Margaret Raymond is the director of the Center for Research in Educational Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University, which conducts studies of charter schools, funded by the Walton Family Foundation. On December 10, 2014, she addressed the Cleveland City Club. About 50 minutes (and a few seconds) into a 56-minute talk, she gave the following response to a question about charter school policy:
“This is one of the big insights for me because I actually am a kind of pro-market kind of girl, but the marketplace doesn’t seem to work in a choice environment for education… I’ve studied competitive markets for much of my career… Education is the only industry/sector where the market mechanism just doesn’t work… I think it’s not helpful to expect parents to be the agents of quality assurance throughout the state. There are other supports that are needed… I think we need to have a greater degree of oversight of charter schools, but I also think we need to have more oversight of the overseers… the authorizers.”
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“Education is the only industry/sector where the market mechanism just doesn’t work….”
The only? Is she kidding me?! Has she not heard of healthcare? Prisons? Social services? Libraries? Parks? Roads? The public commons? Criminey.
This, and the director of an institute at a major university referring to herself as a “girl” is mind boggling
Would be nice if CREDO notified New Orleans charters of this insight, since they have been giving them sterling reviews for years, which the charters have used to market and expand to encompass the whole district.
Stanford, a spin tank with students- check out the philanthropy propaganda posted at SSIR, the work product of Stanford Institute for the Evisceration of People’s Retirement and, Finn and Hanushek’s Hoover Institute.
Raymond advises taxpayers to pay for overseers and oversight of authorizers when there’s a public school system that avoids the whole expense?
Wikipedia describes Kenneth Ewart Boulding as “… an economist, educator, peace activist, poet, religious mystic, devoted Quaker, systems scientist, and interdisciplinary philosopher. “ Indeed, Ken Boulding was all of those things and many more. At the University of Michigan in the 1950-60s, he founded the General Systems society with Ludwig von Bertalanffy. Born in Liverpool in 1910, he was educated at Oxford (Masters degree).
His textbook, Economic Analysis (1941) was virtually the introduction to Keynesianism to American academics. He never obtained a doctorate, though surely he never felt the want of one due to the many honorary doctorates he received. In his long career, he served as president of the Amer. Econ. Assoc. and the AAAS, among other organizations. He died in Boulder in 1993.
I was very lucky to be situated at the University of Colorado when Boulding left Michigan in 1967 to join the Economic Department at Boulder. I had joined the faculty there in 1966. Within a few years the word spread that this new fellow in Economics was someone to listen to. Twice, in the early 1970s, I sat through his undergraduate course in General Systems. The undergraduates had no idea how lucky they were; I was enthralled. Boulding was a Liverpudlian, and that coupled with a pronounced stammer made listening to him lecture extremely demanding. But somehow the effort produced greater concentration. I can recall so many of the things he said though more than 40 years have passed. “”The invention of the correlation coefficient was the greatest disaster of the 19th century, for it permitted the subtitution of arithmetic for thinking.”
From 1969 through 1971, I was editing the Review of Educational Research for the American Educational Research Association (AERA). In the office, I enjoyed a few small privileges in connection with the 1971 Annual Meeting. For one, I could invite a speaker to address the assembled conventioneers. I invited Boulding. An expanded version of his talk was published in the Review of Educational Research (Vol. 42, No. 1, 1972, pp. 129-143). I have never read anything else by an economist addressing schooling that equals it.
Here is the merest sampling of what he wrote:
Schools may be financed directly out of school taxes, in which case the school system itself is the taxing authority and there is no intermediary, or they may be financed by grants from other taxing authorities, such as states or cities. In any case, the persons who receive the product-whether this is knowledge, skill, custodial care, or certification-are not the people who pay for it. This divorce between the recipient of the product and the payer of the bills is perhaps the major element in the peculiar situation of the industry that may lead to pathological results. (pp. 134-135)
Boulding originated the notion of the “grants economy” in which A grants a payment to B who delivers a service or product to C. Of course, this turned on its head the paradigm used by most economists, who imagine C paying B for services or products. When Boulding referred to this grants economy underlying schooling as leading to “pathological results,” he was referring to the fact that the schooling industry is “not normal,” i.e. does not follow the course of classical economic models. In the years ensuing since Boulding’s early forays into this notion, the grants economy has become increasingly important to understanding a nation’s economy.
