Advocates for school choice like to say they believe in a free market in education. They say, let the consumer choose, let the market decide. And with this ideology, they merrily seek to undermine public education.
But is there a free market?
I received this comment from a reader:
“There is absolutely nothing “free market competitive” about the charter school movement. The only thing they are competing for is to strip away federal tax subsidies from public schools. I say, terminate all federal tax subsidies. Why should federal taxes subsidize Michael Milken? Public school funding should just stay funded by local taxes.
“The hedge funds are all good businessmen of course, because they smell the free government money. That’s what businessmen always do. Particularly Wall St. They love taxpayer guarantees.
“Free market competition means you are able to sell your product because it is better than the competition with NO government subsidy.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Well said– I agree. Rosemary Wilson Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2014 15:01:14 +0000 To: rmw49high@hotmail.com
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The article below has Krugman discussing oligarchy, a topic some of us here continually write about. Bottom line definition is “Patrimonial Capitialism”…children of the uber wealthy a generation of inherited wealth…total lack of work ethic and/or languishing in greed. See the Walton Family as a prime example.
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Paul Krugman: What the 1% Don’t Want You to Know
Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company: Economist Paul Krugman discusses how jumps in executive compensation may have a profound effect on widening income inequality and explains how the United States is becoming an oligarchy – the very system our founders revolted against.
Watch the Video and Read the Transcript
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Right on. JFYI I tried to explore some of the ways the ‘free market’ model is abused (and internalized) in this post on “The Root, Stem, Leaves, & Fruit of American Education” at http://ow.ly/vWWMv
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The definition of free market states specifically “without state intervention in the form of taxes, subsidies or regulation”. Needless to say some, if not most, of the state regulations and laws are contortions solely to give advantage to charters and vouchers..
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That definition seems to be to be overly strict unless you are willing to say that no free markets exist. How many markets are free from regulation or taxes?
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Should market forces be used for police, for fire?
A public good should never be left to market forces. Just look at our mess of a health care system for proof.
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What makes something a “public good” in your mind. Economists have a technical definition, and I am interested in how that differs from the way you are using the term.
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I am interested too — perhaps you would share your “economists’ technical definition” — my personal definition of “public good” is police, fire, public works (e.g. water department), prisons (I realize these have been privatized and with, especially historically speaking, the most outrageously bad results), health care (again, private and for profit has brought us a lot of badness in results, not the least of which is the excessive control exerted by profit seeking drug companies), the Armed Forces, and public schools.” I’m sure my list isn’t exhaustive — but I would include anything that can and should be done WITHOUT regard to efficiency or marketing! Services that every citizen should help pay for because we all benefit from them.
Remember, private schools are not necessarily successful at educating — they are successful at marketing themselves. Public schools should NOT have to market themselves — that is not what their resources should be used for. We should be working to improve government, not to put it in competition with profit seekers who will unethically create an illusion of good service, all to the detriment of our society overall.
If we gave Bill Gates the choice, he might not want to help pay for libraries or fire departments or any of those things — he could easily hire his own. Why are we letting this guy interfere with the education system as a hobby ? If he is smart, he is evil too. If he is not smart — at least as to things like this, we still shouldn’t let him dictate policy.
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The definition is fairly standard in economics. A public good is any good that is 1) not rival in consumption and 2) not excludable.
A good is rival in consumption when one person’s making use of the good prevents another from taking full advantage of the good. A great example of a non-rival good is the satellite signal that all GPS units use for location. My phone using that signal to locate me in no way interferes with your phone using that signal to locate you. If a good is not rival, it is foolish to limit the number of people using it. Unfortunately teaching in a classroom is rival as class size expands (one of the interesting things about MOOCs is that education by MOOC might not be rival, so there may not be a need to exclude anyone from a given MOOC). Education in a classroom is rival when congested in the same way that a highway becomes rival during rush hour or a park becomes unpleasantly crowded.
A good is excludable if it is possible to prevent a person from using the good. Education in a classroom is excludable. That is how all admission systems, based on street address or anything else, works. Education in a classroom is what economists would call a club good: excludable and rival when congested. The congestion problem suggests we should exclude people from particular classrooms, the excludability means that we can exclude them.
Your example of the armed forces, if i can translate that into strategic defense against nuclear attack, is the classic example of a public good. If your neighbor purchases strategic defense against nuclear attack, you are protected even if you don’t purchase it, so it is not excludable. Your being protected against nuclear attack does not mean your neighbor is less protected, so it is not rival. These goods are generally produced by governments because governments can force the good to be purchased. If you left it up to individuals, too many would free ride and attempt to enjoy the benefit of the good without contributing the resources needed to produce it.
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Julie, Just so you know, you were set up to receive this convoluted economists’ response, because “public good” differs from the term “common good.”
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CT,
Public good differs from the term common good because they are two different ideas. Julie asked how economists use the term public good and I responded with the generally agreed definition. Do you find fault with it as a description of what economists mean by that term?
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TE, For most people who are not economists, I think the terms “public good” and “common good” are viewed as synonymous.
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So, you are saying that education is not a “public good” because when it becomes crowded, it is “rival” and it is excludable, bc citizens/students receive less in a more crowded school or are, in fact, excluded based on street address. As a teacher at a public school that non-residents would like to come to, yes, I get it, because we do turn people away, based on the fact that they don’t actually live in our district. But — they do live in A district — that is, every single piece of real estate is part of A public school district. So, it’s not excludable in that there is A public school for everyone — I would regard “public school” to mean “the system of public schools” that does draw governance districts with defined physical boundaries. In rural areas, some farms cross over district lines, and at least in my state, those kids have their choice of districts.
I suppose it would be semantic to me (I’m a science and math person), but it seems to me that if you are making that distinction, it would make sense to respond that I would see that distinction to be either, “a distinction without a difference” as lawyers say, or a “false dichotomy”, I would say.
