> > (a) break the power of teachers’ unions (and organized labor more generally), so that they can reduce teacher pay, benefits, social respect, and job security
> Wouldn't an education market that worked do precisely that for schools that are failing catastrophically?
(1) Education is not a good with the kinds of features which allow approximating rational choice, and so there's little reason to expect that a market would work.
(2) Even leaving aside (1), no, there's no reason to expect that; among the errors that appear to be implicated in that conclusion is confusing schools with teachers.
> As far as I know, no one outside of libertarian absolutists actually has a goal like this.
Plenty of Republicans at all levels have openly advocated for this and even advanced bills for it. Whether they are all libertarian absolutists I'll leave to.you, but it's a real viewpoint with substantial support in the political sphere.
> If "publicly accountable" means less micromanaged by a centralized bureaucracy, I don't see how this is necessarily bad.
If they really believed that excessive central regulation was the problem, then rather then promoting charter schools exempt from the bureaucratic rules along with greater central accountability and regulation for traditional public schools, advocates would instead simply reduce central control and increase local (district and even site-level) control of traditional public schools. They don't, because what they really want is a subsidy for private, for-profit entities while engineering maximized paralysis in traditional public schools to drive an exodus to the subsidized private providers.
(1) Education is not a good with the kinds of features which allow approximating rational choice, and so there's little reason to expect that a market would work.
The school has a good reputation, so we'll pay money to send our kid there. Sounds like a rational choice to me.
(2) Even leaving aside (1), no, there's no reason to expect that; among the errors that appear to be implicated in that conclusion is confusing schools with teachers.
I suspect there is a granularity problem here. Discerning comics fans follow creators, not titles. Maybe the future of the education market will involve dis-intermediation and a more direct connection between students and teachers.
If they really believed that excessive central regulation was the problem, then rather then promoting charter schools exempt from the bureaucratic rules along with greater central accountability and regulation for traditional public schools, advocates would instead simply reduce central control and increase local (district and even site-level) control of traditional public schools.
This is a bit of a non-sequitur to me. "Promoting charter schools exempt from the bureaucratic rules" is a perfectly reasonable step.
along with greater central accountability and regulation for traditional public schools
If those schools are failing catastrophically, I don't see what's necessarily wrong with that. So long as there are some schools more independent of the central bureaucracy, there is more choice in the market. Again, your "logic" relies on false dichotomies and doesn't logically hold up.
They don't, because what they really want is a subsidy for private, for-profit entities
What if there was a more direct way to divert funds at the behest of the parent to private for-profit entities? There's a "subsidy" for public education. What's wrong with empowering parents to redirect those funds? It's beginning to seem like you're just restating the whole point of the proposed idea, just wording it so it sounds bad to you.
while engineering maximized paralysis in traditional public schools to drive an exodus to the subsidized private providers.
I many cases, the traditional public schools are already "paralyzed." The whole point is to enable an exodus to private providers, if the parents so choose. Would you support such initiatives if they didn't come with "engineering maximized paralysis in traditional public schools?" Why is a for-profit school necessarily bad?
I think your example here of “rational choice” is a great example for the problem of treating the school ecosystem like a market. Only those with means to participate will benefit. If there is someone with no means to pay for better, what is the default? You quickly end up with a system where those who need access to quality education the most (the poor) have the least access, or only access to the worst.
Furthermore, markets require demand to drive pricing. In k-12 education, demand is completely inelastic - school attendance is compulsory. Who services those who can’t afford to participate but are required to do so? And how does the entity serving those have motive for quality? There’s no competition.
I think your example here of “rational choice” is a great example for the problem of treating the school ecosystem like a market. Only those with means to participate will benefit.
So why not give people the means to participate?
You quickly end up with a system where those who need access to quality education the most (the poor) have the least access, or only access to the worst.
That's where we are right now.
Furthermore, markets require demand to drive pricing. In k-12 education, demand is completely inelastic - school attendance is compulsory.
Non-sequitur again. If it's still possible to choose which school to attend, there's a choice. Eating is compulsory. There's still a market for food.
Who services those who can’t afford to participate but are required to do so?
We already have this entity.
And how does the entity serving those have motive for quality? There’s no competition.
We already have this problem, just that there's no way out for a lot of people, and we could enable a few people to get out.
> We already have this problem, just that there's no way out for a lot of people, and we could enable a few people to get out.
Actual studies of choice programa generally show that in the short term they hurt outcomes and in the long term that goes away to about even; some of the worst student outcomes in the US are in the systems with most extensive availability and use of school choice. The evidence does not suggest that school choice is a solution to any actual problem in public education—which has real problems—no matter how much both those with money at stake in the private education business and religious devotees of free-market fundamentalism want us to believe it is; it's certainly a powerful distraction from efforts to find real solutions, though.
