Competition might prove to be a valuable component to revitalizing and reinventing education in this country as a success story across the board - but this must be done carefully. Competition is not necessarily a categorical good in this case. For one, it would be nearly impossible to achieve the type of entrepreanurial spirit within public education that would necessarily achieve Mr. Stossel's vision. I, for one, would be more than hesitant to send my children to a school run by, say, McDonalds or Disney or Wal*Mart - or any other profit-based organization. I would like to ask Mr. Stossel if he would consider sending his children (or, if he has none, he can pretend he does for the sake of answering my question) to a school free to teach children that french fries, though not the healthiest option on the menu, provide a good source of valuable starches and salts making them a part of any balanced wholesome meal?
More concretely, public schools need government control to regulate what is taught, how it is taught, and when it is taught. This is not something that private entities (that is, any entity not accoutnable to a public standard) should be permitted to determine. What sort of national consciousness would we have in the United States if in California, PETA (or insert similarly crazy or far-left wing group) ran the most successful schools while the American Enterprise Institute (or insert any similarly conservative or far-right group) runs the best schools on the East Coast?
Private schools accountable to a public standard might appear to be a reasonable approach to Mr. Stossel's much pined for competition in education, but paying for a quality private education is difficult for many well-to-do families. Oh, and government vouchers not covering the complete costs of private education would simply privilege the rich to the severe disadvantage of the poor. Furthermore, if the government were to agree to pay for private schooling in lieu of public schools, who would determine the yearly costs? The salaries of the teachers and administrators? Who would be accountable for the ultimate use of this public money? How would this avoid ending up as precisely the sort of 'government monopoly' Mr. Stossel is so against?
No, competition sounds like a good idea, but the nuts and bolts of it are far from clear. So instead of evicerating our public school systems as ineffective, overly bureaucratic and otherwise undesireable, I wish people like Mr. Stossel would propose some practical, implementable means of fixing the problems (or similarly realistic alternatives to the current system).
~JDS
Another School Year Without Competition
BY JOHN STOSSEL - JFS Productions Inc.
August 31, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/38927
This week's back-to-school ads offer amazing bargains on lightweight backpacks and nifty school supplies. All those businesses scramble to offer us good stuff at low prices. It's amazing what competition does for consumers. The power to say no to one business and yes to another is awesome.
Too bad we don't apply that idea to schools themselves.
Education bureaucrats and teachers unions are against it. They insist they must dictate where kids go to school, what they study, and when. When I went on TV to say that it's a myth that a government monopoly can educate kids effectively, hundreds of union teachers demonstrated outside my office demanding that I apologize and "re-educate" myself by teaching for a week. (I'll show you the demonstration and what happened next this Friday night, when ABC updates my "Stupid in America" TV special.)
The teachers union didn't like my "government monopoly" comment, but even the late Albert Shanker, once president of the American Federation of Teachers, admitted that our schools are virtual monopolies of the state — run pretty much like Cuban and North Korean schools. He said, "It's time to admit that the public education system operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybody's role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It's no surprise that our school system doesn't improve. It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy."
When a government monopoly limits competition, we can't know what ideas would bloom if competition were allowed. Surveys show that most American parents are satisfied with their kids' public schools, but that's only because they don't know what their kids might have had!
As Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek wrote, "competition is valuable only because, and so far as, its results are unpredictable and on the whole different from those which anyone has, or could have, deliberately aimed at."
What Hayek means is that no mortal being can imagine what improvements a competitive market would bring.
But I'll try anyway: I bet we'd see cheap and efficient Costco-like schools, virtual schools where you learn at home on your computer, sports schools, music schools, schools that go all year, schools with uniforms, schools that open early and keep kids later, and, who knows what?
Every economics textbook says monopolies are bad because they charge high prices for shoddy goods. But it's government that gives us monopolies. So why do we entrust something as important as our children's education to a government monopoly?
The monopoly fails so many kids that more than a million parents now make big sacrifices to homeschool their kids. 2% of school-aged kids are homeschooled now. If parents weren't taxed to pay for lousy government schools, more might teach their kids at home.
Some parents choose to homeschool for religious reasons, but homeschooling has been increasing by 10% a year because so many parents are just fed up with the government's schools.
Homeschooled students blow past their public-school counterparts in terms of achievement. Brian Ray, who taught in both public and private schools before becoming president of the National Home Education Research Institute, says, "In study after study, children who learn at home consistently score 15-30 percentile points above the national averages," he says. Homeschooled kids also score almost 10% higher than the average American high school student on the ACT.
I don't know how these homeschooling parents do it. I couldn't do it. I'd get impatient and fight with my kids too much.
But it works for lots of kids and parents. So do private schools. It's time to give parents more options.
Instead of pouring more money into the failed government monopoly, let's free parents to control their own education money. Competition is a lot smarter than bureaucrats.
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