ve referred to how wrong these ruthlessly competitive models are. I completely agree with you that schools should be more like families. But just to be clear, school can only partly make up for family deficits, as I’m sure you agree. We need to have social policies that strengthen families. That is one of the few things I agreed with W. Bush about—though he failed to have the critically important economic policies that would have helped poor families.
Schools don’t improve by competing. That is a fallacy. Families don’t improve by competing. Think of it: Are you a better dad or son or brother because of what your neighbor does.
Compeition doesn’t work for teachers or schools or families.
I have raised three boys, two of my biological children and one foster son. They competed with each other over almost everything. They competed with other brothers in the neighborhood. I think there is a huge amount of competition between family members and between members of different families.
And universities, as schools and communities, do not get better by competing? School debate teams, athletic teams, math teams, communities all, do not improve with competition. My son’s high school cross country team is a community of young men and women who run together in 100% heat every afternoon, they don’t get better because of competition within the team and with other schools?
Sports teams compete. Debate teams compete. Schools do not get better by competing. They get better by building a strong sense of community.
Wisdom requires that you recognize differences.
Diane
Say it ain’t so, Joe … Pa …
I am a limitless lost about that this last comment. What does it mean?
Darn autocorrect, dont know where the word limitless came from in the posting above.
Universities are indeed communities, and communities have many accessory and auxiliary functions that are incidental to the espoused educational mission of a university. That is fine, that is just part of being a community. Everything in moderation.
But there are times when an excess of stress on peripheral activities, especially those where egos are on the line stake and over-weening pride goeth before a fall, and even more especially where competing for the The Big Bucks is at stake, will almost tragically and inevitably bring ruin on all the missions, main and otherwise, of the institution.
That’s all, Sports Fans …
I am not sure what this has to do with the claim that 1) families and communities do not compete and 2) that competition does not result in better performance by schools.
I admit it is not clear if Dr. Ravitch means that family and community members don’t compete with each other or if she means that families and communities don’t compete with other families and communities, but as I said before, I believe she is wrong on either interpretation.
In a long exchange with William Berkson I think we have agreed that neather competition or non-competition addresses the lack of high quality teachers and administrators in schools, both public or private. That, I think, is part of the reason that school competition has not showed significant gains in educational outcomes
If your point is that competition can grow to be destructive, you will get no argument from me, nor, I imagine, anyone else on the planet. Most competition, be it in sports or education researchers competing for limited journal space, takes place within the rules. Some at athletes do take EPO, some researchers fake their data.
I think I have figured out what you are saying here. Schools don’t compete, students who are members of the school community compete. If competition inspires every student in the school to learn more then they would without competition, I would say that competition improved the school, but you would point out that it only improved the learning of the students in the school.
Families absolutely do ‘compete.’ The phrase ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ got its genisis somewhere?
It may be subtle ‘competition’ but it still drives innovation. Two small examples…
The cell phone, when cell phones became widely available, I thought when my daughter was at the age at which she could work and pay for the phone (approx. 15) was the appropriate age.
My next daughter recieved hers at age 12. Why? Primarily because all the children at her age had cell phones. You may argue that I may have caved to peer pressure (or ‘competition’) but I would argue that if the majority of my daughter’s peers didn’t possess cell phones, she wouldn’t have had an interest either. The actions of other families drove ‘innovation’ in mine.
Solar panels are similar. Once one house got one on our street and neighbors we able to see what they looked like and talk to an owner they trusted and knew, other neighbors were suddenly interested. Now our street has several houses with solar panels.
This ‘competition’ may not have been in the traditional sense, but the dynamic definitely drives innovation in families.
You gave examples of consumerism, not innovation.
Competing to see who can buy the flashiest car or shoes is not innovative.
I saw no real innovation in the final of the men’s 100 meter run in London, does that mean there was no competition? (actually, I guess in that race, the competition was for second and third, not really first.)
Most of the “innovation” is screened out by drug testing.
Which just goes to show how testing puts a cramp on creativity.
Teaching Economist, my question stands, but I do like your distinction between primary and secondary effects—which I’m taking to mean benefit to an individual student vs benefit through school improvement. It is possible to have individual choice among totally public programs in different specialized areas, and that’s what I’d like to see for older children.