Sounds great. How? Show how you can provide everyone the means to participate and doesn't just raise the bottom line on the cost to participate, returning to the normal equilibrium that you'd expect from a market where there are always those who are priced out. How does it avoid the pitfalls of things like UBI?
>Non-sequitur
A non-sequitur would be talking about the reproductive life of penguins. "Inconceivable!" The concept of "you're free to choose" always sounds great but glosses over reality: choosing schools is not like choosing apples in the grocery store. Choice comes with cost, and the costs of attending different schools can be enormous. Not all schools are right outside your door. Since socioeconomic groups are frequently geographically concentrated (sides of the town/tracks), you'll end up with terrible schools in poor neighborhoods and good schools in good neighborhoods far away. Sounds like what we currently have, right? How does a "market" improve on this situation? It would seem that it provides incentives for schools to work against integrating student populations. Schools are disincentivized from enrolling poor kids, because poor kids are much less likely to perform well. A rational school will do everything legally possible to avoid accepting kids from populations statistically less likely to perform well in school.
So maybe you try to solve that problem with regulation? Schools are... what, required to do all acceptance via random lottery if they want to be eligible for payment through federal vouchers so they can't discriminate against poor applicants? Well, now school-choice isn't much of a choice anymore, it it? Maybe you have better suggestions on ways to force a rational, privately run school to accept kids they don't want to accept.
> We already have this entity.
I'm tired of people wanting all the benefits of "markets" for themselves and hand-waiving all the problems away back to the government. The public school system cannot exist in its current capacity if there is a massive shift to school privatization. So no, you can't just assume it will exist, you have to support your case with how you think it will function, and how it will be more likely to provide better outcomes than the current system.
Fundamentally, you have to be able to justify the merits of your proposal in real terms, and not in terms of "markets make everything better." Markets are awesome, and for so many of the goods and services in life, using and acquiring them through a free market with good competition to establish true market prices is really optimal. But market's are not a panacea. Roads do not work well in a universally private market. If every user of a road had to deal with transaction costs for every road they used during the day it would be a nightmare. The entire society is better off when people are free to move around. The federal/state ownership of roads funded by taxes is part of what makes the entire economic market work. Education, I believe, is the same: when everybody has access to education, funded by taxes, the entire economy is better off. Privatization will only lead to worse disparity for the vast majority who cannot afford to participate.
The current ecosystem is more like road vs air travel. You can go across the country by car, on public roads. Nobody will stop you. But if you want a better/faster experience, you can pay private companies for that service, but in so doing, you do not get a tax rebate for the road you didn't use. Private schools are great - It's all I've ever been to - but attending a private school should not free you from supporting the system that is universally beneficial.
We have major problems in our current school ecosystem, yes. And they do resemble many of the problems that a market-based system would have: the "best schools" are full of wealthy kids. But unlike a market system where this that outcome is optimal, it's a secondary effect of the residential clustering of socioeconomic strata, AND the reality that the quality of the school is driven less by the quality of its teachers and administration, but the quality of it's students. Student performance is most strongly tied to factors related to the poverty/wealth. So instead of trying to tread the symptom, we need to address the cause: poverty, and poor social mobility.
> The school has a good reputation, so we'll pay money to send our kid there. Sounds like a rational choice to me.
Well, no. It's clearly a choice, but a rational choice is one where he costs and benefits are born by voluntary participants in the transaction who decide to accept or reject them based on maximization of their personal utility function with complete knowledge of all costs of and utilities that will be derived from the decision with an infinite time horizon.
No real decision actually did this, but many reasonably approximate it. But childhood education fails hard and almost every aspect. Opacity of impacts and the downstream effects and the fact that where here is choice, its third party choice on behalf of a party who is not in a good position to weigh the effects of a decision against heir own utility function are the main issues.
> . "Promoting charter schools exempt from the bureaucratic rules" is a perfectly reasonable step.
If the problem is too many rules, then you don't need limited special providers exempt from the rules, you need to remove the unnecessary rules entirely.
> > along with greater central accountability and regulation for traditional public schools
> If those schools are failing catastrophically, I don't see what's necessarily wrong with that.
If, as is the justification for diverting funds to private schools through vouchers and charters, the traditional public schools are “catastrophically failing” because of excessive central micromanagement, increasing central micromanagement of traditional public schools is exacerbating, not alleviating the problem. OTOH, if traditional public schools are “catastrophically failing” because of inadequate central management and accountability in the use of public funds, diverting public funds to private schools with less accountability and centralized management through vouchers and charters is monumentally stupid. But the same people advancing charters and vouchers have also been behind moves to increase centralized accountability and management of traditional public schools, and in fact have specifically linked those efforts to charter/voucher programs.