Interestingly enough, however, my claim is that “everyone has a public school from which they cannot, in fact, be excluded” (anyone trying to poke holes in this by mentioning ‘homeless persons’ please note that homeless persons are addressed under the law and DO have specifically granted rights to attend public schools), does seem to falter in some modern urban settings, e.g. Michigan, Newark where overpaid, arrogant politicians are trying to eliminate public schools and replace them with charters, which are a hybrid of “get public money but can and do exclude people for all sorts of reasons and don’t have to account for the money or operate with any transparency whatsoever”. But where I live, there is still, literally, a public school from which one cannot be excluded, for everyone, and the districts expand to accommodate (our state has caps on class sizes, caps which I believe charter schools in other places violate).
In any event, though, public schools do NOT exclude people based on congestibility. If, say, second grade becomes “too many kids in a room”, you simply have to create another classroom and hire another teacher. If, say, my physics class becomes too large to manage, then we create a second section and I teach it twice a day, or we could hire another physics teacher. So, literally, no one is excluded, period, and it isn’t rival — we provide the services that are needed.
Finally, while I obviously think it’s clear and certain that public schools do meet your economists’ definition of public good, it also seems clear to me that charter schools would NOT meet this definition, since they, unlike public schools, can and do exclude people, and do run class sizes up, so that they become rival. So, I would say that charters are private (purely private, not a hybrid) and should not be receiving any money from the public….
Back to your point: I infer that you may be intending to imply that a public good should not be subject to market competition (really should say “marketing and huckstering competition”) — but that a “common good” (you haven’t shared a technical definition of that, right ?) should be subject to market/huckstering competition.
If that is your implication, then, truly, “a distinction without a difference”. Public schools are a public good, period, and should NOT be subject to competition from hucksters operating with public money…..
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What makes a good or service a public good as economists use the term is in the nature of the good itself, not who or how it is provided. Education in a classroom is rival when it becomes congested, so we have to make choices about who gets into that classroom and who does not. It is excludable, so we can make those choices. Education in a classroom is education in a classroom, so it makes no sense from the economist’s viewpoint to claim that education in a classroom is a public good when done by traditional public schools and not a public good when done by the Dalton School or the Walton Rural Life Center Charter School. The characteristics of classroom education are the same in each of the schools.
Adding another section to a class will reduce congestion, but there is always a cost. If you switch a teacher out of another class, you lose that class. If you hire a new teacher, your school district must spend less on something else, perhaps moving from having a full time music teacher in the building to sharing one across buildings. If you get new funds to hire the teacher, taxpayers in your district will give up what might have been done with the funds that now go to higher local property taxes. There is no free lunch.
To see the difference think about the example I gave with the GPS signals. Doubling the number of people receiving the signal will have absolutely no impact on your ability to receive the signal, it will create no added cost to anyone. It is not rival.
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This can’t be right. It makes no sense. We can exclude people from the classroom ? No, we actually cannot, period. If a kid who is eligible to take precalculus wants to do so, we have to offer it, period. [Period.] Unless you are saying we can force the kid’s parents to move their residence outside the district ? We can’t do that, so the kid is NOT excludable, period. Maybe you didn’t know that — about public schools, I mean.
Now, you want to say — it seems — there is no free lunch, and if you offer up another class section, something else has to give. Better example: an older neighborhood turns over and young families move in. Suddenly, the neighborhood school that has had lowered enrollments is busting at the seams. The kids are still NOT excludable. There just is NO circumstance under which the public school can exclude them. As to “something else has to give”, well, first, you DO get more money from the state when you have more kids coming in, and with the economies of scale (it costs more to educate the first kid than it does to educate each successive kid — ideal class size being at least 17 and no more than 24), this concern actually is quite trivial, at best, certainly trivial enough to form an insufficient basis for the distinction you are trying to make. Often, an additional student coming into a class BENEFITS the others — these benefits can cancel out any disadvantage that might occur somewhere else later on in in the day. I think you just don’t understand the dynamics of how schools work — don’t feel too bad about this, lots of people don’t — sometime you could ask me or another teacher why we don’t like classes of less than, say, about 15 kids (what I mean by this is why do we think it is not a good scene for the kids).
Analog with the fire department: suppose a group of people move into the area served by a particular fire station — a group with the interesting hobby of starting fires for “no particular reason”. The fire department has to put them out, right — they can’t just say “sorry, we’re busy” and your fire will just have to be “excludable”. Under YOUR logic, apparently they can do this, since it’s no different than with the public school, so now the fire department is not a public good and we should have competing fire departments — fire departments who can say “we will come to your house if you have a steel roof and you get a fire, but you people with wood shake, no, you’re excludable”. And as to the fire department, if one station’s crews are already at another fire, another station responds — this is what public schools do also. We work together to serve. Districts can even change boundaries to adjust populations, and do. There is no free lunch, but there are economies and efficiencies and it makes far more sense to talk about the marginal cost (of adding kids one at a time) than to just say “something else has to give”. Math doesn’t work the way you say.
Finally, to say that charters and public schools are indistinguishable in this respect also misses the point entirely: charters can, and do, exclude people directly, either with a lottery (which acts to only admit kids whose parents/guardians have time to pursue the lottery in the first place) or with parent involvement requirements or with labyrinthine discipline policies, all of which serve to exclude kids whose families are less high-functioning, or just plain too beat down. All of those kids are easily excludable from charters and NOT excludable at all from public schools.
Again, I don’t think you understand what “education in a classroom” really is. It’s about the interactions of a community of scholars and diverse human beings with diverse human backgrounds and diverse human presents and futures, not about injecting specific knowledge into a kid’s brain (which would be both far easier and far less valuable). I don’t want to be disrespectful to your discipline here, but if “economists” want to make this distinction, then of course they can do so. However, this distinction is simply useless when one is analyzing public schools. What I am saying is that what is going on in a charter school IS different from what is going on in a public school. The policies that are applicable to one and not to the other have real effects in the classroom and all of the students and their families, along with all of the administrators and teachers, know all of this, at the level it applies to them (and it applies to all of them at some level) and that has implications for how the community in the classroom conducts its business. Anyone who thinks otherwise is simply ignorant, probably due to inexperience, of sociology and education.