As far as the primary benefit to poor children, I think that the weak ability of poor parents to deal with a complex system to take best advantage is a huge problem. For starters, very often there are not two parents, and there is poverty on top of that.
The key issue here is really about what you are calling secondary effects, and that’s where the evidence seems clearly against any dramatic benefit of charter schools. Note the difference here is not public payment for schools, but sub-contracting them to private managers. It’s the whole private sub-contracting process that is really problematic. And it’s also had a lot of problems in defense contracting etc. It’s not that the problems are unique to education.
I’m not an economist, and I’m still looking for someone to analyze why this is failing. Surely Krugman’s point that it isn’t competitive when government is the only buyer is an important one here.
Teaching Economist, I think ‘we don’t know how to improve education’ is not correct. We do have examples of superintendents and principals who are able to build great institutions, even in poor neighborhoods. The problem is that it is not simply a matter of some gimmick. My late teacher Karl Popper said that “institutions are like fortresses, they need to be well designed and well manned.” I think the outstanding leaders are able to build great staff, and the internal systems to make best use of them in teaching the kids.
My example here is the late Albert Mamary, who was one of those stand-out successes. He said that the main problem is “alignment”, that you need to get everything in the school pulling the the same direction. That includes getting staff that will identify and help students falling behind, and a system to support the teachers and the students in this effort at every turn. In his case, a lot of it was about mastery learning, which involved a lot of testing, but not high stakes tests.
The question is, why would we think that subcontracting would superior in producing schools with this alignment, and staff to carry it out? Surely, as Diane has argued, firing teachers and shutting down schools and billions for high stakes tests rather than teacher and principle improvement is not likely to be a benefit.
I am glad that you acknowledge that it’s not working. But your analysis in my view is lacking in only acknowledging one cause. You don’t address the many issues raised here about corruption, short-term thinking of contractors, and the inability of poor parents to have the information or skills to make the choice. And no, I don’t agree that the primary benefit exists for primary school children from poor, shattered families. And those children are precisely those who need most help. And there is a sound economic analysis here: lack of information and/or the ability to take advantage of it on the part of the parents.
I am glad to know that there are examples of great schools and we can identify them (reading many of the entires on this blog I was becoming convinced that there is no way to know if children are learning in the classroom).
The next step is to duplicate them. Building a great school here or there is not good enough for competition to work. Parents must have the choice between a great school and a poor one.
So my next question, and I really don’t know the answer to this, can we duplicate these great schools in significant numbers, say make 20% of all schools as good as these great institutions?
Well, my feeling, and there are those who know education a lot better than I, is that the way to get more great schools can only be done by long-term, continuous investment in developing great teachers, principals, and schools. That means attracting people higher on the academic achievement ladder to enter the profession through higher salaries, having great training before hand and effective mentoring and good working conditions once on the job. Then recruiting good teachers who have management skills to be principals, and train them. It is a long term effort that require most of all a recognition that long-term, substantial investment of public funds is necessary. Not sufficient, but necessary. The current anti-government mood, which has led to chopping teachers all over the country in the name of austerity, based on phoney economic arguments, is a disaster.
In the short term we can start by not wrecking the schools we have and demoralizing their teachers. In the medium term we can build a really strong system for inspiring and teaching the 15 year old and above students who are not dropping out, through apprenticeship and work programs, combined with academics to support.
I think we are at a point where we can agree on an explanation for why school choice has not resulted in measurably better outcomes for students: we do not have the resources needed (in terms of highly skilled teachers and administrators) to make very many excellent schools. Without those resources no system of education, public, private, miixed, or charter can create a significant improvement in education.
I think we can also agree on the solution to the problem: create incentives for the more able individuals to become teachers. I do think that there might be some hope that incentives could encourage existing teachers to become better, but perhaps you are right to argue that it would simply demoralize the existing group of teachers.
I meant to write ‘now dropping out.’
