These agencies also have their own open government pages where you can find out about their respective plans. Here's NASA's page as an example: http://www.nasa.gov/open
Education is guaranteed under article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the US signed and helped author. Not providing a public option for education would mean redefining what we believe to be fundamental freedoms. How are you going to provide education to the poor without public schools? Will the government give the poor money for education? Will you subsidize the "private" schools with government money? That would defeat the whole purpose of having private schools as you aren't allowing them the operate in the free market. It's not clear 100% bastardized "private" schools would be any more competitive than the current hybrid system. Public schools and the belief that education is a fundamental human right are inextricably intertwined.
EDIT: I'm going to edit this comment to refuse the arguments below, as there are multiple posters with similar points of view.
The claim is that restoring "choice" to the educational market will increase the quality of education for all. This choice is already happening. Wealthy families choose to move to areas with high property taxes that fund excellent public schools. I grew up and was educated in such a neighborhood; when I was in HS the average salary of a teacher at my "public" school was $100k. Each year, students from inner-city Chicago try and register for the schools in my HS area. They are not allowed because the schools are full with residents. Therefore, they have to go the public school in the neighborhood they reside in.
In a private system, the same behavior happens, except the barrier to entry becomes price not the geographical location of your residence. Several people have suggested government vouchers to help defray the cost of education. Do you really think these vouchers will be able to buy a higher quality of education than what is current available? The best private schools will raise their price to the most efficient market point where they charge their students the most and enroll exactly enough students.
Now some might argue that we already have a private system by proxy. People are still paying for higher education, they are just doing it though home ownership. Why not just covert to a private system? The answer is this: the quality of the weakest school is far more important than the quality of the strongest school. People with money will always be able to find a way to get their kids an excellent education. As a society we don't need to worry about these kids. Society does need to worry about the bottom line. The long term cost of failed education to society is immense: increased crime rate which leads to prison costs, lower voter literacy which results in less qualified politicians, the list goes on. In a private system, the low end is forgotten about. The idea that a government voucher would be large enough for the bottom end is ridiculous. In the public system there is a constant struggle to push the low end higher. This is (part of the reason) why the public system costs so much. The public system has to bear an extra burden (for the good of society) that the private system eliminates through efficiency.
The bottom line: Choice is already taking place in the hybrid school system by proxy through property tax or expensive private schools. The 100% private system would be exactly the same, with the added disadvantage of a forgotten low end. Vouchers are just a half-assed replacement for the public part of the system already in place. If the vouchers were high enough to raise the low end to an acceptable level, the cost would be equal to the public part of the current system. In order to raise the low end of education above the fair market value, government regulation is by definition necessary. A small correction must be made for the failure in free market forces.
In reply to your edit: Your entire argument rests on the assumption that private schools that poor students attend will be worse than public schools that poor students attend. You haven't presented any evidence for that, and it is contrary to what a naive analysis would suggest.
Today, poor students have absolutely no choice when it comes to schools. They live where they can afford, and they go to the schools they are zoned to. In a voucher system, poor students would actually get to pick schools, and one would assume that they'd tend to pick better schools after taking distance and other requirements into account.
Bad public schools continue in perpetuity because students are forced to pay for them. In an ideal world, bad private schools wither away when students choose better schools.
"In the public system there is a constant struggle to push the low end higher. This is (part of the reason) why the public system costs so much."
If that's the case, there's no reason that students who require extra attention can't be provided extra funding via vouchers.
"If the vouchers were high enough to raise the low end to an acceptable level, the cost would be equal to the public part of the current system."
If that's the case, who cares? Getting to choose the school your children attend is a good in itself, so you're suggesting that vouchers would be an improvement even with your incorrect assumption that current public school costs are necessary to achieve current public school quality.
You refer to a market failure several times, but you've never described it. How would the market fail to provide at least equal quality with equal funding per student?
Consider this. Money is directly related to the quality of education. New Trier is a school in the area where I grew up. It is one of the best high schools in the nation. New Trier spends more than $15,000 yearly per student, compared the the state average of $8,786 [1]. Now in a private system we could just provide vouchers to everyone for $15,000 and everyone would have an excellent education. Except this would cost way more than the current system and no one is willing to pay it.
Now, you would suggest that though free market forces, New Trier's figure of $15,000 could be brought down. But these free market forces are already operating on New Trier! New Trier already has all the characteristics of an elastic good! (1) Many substitutes - families are rich so they can move or send their kids to private school, (2) Low percentage of family income - families are rich, (3) Breadth of definition - there are public and private schools in the area with similar prestige, and (4) Necessity - the kids of rich and educated parents are the least likely to need a degree. To be honest, $15,000 per student is probably a pretty accurate figure for what it takes to give a kid a top notch education. A private system wont lower this figure. The cost of education wont be reduced.