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Julie,
Almost all students in the world are excluded from your class. Students outside your district, in your district but outside your catchment area, in your catchment area but unqualified in the eyes of your district from taking your class (too old, too young, etc). Charter schools, magnet schools, traditional public schools and private schools all have an admission system that picks out some students that may attend that school and some that may not.
Perhaps another example will help. Technology changes have made recorded music not excludable despite the very very best efforts of the recording industry. That is what not excludable means.
As you say in your post, if you have more than 24 students in a class the class will suffer from the crowding. You will have less time for each student. This is exactly what is meant by the idea of a class being rival when congested. Less learning happens for everyone in the class as the number of students goes beyond 24. This is why we want to exclude most of the students in the world from your class.
Fire protection is excludable in rural areas (google Tennessee house burns firefighter watch for an example) but most folks don’t want to exclude people (at least this is true for my students), so we usually force them to buy fire protection through the local government. Fire protection in a condominium building is not excludable because you will call your private fire service to put out your neighbor’s fire to protect your apartment. These are characteristics of the good or service and do not change if fire protection is provided privately, with a volunteer fire department, or a professional fire department.
You can, of course, expand capacity by using more resources like additional money from the state. That means there are fewer resources to do other things. Often these costs are worth paying, but ignoring the existence of these costs leads to poor decision making.
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There is a public school available for every single kid that lives in my state. Every single kid. No one is excluded, period. Period. If that’s not what the word “excludable” means, then you have got yourself some kind of crazy useless definition.
By your definition, NOTHING would be excludable. There are prerequisites for EVERYTHING. We don’t have a GPS / receiver — so we are excluded from GPS. We could buy a GPS receiver, if we wanted, and, similarly (exactly similarly), we could move into the boundaries of any school district we wanted also. We choose to not have a GPS, and we choose where we live. I see no difference.
If I have a fire, the fire department is legally obligated to provide its services. They are not legally obligated to hop on a plane and fly to another state to put out a fire there. Police, library service. So all those things would be excludable by your definition. Armed forces ? Excludable too because they aren’t going to serve everyone, only their own rulers.
The private fire service in the condominium you mentioned ? Not excludable because you would call your private fire service to put out your neighbor’s fire so as to protect your own condo — clearly, that would be “rival” because they can’t put out two fires at a time and putting out a fire uses resources.
School is different. The 17th – 24th kid uses almost no additional resources. The 25th kid might or might not — remember “marginal cost” — “marginal” here is a technical term and maybe only scientists and engineers use it, but the math of resource allocation does not work the way you suggest in your post. I don’t know that it matters — again, the difficulty is that because everything has prerequisites, nothing would ever meet the definition of not excludable.
I did just read something about fire service being a natural monopoly because it is excludable but not rival — because firemen spend time sitting around waiting for someone to have a need for their services. Schools should be run like this also — ready to fulfill the need. Marginal cost being low to inconsequential. I think we run our school that way also — we keep up on the community, anticipate the needs and plan accordingly, just like the fire department.
I never knew what your point was and you haven’t said. I was curious as to all this “public good” business and you have steered me a bit. I see now why and how public schools are a “natural monopoly” and further understand why charter schools are a bad idea and should be illegal entirely (as they are where I live, thankfully).
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Julie,
You keep discussing the rules that you use to exclude students. If a student is qualified for precalculus, you don’t exclude the student. If the student is not qualified for precalculus, you do exclude the student. Record companies had rules as well: if you buy the recording, you can listen to the recording, if you don’t buy the recording, you cant listen to the recording. Those rules don’t work for the record company anymore because information is not excludable. Your rules work for you because classroom education is excludable.
Things like classroom education, slices of pizza, and travel on a limited access interstate are all excludable. That is how private schools, pizza places, and toll roads get their revenue, by excluding anyone who does not pay.
GPS receivers are excludable (stores keep you from getting one unless you pay for it) and rival (if I am using your receiver on my trip, you can not be using your receiver on your trip). Signals are excludable (we could encode the signal) but since listening to the signal is not rival, excluding people does not make sense.
What are the costs of the 30th kid? the 40th kid? The 200th kid? Clearly increasing class size reduces the learning that goes on in the classroom. Frankly I am puzzled as to why this would be controversial.
My point is to answer your question about what economists mean by a “public good”.
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I do appreciate your efforts to educate me regarding what is a “public good”. As I have said, I am a “hard science” and math person and never took a class in econ, at all (although I do have considerable studies / coursework in public policy type studies).
Where I disagree with you is IF fire protection service is a “public good”, then so are traditional public schools. You told me in one post that it costs “hardly anything” to put out twice as many fires. It is similar for public schools — much of our costs are fixed and as long as we are operating below capacity, the schools can take in more students without spending much more. Fire departments have capacities also. No difference here.
So — it seems “obvious” as a matter of public policy that we don’t privatize the fire service; maybe it’s less obvious (to you) that we should not privatize the public schools (and when I say “privatize”, I include charters with their zero accountability), but upon examination of the facts / realities, it is clear that there is absolutely no difference between the philosophies behind fire department or public schools.
Everything is excludable; everything is rival (by your definitions) — that’s what a physicist would say. That being the case, it’s hard to argue that the terms (as you define them) have any usefulness.
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It is not the same in education because doubling the number of students will close to double the cost of education. That is not true for fire stations. Most of the expense of a fire station is a fixed cost, most of the expense of a school is a variable cost, that is it goes up with the number of students (more teachers, more food, etc). Schools do not have the day to day excess capacity that is required of fire protection.
Once again, music companies would very very very very much like to make recorded music excludable again. They cant. Ask them if the idea has no relevance.
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Lots of differences between fighting fires and educating youngsters. We’ve seen all over the country that youngsters might do really well in a non-traditional school and poorly in a traditional school ( or vice versa). Some families prefer a Montessori approach, others a more traditional approach. Some prefer that their children attend a school that is bi-lingual English/Spanish or English/Chinese or some other language.
Also some teachers prefer a Montessori approach, others like Core Knowledge, or project based, or …
So – having government action to offer some options for low & moderate income families makes sense both for families and educators.
