It's All About Timing

Yes, those crazy market fundamentalists who run the school systems of Sweden and The Netherlands according to this model are way beyond the pale. And of course, the U.S. higher education system needs to convert to a government monopoly in which you assigned to exactly one college that serves whatever "university district" you happen to live in.

Yes, those crazy market fundamentalists who run the school systems of Sweden and The Netherlands according to this model are way beyond the pale.

Late in the campaign, when talking about health care, Obama made frequent references to the financial crisis and John McCain's support for privatization, saying that McCain wanted to let the market do for health care what it had done for the housing sector. He also got in similar digs about Social Security privatization.

Do you really think that the same thing wouldn't work with education? "Bobby Jindal thinks we should let the market work on education. He wants to let Wall St. gamble with your children's future, like they gambled with your mortgages."

The problem I see with continuing to back voucher plans is more tactical. It's a really radical change to a huge industry. Also, insiders fight it hard and public support is anemic. That makes it a bad bet, politically speaking. With conservativism at its present low ebb, I think the liberatarian right would do well to argue for something a bit more limited, such as charter schools.

There may well be some merit to letting public schools compete for students. This already happens in parts of Vermont, where students from towns without a high school can choose to attend any high school in the state. But people will not want to trust things to the "market" when they have good reason for thinking the markets don't work properly. At the moment there are many people, even people with strong libertarian tendencies, who reasonably believe the financial markets aren't working properly (see, e.g., comment threads at Calculated Risk).

For the past 28 years the semi-official religion of the business world could be summarized as follows: There is no God but Mammon, and Adam Smith* is His prophet. The Republicans have been campaigning on the promise that they would make government run more like a business--one of the few campaign promises they have kept. The problem is that the businesses they emulated have been businesses that have gotten rich on things like derivatives and fancy accounting. Such a business plan might not blow up this year or next year, but it will eventually, as it has this year for much of Wall Street. Now the game plan of "privatize the profits, socialize the losses" is all too obvious.

*As with Christianist fundamentalists, the free market fundamentalists misread their Bible. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith specifically cites the existence of large corporations formed for the purpose of exploiting the resources of India, and the lack of such corporations in the American colonies, as a large part of why the people of the latter were so much wealthier than the people of the former. Today's free market crowd would consider the real Adam Smith a socialist, much as today's religious wingnuts would consider the Jesus depicted in the Bible a radical leftist.

I agree with a lot of this. You'll note that I was very careful to call for:

"competition for students among public schools in which funding moves with students and in which schools are far freer to change how they operate."

This is close to charter schools with fudning-follows-student rules within public school systems. It's well short of true vouchers, partially because I think they are a political non-starter (and not just because I think I'm so much smarter than the public; often political non-starters that force messy compromises turn out to be real, real wise). Also, I call out that this is a decade-long project that requires alot more work and emoritical validation than conservatives have generated to date.

I agree that most market fundamentlists have never read Wealth of Nations (which ironically tends to be pretty tough on businesspeople, while Marx tends to see them almost sympathetically), and more importantly, have never read Theory of Moral Sentiments. HAYEK would strike Rush Limbaugh as a socialist.

Kimberlite is diamond ore. Cornel University abuts a kimberlite dike. It does not require 9 credits of Enculturation Through Labor because its kimberlite is not diamondiferous.

A school must allocate resources to their best destinations. "No child left behind" and "everybody goes to college" are blatant lies. Head Start is 40 years' proof (with 20% higher annual budget than NSF) that sterile kimberlite can be identified - and that no amount of money can thereafter find diamonds (or even pyrope garnet).

My favorite part of the "plan" is their claim that "public schools are organized to serve teachers and administrators rather than students and families". Really? Is that why the teachers in my old school district are going on strike because the district refuses to negotiate with them to renew their contracts? Or why the teachers of our cross-town rival are on strike because the district won't facilitate health care for them?

There are a lot of problems with the competitive school approach. To start with, we already have such an approach in some states where each town has its own school system and people buy into certain towns for access to the school system. Of course, those towns with good school systems tend to have higher real estate prices and higher real estate taxes. I suppose we could open the market by decoupling school access rights from real estate ownership, but access to better schools will continue to cost more. Attempting to lower costs by requiring teachers to live in their cars, eat at soup kitchens and forgo medical care can work in the short run, but the better teachers will migrate to the higher cost systems that will allow them to live in fixed dwellings, buy food at supermarkets and be treated by doctors.