So my claim is that free market forces are already at work. Why then not just convert to a private system if the net effect would be the same? After all, the government is evil and the invisible hand is a force of good and prosperity for the human race. The answer to this question comes from wisty's comment [2]. It is the market failure I refer to several times. The underlying learning will take a back seat to the profit in a private system. Ever notice how some really expensive cloths aren't the ones that look the best? It's because prestige can trump quality. This is inevitable in the private system. It may happen in the public system as well, but the government has the power to try to stop it. No such body exists in the private system to look out for the quality of education.
Changing the education system will inevitably have a tiny effect on the people who can already throw as much money as they want at education. They have choices. Poor people don't. Giving them choices will likely improve their educations.
My school district spends ~$7000 per student. I'd say I got a pretty good education. Vouchers would not have to be ridiculously high to provide a quality education as you imply. Not everyone is going to get a gold-plated education, but the minimum could be far higher than it currently is at the same price.
It seems like you just don't like profit-seeking entities. This concern could be accommodated just fine in a voucher system: choose a non-profit school. Profit isn't necessary for privatization to improve quality. Competition is what creates the incentive to improve.
I think the lack of direct incentives for public schools and their employees to improve is a greater negative than any corrupting influence of profit would be.
My school district spends ~$7000 per student. I'd say I got a pretty good education. Vouchers would not have to be ridiculously high to provide a quality education as you imply. Not everyone is going to get a gold-plated education, but the minimum could be far higher than it currently is at the same price.
So you are basically ignoring the market failure I point out then? Take your pick of any celebrity clothing line to see first hand evidence of this market failure.
It seems like you just don't like profit-seeking entities.
I love profit seeking entities, but different contexts require different definitions of profit. Your average business person lacks an investment in society and in the long term that is necessary to define profit in education.
EDIT: Anyway... I've entertained the idea of education being delivered as a private good for long enough. Truly it's my belief that it's a public good, but I'm forced to argue as if it were a private one in order to make any progress. I'll read your next reply, but cramming education into the context of a private good has worn me out.
The vast majority of the benefits of an education accrue to the person who gets the education. That makes it a private good in the economic sense, but that doesn't necessarily mean it should be provided privately.
I had already replied to the "teaching to the test" issue in the thread you linked to. Public schools already do this, yet somehow that's what we should fear private schools doing? From the very beginning, I've stated that these schools should be certified by the government in some form, so if you're satisfied with the public schools the government deems acceptable, I don't see why you'd have an issue with similar private schools.
I don't understand how you can think you're doing poor people a favor by forcing them to attend their crappy neighborhood schools instead of giving them choices.
First, that's an incorrect (or at least not complete) definition of a private good. A private good is rivalrous OR excludable. Education is non-excludable because raising the education level of economic actors benefits society, which benefits even the uneducated. Two reasons education is (largely) nonrival: (1) we can have more than one student in a classroom and/or host classes online and (2) there are not a finite number of diplomas a highschool can issue, they cannot be permanently consumed. Therefore, education is a public good.
You'll be tempted to nitpick about the nonrival part. After all, diplomas can't be consumed but seats in a classroom can. However given enough seats and enough qualified teachers, education truly is nonrival. This would be a meaningless statement (after all, who cares about situations with unlimited resources) except that making education nonrival is actually fairly cheap compared to the benefit received by society.
And because education is a public good it should be provided by the government, just like national defense. Private education disgusts me almost as much as the idea of private militias. But that's neither here nor there in the context of our current discussion.
I don't understand how you can think you're doing poor people a favor by forcing them to attend their crappy neighborhood schools instead of giving them choices.
They wont have choice. They are contained by geography in a public system. They are constrained by money in a private system. If they go to a poor school they go to an ineffective school, regardless of whether it is public/private. I fail to see why you think schools on average will have more money in a private system. I've already pointed out that free market forces are operating on the public system.
By that logic, pizza is a public good. When I eat pizza, I become a much more pleasant person in my interactions with others, which benefits society. Most things that are good for an individual benefit society as a whole. It's a matter of degree. Education benefits individuals far more than it benefits society, which leads me to place it in the excludable column. Your justification for non-rivalrous is circular. Since education is valuable to society, we should be willing to pay enough for it to be non-rivalrous. I don't think that's a valid argument. It's irrelevant to my point anyway.
