A reader responded to a post about Michigan with the following comment.
I perked up because I was reminded of something I heard on CNN recently. Fareed Zakaria was interviewing Steven Rattner about hedge funds, equity investors, and outsourcing. Zakaria asked why so many capital investors end up sending jobs overseas, and Rattner answered very concisely. He said, and I paraphrase, “in a global economy, capital always seeks to lower costs. In a competitive marketplace, if you can’t cut costs, you go out of business. The name of the game is who can cut costs the most.”
What does this mean in an education marketplace? The school that can lower its costs the most wins. How do you lower costs? You increase class size and/or hire the least experienced, low-cost teachers.
So, the “winner” is the school with the largest class sizes and the least experienced teachers.
But these are not the factors associated with quality education. This would not describe the education at our nation’s elite schools, like Sidwell Friends, where the Obama daughters are enrolled, or at Exeter or Groton or Deerfield Academy, where so many of the corporate reformers send their children.
| Snyder’s proposal to improve education by maximizing parental choice implicitly rests on the Adam-Smith-”invisible-hand” doctrine — that is, in a free market, the sellers who offer the best product will survive while the sellers who offer inferior products will fail.However, the invisible hand only works when the market works. As commenters have noted in responses to recent posts in Diane’s blog, there are major market failures in the school-choice marketplace, particularly in the low-SES/inner-city areas.Most buyers (parents) have little/no accurate information regarding the quality of competing schools and no practical way of obtaining accurate information.Similarly, many/most buyers (parents) do not know what mix of educational services would best serve their particular children’s education needs — i.e., strict vs. relaxed discipline, whole-language vs. phonics reading instruction, 1 well-paid experienced teacher or 2 poorly-paid inexperienced teachers/class; lots of computerized instruction vs. minimal computerized instruction.For even the most concerned, well-educated parents, the school choice decision would be largely a crapshoot and would probably be driven by factors unrelated to school quality — i.e., neighborhood rumors, where the children’s friends are going, ease of transportation.And, in low-SES areas (the only areas where we’re seriously concerned that school quality is too low), many of the parents will be relatively unconcerned with the school choice decision and virtually none of the parents will be well-educated. So, the school choice decisions of most parents in these areas will be entirely a crapshoot with the result that, in these areas, there is no reason to believe that Adam Smith’s invisible hand will operate — that is, there is no reason to believe that the schools chosen by the parents will be the schools that offer the best product.
For these reasons, under Snyder’s proposal, there is a strong incentive for a school to minimize operating costs and little incentive for a school to improve instructional quality, particularly in low-SES areas. We’ll see an explosion of low-cost, low-quality for-profit schools serving the low-SES areas providing an inferior educational product while making a high profit margin. |
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The market model fails for far more fundamental reasons.
It fails because education is not a private commodity that parents buy for their children. All schools would be private then, and no taxes at all would be involved. The corporate raiders have no more interest in that sort of system than anyone else. What they want is the power to tax that government has so far reserved to itself. And they are steadily if stealthily getting it.
Education is a public good that the whole public must grant itself and jealously guard if it would survive as a democratic republic. Every other way is doomed on principle.
Jon,
You’ve got to quit bringing up these pesky base principles-gets in the way of making a lot of money for some of these privateers.
Education is definitely a commodity — a service rather than a product, but a commodity nonetheless, like medical care or drycleaning.
The issue raised by the school-choice proponents (charters, vouchers) is whether the quality of the commodity would be improved if, instead of govt (local school boards) purchasing the commodity from local public school systems, govt gave $ to parents who then purchased the commodity from charters, privates, or local public school system.
The school-choice proponents argue that, if parents were making the purchasing decisions (albeit with govt $), the schools (charter, private, and public) would have to compete in a marketplace for the purchasers’ dollars + the “invisible hand” of market competition would cause the schools that provide the best quality to win out over the schools that provide a lower quality. (In this model, quality would govern the market competition because price would be the same for each competing school.)
The school-choice proponents’ argument is theoretically sound and therefore superficially attractive. In the real world, it is seriously defective.
An important defect in the argument is that, when parents make the school-purchase decisions, they rarely have sufficient information to make informed decisions regarding school quality. A similar important defest is that they often — particularly in low-SES areas — lack the interest/ability/time to make rational decisions. In other words, for most purchasers, the decision is driven largely by irrational factors and there is, accordingly, little reason to believe that the school chosen by the most parents provides the best quality education — it’s a crapshoot, not a rationally-behaving best-quality-seeking market.
Another — and less obvious — defect in the school choice proponents’ argument is the concept you refer to — that is, the idea that education is a public good intended to serve the entire community. School choice (i.e., charters and vouchers) in low-SES areas inevitably results in the charters/privates enrolling the children of the concerned/functional parents and the neighborhood public schools enrolling the children of the unconcerned/dysfunctional parents. By concentrating the children of the unconcerned/dysfunctional parents in the neighborhood public schools, the school choice proponents condemn these children — the children most in need of a quality education experience — to chaotic schools and negative peer pressure. The society as a whole will pay the price when these children disproportionately become drop-outs, low-achievers, and life-long losers.
So we should sacrifice the welfare of the children of the concerned and functional parents in the hope of improving the outcome for the children of the unconcerned and dysfunctional parents. How big a sacrifice do you want them to make? Would being unable to attend college be enough or would you require something more of those students?
There are some critiques of the invisible hand. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand#Criticisms for example.
The biggest problem I see with the current educational choice concept is that we are not dealing with “things.” Children may be more like consulting clients. Does a business in search of a business consultant look for the cheapest consulting firm or one that meets their needs, adds value and gives them the most for their money? Isn’t this model better than one in which price is the most important factor?
Another way to think about this is one of the central ideas of democracy – freedom. One of the principles that brought people from all over the world to the US was freedom. I’m delighted that in Minnesota, youngsters can take courses like Advanced Placement or Int’l Baccac or “College in the Schools,” or take courses on college campuses. And the fact that students can take classes on college campuses has encouraged many high schools to offer more AP, IB and College in the Schools courses. Plus, some youngsters who are not comfortable in the high school environment have blossomed on more flexible college campuses. The vast majority of youngsters participating in these kinds of courses are taking them on high school campuses. That’s fine. The options help youngsters.
My son benefited greatly from being given the freedom to both take courses at a university and doing independent study leading to AP exams. With this flexibility he graduated from a public high school with two years of college credit. Without this flexibility I suspect he would have been so frustrated that graduating from high school may have been in doubt.
And this global extractionist capitalism will continue to grow as there are at least a couple of trillion dollars in assets held within public education. And the corporate / institutionalist elite will take it. They outspend unions, schools, communities on everything from advertising to acquisition of public assets–i.e., public schools. And in Michigan, corporate takeover of public education is granted by state leaders with dictatorial powers to enforce the taking of the commonweal.