Boulding was considered a bit of a rebel. David Latzko wrote of Boulding that “The narrow bounds of the economics discipline could not contain his interests and talents.” Perhaps this accounts for why many traditional economists have not followed him where reality leads. Perhaps this is why Dr. Margaret Raymond could pronounce so recently that “And it’s the only industry/sector [schooling]where the market mechanism just doesn’t work.” In fact, the “market mechanism” fails to work in many sectors.
But back to Dr. Raymond. Margaret Raymond is the head of the Hoover Institution’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes. As key researcher in charge of the first big CREDO study of charter schools that dropped on the charter school lobby with a big thud: charter schools no better than old fashion public schools, some good, some really bad. And then more recently, CREDO under Raymond’s direction conducted a study of charter schools in Ohio, a locale that has known its problems attempting to keep charter schools out of the newspapers and their operators out of jail. What did this second CREDO charter school study find? Charter schools in Ohio are a mess.
All of this bad news for the charter school folks caused Dr. Raymond to go before the Cleveland Club and confess thusly:
This is one of the big insights for me. I actually am kind of a pro-market kinda girl. But it doesn’t seem to work in a choice environment for education. I’ve studied competitive markets for much of my career. That’s my academic focus for my work. And it’s the only industry/sector [schooling] where the market mechanism just doesn’t work.
Of course, it is positively absurd to think that schooling is the only “industry” in which free markets just don’t work. And Dr. Raymond didn’t give up entirely on the free market ideology for education — she would probably have to find a professional home outside the Hoover Institution if she did. She went on to tell the Cleveland Club that more transparency and information for parents will probably do the trick.
Frankly parents have not been really well educated in the mechanisms of choice.… I think the policy environment really needs to focus on creating much more information and transparency about performance than we’ve had for the 20 years of the charter school movement.
So parents just aren’t smart enough to be trusted to make choices in a free market of schooling, and they need more information, like test scores, I presume. I’ll leave Dr. Raymond at this point, and recommend that she and her associates at the Hoover Institution spend a little more time with Kenneth Boulding’s writings.
Gene,
If you are unfamiliar with UnKochMyCampus.org, it’s a highly recommended site for all citizens interested in America’s future. UnKoch exposed the Federalist Society takeover of the law school at the public George Mason University and, the staff are involved in the citizen fight to take back the university.
Fordham and Ohio’s schools superintendent, Paolo DeMaria (Education First) have been described as governing Ohio’s education policy. DeMaria was “significantly involved in strategic support for Cleveland, Detroit, Denver and New Hampshire schools”. The kids of New Hampshire’s head of schools were home schooled.
There are twin forces working in states like Ohio -ALEC and theocracy. A connecting link appears to be the Koch network.
Fordham and the Koch-linked Manhattan Institute praise Catholic schools. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops self-describe as strong advocates for parental school choice since the beginning. They and some of the state Catholic Conferences have become highly politicized. A study found that vouchers in some parishes generate more revenue than worshippers.
Political Research Associates (Frederick Clarkson) posted, “The Theocratic Movement Hiding in Plain Sight”. The article addresses the plan for Christian schools to have maximum latitude in accreditation. The study identifies three parts that came together, the evangelical Christian Right, the USCCB and allied politicians in the Republican Party.
The ultimate goal of the libertarians is defunding education- both K-12 and state universities. IMO, the church agenda is colonialism, a situation in which they wield greater power. As a historic example, Ireland suffered under Koch-like ideology, the Catholic Church maintained civil order during the great hunger, and Ireland became more religious, after.
“I think it’s not helpful to expect parents to be the agents of quality assurance throughout the state.”
It’s not helpful to expect consumers to be agents of quality assurance in ANY market because people regularly buy junk.