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Lots of differences in the ways to approach fire-fighting. People might approach one way — others like a different way. So we work on consensus. Just like public schools. I don’t believe your premise, myself personally — I do know that “one size fits all” is the way some charters operate, but not the way good public schools should and do operate. In my school, we have lots of different approaches for kids. Maybe that’s why nobody around here wants charters. Still, nobody anywhere should want charters. Instead, they should exercise the accountability provision — if what they want is rational and reasonable, others will want it too, eventually. That’s our system of government and should be our system of schools — work for good schools, not just walk away “and form your own one-size-fits-all approach.
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If you drop the geographic admission system, schools can be free to become more diversified. There are magnet and charter Montesorri schools, magnet and charter language immersion schools, magnet and charter stem schools, magnet and charter Waldorf schools, etc. with the geographic admission system schools must try to compromise to be pretty good at most things for most students.
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Fortunately more than 40 years ago many districts recognized that one approach, one style does not fit all kids or educators. So districts began offering options as long ago as the late 1960’s. I realize that’s not the case in your district. But it is a fact all over the country.
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I should add that fire protection is a local natural monopoly because there are high fixed costs to having firefighting capacity and relatively low marginal costs to actually fighting the fires. That is not the case with schools. If we want to double the number children taught in a school, we would come close to doubling the expenses, assuming that we keep class size the same and teacher to support staff ratios the same. That is not true of firefighting. We could double the number of fire calls a station answers with very little increase in costs because we would have to hire very few additional firefighters. Saying that schools should be a natural monopoly is a little like saying we should arrange things so that gravity is different. We don’t get to choose if something is a natural monopoly, it is the nature of the technology (which can change) that determines it.
I hope that my last post makes the difference between goods that are excludable and goods that are not excludable clear. Recorded music was excludable when you needed to have a container (vinyl, eight track, or CD) to hold the information. They could keep you from listening to the recording by preventing you from getting the container that enclosed the information. Now that no container is needed, the music is not excludable. Your state has rules that exclude any student not from your state from attending your states schools. Your state has rules that exclude students from your state from attending almost all of the schools in your state. Your state has rules that allow students to attend some schools in your state. The rules are enforceable because attending a school and class is excludable. If attending a school was not excludable, you would not have any more success limiting a pre-calculus class to those qualified to take it than the recoding company has in limiting people listening to Radiation by Imagine Dragons to those that actually purchased the song.
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Julie, Just stick with the “Common Good.” And don’t ask an economist about what is good for the public. If you’re expecting a response based on humanitarian principles, you’d probably have better luck asking a poet.
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CT,
Julie asked how economist define a public good, so i told her. Definitions have nothing at all to do with humanitarian principles. You might as well ask for a humanitarian definition of an Abelian group as apposed to a non-humanitarian definition of an Abelian group.
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My point exactly, TE. Your economist’s viewpoint does not reflect concern for the good of humanity.
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Sorry, didn’t mean to imply that all economists lack concern for humanity. For an insightful perspective on the oligrachy ruling this country from an economist who is very concerned about it, see Paul Krugman on Moyers and Company this week: http://billmoyers.com/
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CT,
Paul Krugman has the same definition of a public good as I do (See Chapter 17: Public Goods and Common Resources in his textbook Microeconomics coauthored with Robin Wells published by Worth) and would reach the same conclusion that schools are club goods. It has nothing to do with any concern or lack of concern with humanity, it is about creating distinctions that are useful when thinking about the world.
The world would be a much better place for humans if nothing was rival. Imagine the great benefits that would come if food was not rival, if your eating a sandwich and gaining nutrition from it did not prevent me from eating that very same sandwich and gaining nutrition from it. There would be no hunger in the world. The ecological devastation that comes from our attempts to feed each other would end. Unfortunately for humans, food is rival and we need to think hard about how to feed each other. Pretending food is not rival is not helpful in this effort.
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And when, pray tell, do you ever speak up here about the dangers of the oligarchy and what can be done about the inequitable distribution of wealth in this country? Except for your ongoing promotion of school choice, including charters, despite the damage that’s doing to public education, I just hear economist rhetoric.
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This is a blog about educational policy, and it seems to me that comments are best focused on that.
If you want my opinion on economic inequality, I do think that the higher than normal level of income inequality in the US is in large part the result of integrating China into the world economy. Now that this process is well underway, I expect that we will see a more normal level of income inequality in the US with the added benefit of many fewer very poor people in the world (the last several decades have seen an unprecedented reduction in world poverty, largely as the result of vastly improved economic policies in China, but also India as well.)
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You’re kidding yourself if you think that the current state of education has nothing to do with our economy and our high rate of child poverty. Corporate education “reform” has served as an effective distraction from ameliorating poverty and addressing the inequitable distribution of wealth, the plutocracy, as well as the growing oligarchy ruling this country. It is all inter-related.
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Certainly there is a close connection between absolute poverty and education. The connection between relative poverty and education is less clear.
In any case, I think it more useful to focus on the things that fall more obviously under the heading of educational policy in a blog about educational policy.
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Diane posts many threads about economics, including this thread about “Free Market Schooling” (which you clearly support) because economic issues are endemic to corporate education “reform.” You jumped into the thread about “The Quest for Efficiency” feet first to spout economics rhetoric and contest terms, too. You are just selective and rarely address the truly critical economic matters driving corporate education “reform” that are negatively impacting humanity.
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Just saw your post saying this: “there are high fixed costs to having firefighting capacity and relatively low marginal costs to actually fighting the fires. That is not the case with schools”.
This is where you are going wrong: “high fixed costs to having a well run school and relatively low marginal costs” — that’s exactly the way it is with schools and exactly the way public schools are and should be run (although we can acknowledge that that is not how a for-profit charter will want to be run, because it does not conceive of itself as providing a pubic service, and in fact, it does not provide a public service). Of course, public schools do make predictions and plan for the long run / future AND SO DOES THE FIRE DEPARTMENT, e.g. a new subdivision calls for a NEW FIRE STATION.