It’s not just incentives for entrance. It’s a whole system that will help teachers once on the job, and continue incentives and actual help to enable them to do their job. When you write “you are right to argue that it would simple demoralize the existing group of teachers” you are profoundly misunderstanding me. That is not my view at all. Now the main incentive is firing those whose students don’t do well on high stakes tests. Since the variation in class composition is greater than the variation of input of the teacher, as I understand it, that amounts to randomly firing people and closing schools. “The beatings will continue until morale improves” as the mocking slogan has it. Nor has merit pay proven to motivate teachers, and it has been studied over and over, as I understand it.
What teachers need is good working conditions, and seeing success in their work, and public and institutional support. They have a mission, and once the general salary level is set, studies show that a sense of being able to fulfill their mission is the most important motivation. There are all kinds of disincentives now, and they are getting worse because of ‘reform’.
The main problem with our schools, as Diane has written, is the poverty of the students. When you control for poverty, we do better than other places that are supposedly our superiors. This is not a reason to give up on trying to make our schools serve the poor more successfully. But we should be clear that the problem is not that we have a sea of rotten teachers.
Helping poor students is evidently extremely difficult, but some stellar institutions have succeeded extremely well. And at least the one I visited up close had the opposite atmosphere and practices from the dog-eat-dog competitiveness that the current reformers seem to think is motivating.
I do think there is a major structural reform needed, as I have said, for taking the lower half of the class at age 15 from school to a respected place in the world of work. But that is another subject.
But do we agree that the country simply does not have the specialized resources (in terms of skilled teachers and administrators) it needs to have produced better educational outcomes for detectible numbers of students in the median term, no matter what educational system we use. I think that is a good explanation for why the competition created by school choice has not improved institutional quality, and answers the question you first proposed.
This is a separate question, so I thought I would put it in a separate comment. You talk about taking the lower half of the class at age 15 and moving them to the respected place in the world of work. What metric would you use to decide who is in the lower half of the class? Would it be the lower half of all students in the country, state, school district or individual school? The only way it makes sense to me is that you mean the lower half of students in at least the state or perhaps the country, and this would have to require some sort of standardized metric, and the results, no matter how you measure it, are pretty high stakes.
I mentioned the lower half—of the class ranking by school grades—as a rough measure of the students whom we know will not complete a four year academic university program. You are thinking of cut-offs and I am thinking of opportunities. I want to have have the apprenticeships and work programs with strong parallel academics, to bring the vast majority up to a career-track academic competence. The students and their parents would be making the choices. I want to make the choice of staying in an academic program much more attractive and motivating, even for the weaker students.
On the issue of improvement, I do think we can continue gradual improvement in the medium term, but not if the high-stakes testing and punishment of students and teachers is the approach. As was the case under W. Bush and now Obama. As Diane Ravitch has been in the lead pointing out, this has been a tragic wrong turn. Doing what actually works, rather than what rich business men and right wing economists imagine works, would lead to continual improvement. In fact improvement has been happening, but I fear it is now reversing.
But are we in agreement that there are not enough high performing teachers and administrators in the country to make a significant improvement in learning in American schools? That it is a lack of resources that is holding schools back?
The Popper comment about the need to be well designed and well manned makes me not agree. We need more high performing teachers, and especially principals, but the design is also important. If the schools were designed as I saw Mamary’s school, then teachers would be able to accomplish more with their existing skills, and also have a system to enhance their skills. There’s chicken and egg problem because great leaders like him are also made by them having great mentors also. If the current reform effort had money behind the kind of “gentle bulldozer” of his schools, slowly but relentlessly moving children forward, I to think it would make a difference.
in my earlier comments I should have made more of an emphasis on strengthening the internal workings of schools
If it is a design problem as well as a resource problem, then there is a failure of our school system, both public and private, to use the best design. If the existing teachers are able to accomplish more with their existing skills using Dr. Mamary’s ideas, then we have a low cost way of improving education. I saw that Dr. Mamary’s book was only published five years ago, so perhaps we have simply not had time for widespread adoption of his proven principles. Now the issue is to get local school boards to adopted these best practices as quikely as practical. Again I have no real information about this, but has his methodolagy at least been widely adopted by the public school distrcts in New York State, where they were shown to have such great effect?