IPhones are a perfect example.
The screens break easily when you drop them which indicates very poor (crap) quality but people nonetheless buy them in the millions with no insistence that Apple improve them.
Software is another industry where people regularly buy junk (eg, from Microsoft).
Most people are a very poor judge of quality and total unit sales bears little if any relationship to quality.
There are two things that can produce quality. One is imposed from without by government and the other is imposed from within by the people working for an organization.
Rarely (if ever) do customers actually produce or even demand quality. Most of them don’t even know what it is and are therefore easily swayed by advertising hype that bears little relationship to reality.
“One is imposed from without by government and the other is imposed from within by the people working for an organization.”
It has always struck me that we should think of governmental organization and business organization as two sides of the same coin. People may complain about the “government”, but what they really are upset about is an organization that has someone else’s interest at heart, other than their own.
Exactly! People think they want to have direct agency over some action that has annoyed them whether it be government or business…until they don’t. They’re not always wrong, but I’m not sure we always have really thought out our reasoning.
When the common good doesn’t serve our personal needs as well as we might want it to, then government is either inefficient or overstepping their mandate, in our own personal view. A similar dynamic can be used to describe our interaction with the corporate world. The phrase “being sold a bill of goods” may bring to mind some such example. Some of these interactions probably clarify the need for government oversight/overstepping on occasion.
Another example of the reform echo chamber’s need to worship at the feet of another high-priced data wonk, faces upturned, only to hear the pronouncement that “markets don’t work”. The real educators have known this since forever. It’s just moronic.
Unrelated to any specific individuals and in general terms, IMO, echo chambers don’t worship at the feet of intellectual prostitutes. It’s more of a symbiotic relationship.
So true…
I agree with you. It is only newsworthy because CREDO and the speaker and her husband, economist, Eric Hanushek churn out reports that routinely treat charter schools and public schools as competing for market share.
moronic and IRONIC: there has been so much pushback from educated professional teachers year upon year
There seems to be a growng body of evidence that markets don’t work in any number of areas. Looking only at the US, it seems incongruous to think positively of neoliberal economic policy which has resulted in 3 corporate leaders worth approximately the same as approximately 90% of Americans. This is not to challenge the conclusions re: markets and charters. It is simply a call for a deeper look at declining birth rates, stagnant wages, rising health care costs, student debt, etc. before proclaiming the wonders of the market place.
Some people assume everyone (else) is motivated by greed. They don’t know teachers.
Exactly right.
People who are motivated by greed assume the rest of the world is like them.
Well, ed reformers designed these systems of “governance”. They were all so incredibly brilliant they threw out everything we learned over 150 years of governing public schools locally and installed their magic new market systems. Hubris.
Now they have a huge group of entrenched contractors who fight any and all efforts at regulation. They can’t even get minimal reporting and transparency into the charter system they designed in DC. The charter operators all oppose it. Of course they do. It’s a huge competitive advantage to heavily regulate one set of publicly funded schools and not regulate the other.
For people who supposedly live and die on a belief in “free markets” they gleefully skew the markets they invented to benefit the schools and students they prefer, to the detriment of public schools and public school students.
They aren’t going to be able to regulate hundreds of publicly funded sites from the state level. It’s a lousy governance system. It’s so lousy and poorly conceived I think the lack of regulation is deliberate. It’s ideological. A belief system, and therefore “evidence” is irrelevant.
The lockstep expansion of vouchers will be worse. They can’t properly regulate the schools they supposedly control. They’re now going to regulate tens of thousands of wholly private contractors? Nonsense. Pure spin. There won’t be a shred of oversight for what will be billions in public funds going to private schools. Another experiment they didn’t think thru.
One of the main products of privatization is the rapacious charter lobby behemoth. It serves to keep the money flowing despite reason, evidence or anything else. This is not a legitimate “free market.” It is a rigged market designed to perpetually move public money into private pockets.
If ed reformers believe in regulated public school systems why do they all support and lobby for vouchers?