There is just no difference — either they are both public goods, or neither of them is.
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Most of the cost of a school is in personal. A school with 250 students (the mean size of a high school in my state) will not have the same personal costs as a school with 2,500 students. A fire station that puts out 5 fires a year will not need to add many firefighters to put out 50 fires a year.
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You mean personnel ? Our district has capacity for more — we recently had this come up where a neighboring school district was going to maybe have to send kids out — we can absorb more, that’s the right way to run a district. This is the right way to run all sorts of things — have enough people so that when things get “busy”, all hands on deck is perfectly good enough. Running things just at capacity or “efficiently” is not a good policy.
Spreading people thin and working them hard ? That’s the “wal mart” way, the charter way from what I hear. If there are public schools being run this way, shame on them and their taxpayer-citizens for making such poor decisions. “Efficiency” is way overrated.
I’m glad I live and work in communities where it’s just “not like that”.
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Julie,
Let my try explaining this a slightly different way. If a school buildings were natural monopolies, combining all the schools in your district into one large building would significantly reduce cost per student while leaving educational quality the same. If school systems were natural monopolies, combining your district with neighboring districts would significantly reduce cost per student while leaving educational quality the same.
Schools buildings and school districts are not natural monopolies, so the cost per student will not change with this rearrangement.
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What the privatizers are doing is looting the public treasury for profit. To neoliberals/libertarians, there should be NO restraints whatsoever on making money, even if it means outright theft of public assets.
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All of the people that tout the free market actually make their money from insider trading, government contracts and subsidies, and monopolies. They are big liars and thieves.
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“I say, terminate all federal tax subsidies…..” “Public school funding should just stay funded by local taxes.” I disagree!
Local taxes do not provide equitable resources for education. In order to give every child access to good schools there must be a cooperative approach to education funding.
Besides, there is no such thing as a free market. The invisible hand is not really invisible, but a well hidden hand busily corrupting the market place. Those who currently have wealth and political power do not want the competition of a true free market system, (an impossible pie in the sky idea to begin with), just like they do not want other children to have the same educational opportunities that they set up for their own children.
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I agree that using only local funding for K-12 education would likely result in vast disparities of opportunities across districts. Even with the current levels of spending, most high schools in my state (a relatively low population rural state) do not offer any AP classes. Without subsidies from richer portions of the state hundreds of miles away, the existing disparities will be even worse.
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Which make public schools a common good? …even if you can’t have your own public Montessori and Waldorf school because you think they are good?
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I am not sure what you mean by a common good.
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To me, the free market concept died during the recession when Obama bailed out the banks with taxpayer dollars (he was “encouraged” by his corporate buddies). If a true free market existed, the banks would have been allowed to fail. As it turned out, they were bailed out (not the homeowners who got screwed) and no one in the mortgage industry served jail time for their role in the mortgage crisis.
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The problem with allowing the institutions to fail is that it would have cascaded through the financial markets, destroying the ability of the economy to turn excess savings into useful investment. If the system had imploded I think we would have seen a downturn at least as bad as the Great Depression, likely much worse given how interdependent we are now.
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The visible hand of cronyism.
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And nepotism. As a convicted felon, Mike Milken could not get one cent of government funding, so he claims he’s not involved and hides behind his brother, Lionel, and his slew of for-profit and non-profit front companies and foundations.
Education corporations like Milken’s get a lot in local funding, too, so I doubt cutting off federal funds would end the gravy train for them.
I would, however, like to see an end to the federal New Markets Tax Credit, where investors can earn a 39% tax credit and double their money in seven years by investing in new charter school construction. Why are there no similar opportunities for investing in genuine public schools? Oh yeah, it’s because the investors can charge rent and when the school fails, walk away with ownership of the building.
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I would like to end E-B 5 as well which is a federal program that allows foreigners who invest at least $500.000 in a U.S. charter school to get fast track visas for themselves and their families. There are 100 Gulen charter schools in the U.S. right now (Turkish owned).
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It’s unbelievable how many ways our government has come up with for selling off public education. Can’t get much sicker than this. What a nightmare.
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We finally get an accurate, un-spun description of ed reform lobbyists from a local paper in NY:
“Education Reform Now is a nonprofit policy think tank, whereas Democrats for Education Reform is politically driven and lobbies elected leaders, Williams said. The organizations, which have offices in several states including New York, has successfully advocated for policies most recently in New Jersey and Washington state. It supports charter schools and tougher teacher evaluations and tenure requirements.”
They support charter schools. Now why was that so hard? Why do this elaborate dance?
Nothing wrong with supporting charter schools and union-busting. It’s a free country.
The problem is we don’t have any lawmakers who support public schools. You’d think the folks who use the word “equity” so much would see the inequity there. Public schools are getting killed because we have passionate and well-funded advocates for charter schools and no one on the public schools side. We don’t have to ask nicely, either. We’re paying these people to run public schools. It’s their JOB. If they have some ideological objection to our schools, perhaps they should step aside and let a real advocate have the job.
http://www.adirondackdailyenterprise.com/page/content.detail/id/542473/
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If all taxpayers pay for publicly funded education, why shouldn’t all taxpayers benefit from this funding regardless of their choice of school?
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Dexter, many taxpayers don’t have children. Many have children who are no longer in school. Supporting public education is akin to paying taxes for the fire department even if you never have a fire, paying taxes for public parks and beaches even if you don’t use them. You may pay for a public pool in your town. If you want a private pool, pay for it yourself. If you want a private security service, pay for it yourself. We pay for public schools because it benefits the entire community to educate the next generation.
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We also pay for some students to attend private post secondary schools because it benefits society. I am not sure that “public” is needed for this argument to have merit.
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Or maybe we ought to stop paying for students to attend private colleges, since we have many public options. I would add private preschools to that, if we had more options for those ages in public programs, but unlike colleges, there are very few public preschools across the nation.
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You could limit Pell grants to public schools, but it would be a shame to prevent students from attending schools like MIT, Stanford, Washington University, etc.