The whole point of vouchers is to reduce the constraint of money on one's educational choices. Poor people will still have limited choices, but they'll have more than one, which is a significant improvement.
I don't think a privatized school system would necessarily have more money in it. (It likely would at the higher end, but not at the lower end.) The benefit doesn't come from money; it comes from competition for that money. Money gets wasted on ineffective programs and teachers in public schools because there's little incentive to improve effectiveness. We're talking about an industry in which merit pay is a controversial topic! When there is a fairly direct relationship between the quality of education imparted and the monetary rewards received by teachers and principals, it seems pretty likely that performance will improve.
For every student of New Trier (which I've never heard of) there are 1000 in DC or New Jersey, where charter school spend fully half that of the "fully public" i.e. "monopoly" schools.
"Will you subsidize the "private" schools with government money? That would defeat the whole purpose of having private schools as you aren't allowing them the operate in the free market."
I don't understand this. The most common proposal I've heard is a voucher system that would allow people to defray the cost of an education at a school that has some sort of certification. In what meaningful ways is that not a free market? How will competition be any less effective?
It is clear to me that restoring choice to the education market will allow competition to occur, which will likely result in increased quality.
It is clear to me that restoring choice to the education market will allow competition to occur, which will likely result in increased quality.
Except in this area, the quality of the student seems to matter quite a bit more than the quality of the school. When Chicago Public Schools used a lottery-based system for granting spots in the top-performing schools, it turned out that students who won the lottery didn't turn out significantly better than those who lost.
Maybe. Public education is a good way to mix student though, otherwise you have segregation. Ghetto schools are bad, because the bad students get worse, and the good students don't learn any street smarts.
Cutting school time, then supplementing it with tutoring vouchers would be my preference. You get a bit of both worlds. It would be tricky for teachers, who would need 2 jobs (one of which they would actually be accountable in) but that could be partly positive. Exposing teachers to a bit of business might be good.
Segregation is alive and well. Public schools don't solve that at all. Human beings naturally stratify by class. Regardless, improving education is a greater good than increasing diversity. If there is actually a trade-off between the two, it's an easy choice.
Part of article 26, section 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory...
I simply disagree with this. It is not a right that everyone have a free education anymore than it is a right that everyone have a free pair of underwear, but people get confused because one seems noble and the other silly. Why do they use the word "free" here when obviously it isn't?
Also is this really a guarantee, as you state? If so, I am sure the UN (which gets 20-25% of its funds from the U.S.) is failing to back this guarantee, as I am sure there are millions around the world not receiving their compulsory elementary education. Perhaps the U.S. should focus on making their education system work and be well funded before signing declarations that "guarantee" every human, no matter how matter how exponential their procreation, receive a "free" elementary education?
>I simply disagree with this. It is not a right that everyone have a free education anymore than it is a right that everyone have a free pair of underwear, but people get confused because one seems noble and the other silly. Why do they use the word "free" here when obviously it isn't?
Does your link explain how education is a human right or free? It might be a good investment, but that hardly makes it free.
When anything that requires significant effort (skills, capital, services, etc) is pronounced as a right to be given to all, that right, by definition, necessitates payment or enslavement of others to be fulfilled.
Please stop mincing words; you know as well as I do what the phrase "free and compulsory education" refers to. Yes, it's tax-funded. No, taxes do not constitute enslavement. (And before you mention that you said "payment or enslavement of others", let's both agree to admit that you included the word "enslavement" solely for dramatic effect.)
I'm not going to play the "human rights" game, because you have no rights [1]. I'm going to say that providing education to everyone has been proven time and again to be good for society [2]. The attitude of "oh well it's not a right" is perhaps the greatest piece of sophistry I've been subjected to in some time, in that the definition of a "right" is entirely subjective and consequently useless. It is a right as much as the freedom of speech, in that it's provision helps to provide a basic framework that is necessary for a free society. An uneducated populace cannot perform simple democratic tasks, like, say, voting.
Speaking of which, why is voting a right? Doesn't counting several million ballots require "significant effort"? I certainly couldn't do it in an afternoon! Are you "enslaved" by having to pay for people to count ballots?
Universal access to education doesn't mean that the government needs to actually run the schools. It just means that funding needs to be provided for those who can't afford it on their own. Bonus points if you can get people to voluntarily subsidize the educations of those who can't afford it rather than forcibly taking the money.