Another problem is that this town by town approach is expensive. Each town needs not just its schools and their staffs, but a board of education and its staff. In New Jersey, this locality of government, jealously guarded, has led to annoyingly high property tax rates. Privatizing the mess only adds executive salaries, even more staff salaries and shareholder profits to the cost side, with nothing guaranteed on the benefits side.

This brings up the agency problem. If we argue that existing educational systems are self serving, how are we to prevent similar humans from infesting any new system, particularly if said system is for profit. While Alan Greenspan might be shocked that someone might be economically motivated, everyone should now know better. Any testing scheme can be gamed, at least in the short run. Worse, once these educational providers become entrenched, they can provide incentives to parents and elected officials to further entrench themselves in a way that education bureaucrats cannot.

Yet another problem is transportation. In a densely populated area, it is possible to have multiple competing school systems. The Catholic school system, once subsidized by religiously motivated volunteers forgoing market salaries, still competes effectively in many cities. Assuming that the requisite transportation system can be put into place and somehow paid for, there is still the cost of travel time. How many hours on a bus is worth a how much better education?

While I think very highly of education, we should not forget that it serves many purposes. It increases our odds of developing new ideas and technologies for the benefit of our society as a whole, it serves to rank individuals to determine their lifetime economic reward, and it develops societal cohesiveness by providing our cohorts with a common past.

Hello, this is student XLM8T4 calling the Education Futures Broker at this unit. As you recall (check your monitor, please) my undergrad years were paid for with a private offering that tranched estimated lifetime income increases contingent on a basket of degree/university pairs. But then, after my first 2 Caltech degrees, I leveraged that 30-to-1 on Postdoc-Default Swaps. Now that the market cratered, I have to either earn 15 PhDs in the next 5 years, or I'm upside-down in Academe. I can't afford the tuition on even 5 universities at once, so I'll be forced to walk off campus forever, and you earn nothing. So I'm asking for either a cram-down on the Postdoc Principal, or a refinance at lower interest on the Publish-or-Perish straddle. You can reach my anonymized Second Life agent at the following link...

Never really understood why people keep referring back to the defunct theories of old dead guys. Is it important that people in favor of market theories read Adam Smith? Not unless they're intellectual historians of economics, I'd say. I'm a working biologist, and I've never read a substantial amount of Charles Darwin. That's ok, his theories are around 120 years or so out of date; evolutionary theory has since moved on with the integration of genetics, large-scale sequencing, population dynamics, modern archaeology, and computer simulations.

In the same way, modern economics isn't relying on Adam Smith. There are mathematical models, observations compiled by hundreds of both old and new economists, massive amounts of data, computational simulations, game theory, psychology, and so on that have been compiled together to make new theories of economics. Adam Smith? He was hot stuff back in the day, but he's just another dead guy now, except to the historians.

Yes, those crazy market fundamentalists who run the school systems of Sweden and The Netherlands ...

It seems to work reasonably well here in Sweden. It's worth noting that our "free schools" are a pretty recent invention, though. Most students (90% I think?) still choose public schools.

The privately run schools that attract students seem to mostly be those with some particular specialization - IT, language, international focus, etc; or a particular "oddball" teaching philosophy. Most are also pretty small.

And our school system was pretty good before the privatization reforms. Not at all sure if, or how, that has changed.

As the significant other of a high school science teacher I can see one main reason why our education system sucks: we require teachers to have a post-graduate education (a Good Thing) yet pay them as if they only have a B.S., B.A. or less. That's ridiculous. There are only so many bright, motivated, and caring people that are willing to settle for less money to deal with teenagers on a daily basis. I wouldn't do it.

You probably don't need a M.S. in education (or physics, chemistry, etc) to teach elementary and middle school. Perhaps they don't need the compensation to keep quality teachers around. However, someone who is teaching high school science in a major metropolitan area making the same $$...well...it's no surprise that at my SO's 4th year in the school there are only 3 or 4 people that have been there longer. In this case I truly do believe the solution is more money (a shift in cultural awareness from "just a teacher" would help, too...but more $$$ would help, there....etc.).

As the significant other of a high school science teacher I can see one main reason why our education system sucks: we require teachers to have a post-graduate education (a Good Thing) yet pay them as if they only have a B.S., B.A. or less.

Indeed, as they say on blogs.
I've commented on this before, with numbers. Teachers, particularly science and math teachers, are seriously underpaid relative to other professionals with comparable education levels. This is a major obstacle to getting good people to go into education, and it's not something that can be fixed by the magic of "competition."