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Why stop at schools, Dexter? Extrapolate to the kinds of private programs where people would next want their tax dollars sent, such as their choice of private pools (i.e., country clubs), police (private security guards) transportation (limousine chauffeurs) etc.
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There is no shame in going to a state school. Students can benefit just as much from attending UCLA. University of Michigan, University of Illinois, etc. Maybe more government sponsored research funding should be going there, too.
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I certainly agree that there is no shame in attending a public university, I have taught at one for over 25 years. Out of state at Michigan, though, is just as expensive as most any elite private. I would think that we might allow students to attend any high quality institution that they believe is best for their individual strengths, hopes, or ambitions.
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Also, Dexter, they do benefit. Can you imagine living in a society that had no schools for its children? Did you see Slum Dog Millionaire?
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They can attend wherever they want. They can also either pay out of state tuition themselves, go to school in-state or take out student loans.
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Indeed students can if they have the means.
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No means necessary for student loans.
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If you want the unsubsidized sort you will have to give up the ability to discharge the debt through bankruptcy. That is the only way that you can get someone to believe your promise that you will pay them back in the future.
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My guess is you do benefit from public school funding, since the majority of people in the US attend public schools there is a good chance your doctor, lawyer, mechanic, etc attended public school at one point in his/her life.
The children of the people who check us out in stores, clean our (public and private) schools, care for our ailing parents, provide us with support care in hospitals, etc. most likely attend public schools. Do you think these children do not deserve an education? We have a nice standard of living somewhat based on the work that people who do not make a lot of money do. Are you willing to pay much more for their services so they can pay for private school for their children?
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These guys only TALK free markets. Ed Deform is all about crony capitalism. It’s no accident that when one looks at the ownership of the charter chains and of the virtual charters, one finds ex-political hacks and the grifter cousins, brothers, and golfing buddies of politicians. These guys make backroom deals with their politician buddies to turn taxpayer dollars into profits.
But that’s the way of the world now. Six trillion dollar in no-bid contracts to run phony wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now these charter scams.
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The so-called “Free Market” is a theory. Which reminds me of a little joke, which I will now paraphrase and mangle:
Sniffed the economist to the reality-based community: “That explanation may be all well and good in reality, but it will never work in theory.”
There is a reason why economics is called the “dismal science”.
Econ 101: The most important condition that needs to be present in a free market is free, instantaneous, accurate, universally available information, which, alas, is against all universal laws of physics and human nature. That old reality thing again, it just won’t quit, will it?
If, in Bizarro World, all necessary conditions are met, free market theory explains market behavior in the _______ run. If you answered “Short”, go sew some burlap bags together and find your scythe, because Serf’s Up!
If the free market corrects itself in the long run, what happens in the short run? Besides bargain-hunting and profit taking? How about lead in toys? Or Enron con games? Or exploding gasoline tanks? Or salmonella in spinach?
If enough people get hurt, the word trickles out and eventually the trickle becomes a rivulet and then a puddle and before long a little pond might form and then a crick and an arroyo then a gulley washer, well… you get my drift – it takes time for word to get to the market and force a correction. Harm to humans in short run, before “free market” correction in long run. That’s all one really needs to know about the free market theory.
Goddamn, who could be against free markets!!! If you’re against free markets, why, you’re against FREEDOM, right?
The reality is that government regulations, and the insider elites who actually control the government regulations through the political process, as well as insider elite self-dealing, cancel out the conditions necessary for even a semblance of a free market. Klein’s point is these elites use “shocks”, both cynically those they manufacture and opportunistically those that just happen, as an excuse for repression by manipulating the so-called free market.
I am open to other explanations, if anyone has any.
Did I say the free market was a theory? Sorry, I was wrong. The Free Market is a big fat LIE.
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Funny and true.
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Nice post, Michael.
Re: Klein’s point is these elites use “shocks”, both cynically those they manufacture and opportunistically those that just happen, as an excuse for repression by manipulating the so-called free market.
If anyone would like some evidence of how it all worked as part of “school reform” check our Uncle Milton just after Katrina. Proposing…Vouchers!
In this editorial written only a few months after Hurricane Katrina hit, Milton Friedman states that the storm gave New Orleans “an opportunity to radically reform the educational system” and calls for replacing the public school system.
Here is the article he wrote:
http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/resources/part7/chapter20/friedman-promise-vouchers
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Milton said something like, Katrina did for us in one day what we have been trying to do for fifty years. We can privatize education now.
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Ah free markets. Like unicorns, yeti, and the Loch Ness Monster , much discussed, never encountered in the real world.
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The “federal” factor does seem to be the common link in both sides of the public education trash compactor we now find ourselves in. RttT (federal money) and the new market tax credits motivating hedge funds to launch charters (federal). Right? So we can see where the head of the dragon is.
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Is the government going to come up with a ‘lemon law’ for defective charter schools?
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Long before charters there was (and remains) a “market” in education which allows affluent families to select exclusive suburbs. That’s the single largest school choice program in the country.
Progressives have worked since the 1960’s to create new public school options because we’ve recognized that there is no best single model or all students. But a number of progressives oppose some forms of choice, such as choices that allow schools to use admissions tests to select schools – a form of school choice that has been used for decades in a number of large cities. A number of progressives also oppose public funds going to private & parochial k-12 schools.
There isn’t one form of school choice. There are a number of them..some more helpful that others. And allowing low and moderate income families to have more choices – as wealthy people do – also empowers educators to create distinctive public schools, whether they are Montessori, project based, Core Knowledge, etc. etc.
School choice isn’t just about markets and competition. It’s also about recognizing that creating distinctive public schools can empower educators and help more students succeed.
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Hogwash. There is no need to go outside the school system to create choices, as demonstrated by the many options that magnet schools provide, including Montessori, etc. I shudder to think that people who support privatizing education like you call yourselves “progressive.”
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In my district the only way to get a Montessori, Waldorf, or progressive education is to attend a private school (tuition about $10,00 a year). My local district is probably small by coastal standards. at around 10,000 students, but it is one of the ten largest in my state.