This stuff is just nonsense. Everything they claim about the charter systems they supposedly want to put in is directly contradicted by how they treat publicly funded private schools.
The “movement” is incoherent. The only consistent belief they hold is opposition to existing public schools.
Is anyone ever going to ask them how they square their supposed principles of regulated contract systems with the completely unregulated private school subsidies that all lobby for?
They’ve already ditched their supposed belief in “great schools!” and “accountability!” by handing out vouchers to any and all takers. They chose. “Choice” was elevated over everything else. They’re true market believers. They left “public” behind long ago.
“Public” means “publicly funded” to these folks and that’s ALL it means. If anyone had any doubts about that the lockstep support of vouchers can put that to rest.
Nothing against Margaret Raymond of CREDO but how arrogant do you have to be to pitch an entire public system in the trash without a backward glance because you believe your faddish “innovation” of hiring contractors is better?
Boy, ed reformers must be super smart. MUCH smarter than the tens of thousands of people who worked to establish public school in the first place, over TEN DECADES.
Do they pick insufferably arrogant people to work at think tanks or do they get that way after being hired?
Hiring service contractors is not groundbreaking. It’s just hiring contractors. It’s how every public system is privatized. Every. One. There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between this and replacing a local human services agency with a contractor, other than the fact that the people who do that don’t pretend they’re inventing something.
It is, of course, disingenuous in the extreme to describe as “free” markets that vast numbers of people can’t participate in, like the market for healthcare and dental services in the United States. Guess I’m not a free market kinda gal.
And, of course, the notion that “Education is the only industry/sector where the market mechanism just doesn’t work” is totally loony. Healthcare in the US costs TWICE, per capita, the average in the OECD, and health outcomes are worse. Why? Because vast amounts of US healthcare dollars are siphoned off into the pockets of those who run the US healthcare RICOs. And, does this speaker think we should turn over defense to the free market? Highways? How about we do away with school lunches for poor children? (The Trump misadministration just promulgated regulations that will steal lunch from a million poor kids in the US.) And what of Social Security and Medicare? Should our police and fire services all be privatized? Yes, we will put your fire out if you can pay for this.
Crazy talk. But the speaker is right about one thing: It certainly doesn’t work in education. Applying the rapacious US business model to education gives us depersonalized education software, Orwellian databases of private student information, the standardized testing scam, crazy religious schools that teach bigotry and superstition, and the rest of the Gates/Walton/etc. Deformer agenda.
Come on, Bob. Why would you not expect a school headed by a principal earning five or six times the normal salary for a public school principal and teachers that earn starvation wages to succeed? Your problem is that you just do not get it. You need a different definition for success. Look,at it from the principal’s point of view.
Making everyone the arbiter of quality of products and services eliminates the cost savings of purchasing as a unit of many individuals. Mass transit operates on a group rate structure but it sure would make some private contractors a lot more money if each individual was charged by their trip. Does anyone wonder why everyone doesn’t take a taxi all the time? There are so many services that are better provided through shared costs. I have to think through this idea further. My town has decided to require local organizations and businesses to seek private contractors for trash pickup that is now handle through village service fees. The village contracts with a private contractor for recycling, but they are now going to require businesses and other community organizations to seek their own. It will save them money since they will no longer provide the service, but business owners are getting shafted. This from a village that is trying to “save” its business district through “beautification.” So we get seating areas and fancy lights while the businesses are struggling to survive. I think it is driven by individuals with loud voices who complain about high fees for services from which they don’t feel they are getting enough benefit. Hey, my kids are gone, so we generate much less garbage, but I don’t mind paying a standard fee like my more high volume neighbors because we all benefit in the long run. We are a community. “The market” doesn’t have a community.
We have spent years and billions of dollars to improve education. The strategies are not working and children are suffering as a result. When will we have strategies that provide both good and negative consequences for parents who are not parenting so that vulnerable children have real opportunities for success. We place great demands on teachers but no requirements on the parents. It takes both to educate a child.
We need to spend billions on medical care, nutrition and other basic needs. A hungry, sick child won’t learn no matter what method is used.