I think you have to realize that political decisions are regularly not following what works. For example, merit pay for teachers has not worked, but people keep supporting it because they think it ‘should’ work. Similarly with Mamary’s whole school application of mastery learning. It was viciously attacked with misrepresentations by right wing ideologues. I think it was the only whole system validated by the US department of education (if I remember rightly), but this didn’t make any difference.
It was on to the next fad, high stakes testing and choice among charters. Why? Because of ideology, which still reigns. I was very interested to hear from my wife about the great Lee Kuan Yu’s view of the Western governance: he said we waste our time fighting for ideology, rather than looking at what works. So true, alas.
Actually I do realize that public school officials make decisions that are not in the best interest of the students. This brings us nicely back to where the whole discussion started: the principle agent problem in the public school system.
If, as you say, “political decisions are regularly not following what works”, why not consider removing the politics from the decision making?
Good grief, is there some master list of talking points you all read from?
That’s the old “get rid of corrupt cops by eliminating all the cops” line.
The problem is that particular brands of corporate interests have suborned and short-circuited the relation between constituents and their representatives.
You don’t fix that by taking the people’s representatives out of the loop altogether. You fix that by taking the corrupting influences out of the loop.
Your recommendation to fix the education system is that we have no corrupting influences in the political system. Certainly a realistic, achievable goal firmly rooted in real world experience.
I am a little fuzzy on actually how to do this, but I am sure you will be able to explain how easy it is to accomplish.
Simon says, “satisficing”.
Newell says, “backtracking”.
In the real world, we may try to perfect things, be we are usually happy to improve things.
And when we find we have made things worse, we backtrack.
I’m guessing a lot of people here could make you a very long list of recent disimprovements in education that it would improve education a lot simply to backtrack on.
Still waiting to hear how to take the corrupting influences out of politics, or at least reduce them.
No doubt we are doing many things in schools that are detrimental to the students and hould be stopped. But would the politicians allow it? Would the union contracts allow it?
A lot of what I read above is so detached from reality that I have trouble doing more than sampling it. From my sample I get the impression that there’s supposed to be a consensus of one that choice would be a good thing in a Panglossian world where everyone had their Great Expectations realized of inheriting all the money they could possibly use. And maybe there is a consensus of two that we (I mean, those two) don’t really know how to improve education.
Most of what I hear about choice is utter nonsense.
I have sat in a town hall meeting with our local Rep (R-ALEC) and I have heard parents talk about the “choice” they made to move into our community, a move that cost them an amount of overhead not be sneezed at, but which they gladly paid “for the sake of their children”, making that “choice” on the basis of reliable information about the quality of the local schools.
And what happened?
Our dear Governerd took the $1,800,000,000 surplus in the School Aid Fund and used it to give a tax-break bonanza to those those business people, those students of economics, who as we know exhibit “a much more nuanced understanding of the external returns to education that rightfully justify public subsidies” than your typical parent of school-age children.
Now, some of those parents still labored under the misapprehension that the Rep in question was their rep and not a sales rep from ALEC, and others, better informed, were beginning to get a clue about who his real constituents were, but they all told heir stories of “choice” anyway, “for the sake of the catharsis”, I guess.
It seems to me you are saying that the problem is stupid politicians, yet you insist that these same stupid politicians must be in charge of the details of how our children are educated. That does not make sense to me.
I answered that above.
But I’m sure you can’t really be that stupid as to fail to grasp the obvious.
And neither am I.
Teaching Economist, a few words on politics. Your question, why not get rid of politics? The simple answer is that it’s less bad than war or autocracy. But ‘politics’ covers many different ways of governing, some much better than others. I do think that the particular public-private mix that Charter schools represent hasn’t worked. I’m trying to understand why, but I’m still am not entirely clear about what factors are most important. I do think political corruption is one important influence.
One important factor here that I haven’t mentioned is the extreme inequality in our country that has arisen since 1980. Extreme inequality is corrupting, because you have so much money sloshing around at the top, and that money gives disproportionate power to a few. This is, incidentally, a big part of the story of why poor countries stay poor. It is a political economy issue–you can’t actually separate out the economic issue and understand what is going on. And the corrupting influences are different when you add a whole new stream of money going from public funds to private Charter Schools. You can’t simply regard that as the same situation as when the schools are completely public, with school boards governing them—particularly in the face of the extreme economic inequality we have now.