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And yet your district has a charter school. If the district can pawn off services and siphon funds to charter schools, they can create magnet schools.
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If your comment is directed at me, I doubt that you would say that the charter draws off public school resources. The charter in town was established by the elected public school board and is managed as part of the portfolio of schools under its control. The presence of a research 1 university a couple of miles from the high schools probably dampens the need to offer advanced classes in the high schools in town, at least for those that can afford the tuition.
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Why wouldn’t I have a problem with that? I have watched my own school board authorize many charters in their ever expanding portfolio of schools and, at the same time, close an abundance of neighborhood schools. Wait til you have no neighborhood schools left and you realize that it’s charters that choose students and not the other way around.
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The school board did not authorize the charter, it runs the charter just like it does the other high schools in the district.
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My board “runs” charters, too, but charters have very little regulatory oversight and they mostly do what they want with impunity, while the board keeps dumping neighborhood schools and grows its hands-off charter portfolio,
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I guess that is the choice of your elected officials.
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Actually, that is the choice of ONE elected official, the mayor, and his hand-picked, rubber stamping, appointed board.
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School choice is a ruse. Charter schools may use lotteries to accept students but they quickly “counsel out” any child that needs something different than one size fits all boot camp. Charters drain money from neighborhood schools, skim off the top performing students, do not offer a wide array of special education services or any services for English language learners. They pay their administrators outsized salaries while paying their teachers peanuts. They have a high turnover in staff and a high turnover in students. Most wonderful charter school success stories turn out to be fabrications when you actually match up the names of incoming students with the names of graduates. They play a numbers game by touting their graduation rates. They do not have local school boards. There is no one to complain to.
They access taxpayer money but cannot be audited by the state. What kind of choice for the taxpayers is that?
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Qualified admission magnet schools also “drain money from neighborhood schools, skim off the top performing students, do not offer a wide array of special education services or any services for English language learners,”
Should we object to those schools as well?
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How about we offer all students the same thing we offer “students of promise” at qualified admission magnet schools?
Who isn’t a student of promise?
And I am sure that those schools do not hire TFA who have been trained for 5 weeks in the summer to teach those students of promise.
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It sounds to me like you do object to qualified admission magnet schools. Am I correct?
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They would be unnecessary if we had a system like Finland where equity was an actuality. There are no bad schools in Finland no matter what neighborhood they are in. That would be a new concept here.
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I have to disagree there. Thomas Jefferson high, a qualified admission magnet school in Virginia, offers students the first couple of years of a typical college math program (through differential equations). It would be unjustifiably expensive to provide that in every high school.
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Not everyone wants to study that level of math in high school. Finland’s teacher preparation programs are rigorous. Only 10% of the applicants are accepted. it is a respected profession like a doctor is here. Why does it have to be so expensive to offer differential equations to students who are ready and eager to learn them?
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The major reason that it is expensive is that those students that do wish to study it are thin on the ground. Generally a student taking differential equations will have had to take several post BC level math courses beforehand. Offering multiple classes with one or two students each will become expensive. In my state, the majority of high schools are too small to even justify a calculus course, much less multiple variable calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations.
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Admission test schools like the one that the current NYC mayor selected for one of his children are not all the same. While they all teach reading, writing and math, some specialize in performing arts, some math and science, some in another field.
Many educators have learned that they can reach more youngsters if they offer options.
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I don’t object to the specialization of schools, art, science, music, math….that is wonderful. I do object to the qualified admissions part. if the idea is that the seats in these schools are so few that a “student of promise” should not be denied a seat while a student who has previously shown no promise gets one…..then the obvious solution to that is to create more specialized schools. They should be open to all.
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Dawn, we agree that k-12 public schools should, as you wrote, “be open to all.”
Moreover I think part of a school’s record, available to the public school be the number of students who remain over a 3-5 year period (depending on what ages the school serves). There are some schools that encourage youngsters to leave. That information should be available to the public.
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School choice seems supported by many people on this list serve so long it is limited to magnet schools that use admissions tests to screen out students, suburban public schools that sometimes hire detectives to keep out students whose families can’t afford to live in the suburbs, alternative schools that turn out to be, in some cases, “last chance options” that rely extensively on worksheets, and other options offered by local districts.
I’m all for district options that are open to all students with no admissions tests. It’s great that many district educators have created distinctive options within districts (although they sometimes face opposition from administrators who prefer standard schools). But all over the country educators have joined with parents to create other options – sometimes charters, sometimes opportunities for high school students to earn college credit on college campuses (as well as on high school campuses).
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This is an interesting discussion.
If a school has no admission test (or criteria) do you also feel the school should not have requirements for advanced placement classes? Should AP classes be open to anyone who wants to take them?
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The problem is that after a certain point adding an additional student to a class will make it a worse class for the students already in the class. Adding a new section will require a teacher that might be teaching other students other classes.
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You are making specious arguments.
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I am making an argument based on the premise that smaller class sizes are better for learning than larger class sizes and that a teacher assigned to teach one class can not be teaching a different class at the same time. How is that a specious argument?
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The way it works in my local public high school is that if a student expresses an interest in taking an AP course he is advised to take all prerequisite honors courses first and then get a recommendation from two teachers. Anyone can do this. The only problem is if a student spent 9th grade fooling around not realizing that a certain course of study begins then in order to reach the AP level by 12th grade. It really is up to the guidance counselors to impress upon students what their options are right from the beginning of 9th grade so that there are no surprises.
In short, yes everyone should get a shot at AP courses and in the schools that I know of they have one.
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In my state most high schools are too small to offer AP classes. My local high school has some, but they are limited by the possibility of attending the local university as a special student. The courses at the university must be paid for by the family and don’t count toward high school graduation, but they do keep a student learning new material.
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Yes, I think AP courses should be available to anyone but I do think prospective students should be told ahead of time what the course requirements are. As a former urban public school teacher who now works with urban as well as suburban & rural teachers, I’ve seen many times when teachers helped students accomplish far more than they thought they could.