Competition is a pretty powerful force when it comes to improving products, and it seems likely that the quality of education would improve if everyone wasn't forced to purchase an education bundled with their housing.
Calling education a product is tricky. Do you mean degrees or other attainments, or do you mean the underlying learning? Because it's damn hard to separate the two, and private providers have a big incentive to half-ass the second, especially if they are targeting the mass market.
Education is even harder than health to privatize, because you are trying to target kids, not parents, but the parents will be making all the choices.
Public providers half-ass the underlying learning as well. The concept of "teaching to the test" didn't come from private schools. Whatever we choose to measure schools by will generally be what teachers and principals optimize for, whether public or private.
That's true, as well. But I think it would be worse under a voucher system. Private providers would be a lot quicker to race to the bottom of "teaching the test" if the voucher system included bonuses for good test performance.
A voucher system doesn't need bonuses. If a school improves its reputation in the eyes of the public, it will be able to charge more money. Allowing customer choice lets people take into account less concrete metrics of school performance instead of the government punishing and rewarding schools. If customers don't want schools that teach to the test, they'll actively observe other metrics to come to their decisions.
Customers who don't put in as much effort into picking schools will be no worse off than they are today. Schools already teach to the test, especially schools in poor areas that are trying to raise their test scores. However, a functioning market allows them to benefit from the choices their more responsible peers make. Fewer underperforming schools will survive.
I bet people buy crappy foods (chips and soft-drinks) for the children when they use food stamps. So there is some similarity.
The difference? People have a fair idea as what good food is.
Also, education is vulnerable to getting derailed by optimization for tests. And the testing will most likely be controlled by the state. I would worry that big mass-market voucher schools will specialize in marketing, cutting costs, and gaming the state-run tests.
I'll bet you're right and the risk when allowing people to retain their freedom to make decisions is that they'll make ones with which you disagree.
But I'm less pessimistic than you about people's abilities to make good decisions especially when their children are involved. At least their motivations are better aligned than the government's with their children's interests. Teacher's unions?
But where are the private school rankings? They don't take the accountability tests which are mandatory public schools.
I'm curious where you are getting your facts from. Claiming that private schools consistently outperform public schools suggests you must have some strong facts. So let's see them please.
And while we wait for your facts, consider this. Current private schools don't have to deal with kids that have learning disabilities. Current private schools don't have to deal with as much diversity. Current private schools don't have to deal with underfunding. Current private schools have strong alumni networks. The private schools of today are not your average private school of a 100% private system.
However, even if we accept it, you're concluding too much.
Public schools insist on letting bad students drag everyone else down with them. Private schools don't.
Neither one seems capable of reaching bad students. However, it's unclear why letting them ruin things for everyone else, as public schools do, is a good thing.
I think you would have to set the parameters very carefully.
In Australia, universities have been encouraged (or forced, depending on how you look at it) by budget cuts to offer courses to full fee paying students from overseas to supplement their revenue. This contrasts with the local Australian students whose courses are still highly subsidised by government funding (the subsidy has been decreasing as well though).
If a university is offering a course with an aim to maximize revenue, then it will naturally want to attract as many students as possible, in competition with other local universities and with overseas universities. Often that means lowering the entrance criteria for prospective students. Because the students are paying for the course, they expect to have their degree at the end of it, and this leads to significant pressure to lower the depth and difficulty of the material taught, as well as the grading criteria, to accommodate the weakest students.
I don't believe the actual teaching is poor, but the quality of education is lowered. I know professors who have had to take phone calls from overseas from parents demanding to have their children's grades altered, with a financial threat attached. Reputation is a key driver in students' choice of university, which adds a further incentive to placate the customer. I don't know if any of these anecdotes actually resulted in a "pay-for-grade" situation, but the normally assumed academic independence is certainly threatened.
Maybe education can be made to work well under a competitive market system, but in this situation I don't think it has, and I'm not smart enough to think of ways to fix this particular situation.
Thanks. Great catch. Admittedly, I'm still disappointed though. If they were taking it seriously, I'd expect something bright and shiny on that front page of theirs.
or rephrased : idea no.1 - redesign ed.gov and associated programs.
:)
I'm not trolling; this is an actual idea. I'll construct a better, longer version of this and post it soon on the site. A better portal could make ed.gov a fantastic place for all to visit.
Real people at these agencies are using these pages to develop their prospective open government plans, in response to the Open Government Directive (http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/assets/memoranda_2010/m10-06.p...)
These agencies also have their own open government pages where you can find out about their respective plans. Here's NASA's page as an example: http://www.nasa.gov/open