If we were more equal, like in the 1950s, would the Charter School system have worked out better? I don’t know. Other countries are doing it also, so a comparative study would tell us something. I do think we are agreed that it hasn’t worked out, so the issue is what to do.
As to what we can do, it is to try to exercise our influence to move the political decisions in the direction of what actually works. This is difficult given the money on the other side, but I think it can be done. How quickly is the question, and how much damage will be done by present policies.
I won’t be able to post the rest of today, Friday.
Of couse I was suggesting that we might want to get the politicians out of the business of determining the details of how almost every school in the country educates their students, not that we go to a Hobsian war of all against all. Perhaps I am more sensitive to political interference in my children’s education because of where I live. In recent years my state school board has come very close to requiring all teachers to teach that “God did it” is a valid scientific explanation. When this happens, the public schools in my state will no longer teach science, and perhaps they should not even be called schools at all.
I certainly agree that inequality and more importantly deprivation is a very important problem in learning. Twenty years ago my foster son was, as far as we can tell, a two year old living on the streets of Freetown, Sierra Lione. His time on the streets there and as a refuge have created huge obstacles to his ability to learn. Fixing the problem of deprivation is much larger then fixing education, but I am even optimistic about that. The number of very poor people in the world has been decreasing at an unpresidented rate over the last couple of decades.
If you want to talk about the problem of corruption and rent seeking in the developing world we certainly can. When a public official is given the power to say yes or no to something, you have given them the opportunity to be corruptly influenced. In the developing world it can often be the case that you must obtain a government permit to do most anything, this giving the government official the ability to solicit a bribe. You might be interested in some data collected by The World Bank on the number of permits required to to do various things in different countries. I’ll post the link if you are interested. The officials who determine the host cities for olympics famously use that power to solicit money and goods.
In the case of school boards in the US, I suspect that textbook publishers are a major sources of corruption. I have had many offers to “review” short sections of a textbook in exchange for an honorarium from book reps. I can only imagine how much they would be willing to pay for a school board to adopt a text district wide for the next couple of years. I also think that labor unions would have the most influence on local politicians in these low turn out races, both by providing money and workers for the ground game. Charter schools might well contribute to corruption, but I don’t think they are the most important source of corruption in the system.
I look forward to your next post.
There are critical distinctions to be observed among public funding, public oversight, and political micro-managing.
The first two go together — like love and marriage, as they used to sing — but nothing about the power of the purse makes office-holders into instant experts on the mission being funded. Decisions about priorities and best practices must be negotiated with the benefit of the doubt going to the professionals who have expertise in the field. That is something we used to have to a far greater degree in education, both in the federal department and in the state boards, than we currently have.
It’s one of those paths that needs to be backtracked before we can move forward again.
Well. at least we’re beginning to talk about the relation between politics and economics as they impact education. That is progress, and it may be enough for one week’s lessons — 4 more weeks and we’ll all be qualified to lecture the masses!
For my part, I’m doing little more than reciting the lessons I learned in school a millennium ago &mdash: how we don’t live in armies, corporations, or markets — if we try to live in those things we will die. We live in communities and societies, and keeping those alive requires a government that is people-based and people-driven, not ruled by how much a few can amass by way of market dominance and military might.
A blog post I wrote a short while ago on Pseudo-Choice may have application here.
The following question may have gotten lost in the fray of the thread above, but it strikes me as such a critical clue to a possible avenue out of the maze that I will rethread it here —
That is the question.
What is the purpose of an accounting system?
And how can we tell if the one we choose is good?
Well, I suppose we could wait for all the things we care about to die off — country, civilization, the human race, the planet earth — then reckon the goodness of our guidebook in proportion inversely* to the time of extinction. That would give us the most objective quantitative measure of all possible measures.
And it looks like the measure of choice in many quarters.
But I reckon we should look for others, first.
* NB. I am thinking of priority ranking system here, where small numbers are best.
Are you talking about a metric to evaluate education or an economic system or really an accounting system?