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You’re just jam packed with BS today, Joe. We’ve had this discussion before and many people here have said they support magnet schools with open admissions policies. I do, too. Unlike most, however, I also support selective enrollment programs for gifted students. because I am a special educator so I know that population is exceptional and has special educational needs. .
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I can’t believe all the lies here. Unlike charters, magnet schools offer the same specialized services to exceptional learners and ELLs as neighborhood public schools.
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I have no doubt that Qualified magnet schools offer the services that any student who passes the standardized tests to enroll in the school requires.
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Many magnet schools require admissions tests and use those tests to screen out students – including many students with special needs who can’t pass those tests. The anger than many parents and educators feel toward admissions schools helped lead to the charter movement.
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And I have no doubt that you have absolutely no clue what you are talking about. We have many magnet schools in my district and the majority are open enrollment. Regardless of the type of magnet school, ALL magnets here provide specialized services onsite.
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Here is the flow chart of the mathmatics curiculem at Thomas Jefferson High School, a qualified admission public magnet school in Virginia. Note that the bolder courses are required for graduation. I don’t see a lot of accommodation here. Do you?
The link: https://www.tjhsst.edu/research-academics/math-cs/math/docs/Math%20FlowChart14-15notnew.pdf
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I have no idea what you want to see on the flow chart. Maybe you need to take a look at their Special Services Department: https://www.tjhsst.edu/studentservices/special-education/index.html
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What I would like you to notice is that calculus is a graduation requirement. Is that comparable with graduating students with all learning disabilities or do you think those students are screened out by the admission tests?
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It’s a STEM program for gifted students and only 3-5% of the population is going to qualify for entrance to it. If students need help fulfilling graduation requirements, they can get that help, including students with learning disabilities (Gifted kids with learning disabilities are called “twice exceptional.”)
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Too many people like Joe are willing to throw gifted students under the bus because of a misconception that they are advantaged and don’t need help, which is contrary to a large body of research. Some states include gifted children in special education, while others do not and those that don’t have been defunding gifted education over the past decade, while federal funding has also dried up. That is a great disservice to gifted children, as well as to our society:
http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/gifted_education.htm.
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Actually, I’ve helped start a number of programs that serve students with various gifts. This includes but is not limited to a Mn law that allows high schools students to take courses on college campuses with state funds following them.
The state funds make taking such courses free – free tuition, books and lab fees.
This is available in both academic and career tech areas. More than 120,000 students have taken since courses since the law was established in 1985. A number have testified that it “changed their lives.”
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Here’s an article published today regarding the attempt to remove gifted students from special education in New Mexico: http://www.abqjournal.com/386614/opinion/gifted-students-belong-in-special-education-framework.html
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Than you should know better than to characterize magnet programs for gifted students as intending to “use admissions tests to screen out students” Joe, when the purpose is to identify students who are gifted and in need of specialized services. For all exceptional learners in special education, we maintain a continuum of placements because not all kids can benefit optimally from being placed in general education environments for part or all of their day.
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CT – thanks for your commitment to students who have multiple special needs. Part of the reason I think we need options is that there is no single school that will serve all students well. That does not mean public schools should use standardized tests to determine which students will be allowed to enter.
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We use standardized tests as part of a case study when determining whether a student is eligible for services. While we never use them as the only diagnostic tool, they are extremely useful for guiding and confirming the conclusions drawn from a case study.
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Don’t let Duane know that you use standardized tests. 🙂
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cx: Then
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Joe, It doesn’t sound like you know very much about special education. Multiple measures, which include a battery of standardized tests, are typically required by law for determining eligibility to receive special education services.
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My wife recently retired after more than 33 years as an urban public school teacher working with special needs. We also have a son with special needs.
The larger issue is whether we should offer various options to families within public education. Yes, with some regulations, we should and fortunately, we do.
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Yes, 2old2teach, case studies usually include standardized tests, as well as portfolio assessment. I think teacher reports can also be very insightful, especially for gifted kids, though not everyone values them.
I’ve worked with a lot of gifted students. Years ago, it was evident that 4 year old in our preschool was way ahead of his peers, so I accepted him early into my Kindergarten class. He was very creative and advanced academically. With differentiated instruction, he was soon reading and doing math at a middle school level. Then, he failed to distinguish himself on a standardized test for entrance to a gifted school. I called the school but they did not want to hear anything I had to say about him, so his family decided he should stay in my class another year. I knew he was highly gifted and I continued to collect many work samples in his portfolio.
The following year, after he was rejected in the gifted program at a different school, I called the school and they, too, did not want to hear anything I had to say. So, I told them to get back to me once they got to know him and I would then provide two years of evidence of his giftedness. A few weeks later, they called, said I was right and asked for his portfolio. He was accepted in their program. I recently learned that, today, he is completing his PhD in physics. That does not surprise me in the least.
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“The larger issue is whether we should offer various options to families within public education. Yes, with some regulations, we should and fortunately, we do.”
Huh? That sounds like a different tune.
The point is that many highly gifted children need specialized services and that might mean separate classes or schools for gifted students. If the gifted child I just mentioned, who was functioning at a middle school level when he was a 4 year old in my Kindergarten, had been required to follow the typical 1st Grade curriculum after leaving my class. he would have been bored to tears. He might never have actualized his potential as a future physicist. I’m very grateful that his public school eventually recognized this and served him well.
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Yes, we agree it’s good the school listened to you.
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Thanks, Joe. I should probably add that this highly gifted student was an ELL whose family had immigrated to this country about six months prior to his entering my class. In that short time, he learned to speak English fluently and, after about a month in my class, he was also reading fluently. His family planned to move after he graduated from Kindergarten, which is why we were looking for different schools that would be a good fit for him and, ultimately, it was the local public school in his new neighborhood.that agreed to make those modifications and accommodations for him.
Personally, except for diagnostic purposes, I detest standardized tests and I don’t believe that any major decisions should ever be made based on the results of a single test. I think this is a good example of the importance of using multiple measures that include authentic assessments, because even the brightest children might not perform very well on standardized tests –many of which are not valid and reliable for kids under age 7.
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