> The whole point is to enable an exodus to private providers, if the parents so choose.
Which would be problematic, even if it didn't involve policy designed to increase both the actual and perceived failings of traditional public schools, because it rests—even further than is already the case—quality of education on parental skill in evaluating quality of education, even if the vouchers were restricted to institutions which took them as full-cost with no supplemental required payment (which is sometimes not the case; voucher programs, and even more often tax credit systems, are often partial tuition subsidies which drive market clearing tuition up at private schools but don't make it an equal cost choice with public schools l), thereby entrenching inequality from generation to generation.
But in the real world, that's not the goal; the “if the parents so choose” isn't part of the goal, the goal is to in the near term deceive parents into the choice, and in the long term collapse public education entirely so that there is no choice.
Well, no. It's clearly a choice, but a rational choice is one where...
Sorry, that sounds like a bunch of ideological gobbledygook to me. As you say, "No real decision actually did this." Parents already choose schools for their children, often doing their best to be rational based on incomplete information. That's a situation called "life."
If the problem is too many rules, then you don't need limited special providers exempt from the rules, you need to remove the unnecessary rules entirely.
Nope, you're strawmanning here. Again, you can have more rules for the failing incumbent players and fewer for the new experiments. No contradiction there, if the increased rules are determined by the failing track record. If the new experiments start to fail, they can have the same rules as well.
because it rests—even further than is already the case—quality of education on parental skill in evaluating quality of education
Parental skill in evaluating quality of education worked well enough in the 1st half of the 20th century. (Granted, public schools also worked better.) Polish, Italian, Hungarian, and many other immigrant groups arrived and scored lower than the US median on IQ tests, but had caught up and surpassed the US median by the 1950's. There were similar gains in socioeconomic status. A big difference is that there were no perverse government subsidies applied to those groups to enable 73% of children to be born out of wedlock. A big difference is that there wasn't a glorification of antisocial and anti-learning attitudes and behaviors throughout the media, making it uncool to study hard and get good grades.
>> "1) Education is not a good with the kinds of features which allow approximating rational choice"
Sure it is, and it's well exemplified at the post-secondary level.
>> "advocates would instead simply reduce central control and increase local (district and even site-level) control of traditional public schools."
Intellectually, sure, but pragmatically, it's a canard; big, complex systems generally do not re-organize themselves. The IRS will not 'simplify the tax code'. Bureaucracies do not trim themselves, rather, they get replaced.
While I'm a big fan of public schools, the fact remains that there are legitimate 'libertarian' arguments to be made here. Decent charter schools might offer an opportunity to shake off some of the cruft and allow entrepreneurial thinking to lead the way.
Almost all of the arguments on this thread ignore the libertarian arguments at face value, and instead imply some kind of nefarious 'dark motivation' behind everything. It's not entirely unreasonable to bring up such factors, but it's intellectually a little shifty.
There are reasonable grounds for charter schools. Most of the 'possible dark patterns' might even be mitigated by decent regulation, for example, maybe they have to hire union teachers, or maybe schools have to have open enrolment for local kids, maybe tuition has to be graduated etc. etc..
>> "1) Education is not a good with the kinds of features which allow approximating rational choice"
Sure it is, and it's well exemplified at the post-secondary level.
Post-secondary education has somewhat less obscure results and at least the main participant is actually the decision maker, but even post-secondary education doesn't well approximate rational choice, which is why the private for-profit segment is rife with predatory actors.
>> "advocates would instead simply reduce central control and increase local (district and even site-level) control of traditional public schools."
> Intellectually, sure, but pragmatically, it's a canard; big, complex systems generally do not re-organize themselves. The IRS will not 'simplify the tax code'.
Well, no, because it can't, Congress controls the tax code.
But, in any cases your argument is the canard—any faction with the power to dictate policy can just as easily dictate an increased local control of traditional public education policy as one of increased centralization of traditional public education with public subsidies for private alternatives. What a bureaucracy is inclined to do for itself is irrelevant when we are talking about alternative rules that can be imposed on the bureaucracy, where either alternative requires the power to impose rules on he bureaucracy independent of what it would choose for itself.
> Wouldn't an education market that worked do precisely that for schools that are failing catastrophically?
(1) Education is not a good with the kinds of features which allow approximating rational choice, and so there's little reason to expect that a market would work.
(2) Even leaving aside (1), no, there's no reason to expect that; among the errors that appear to be implicated in that conclusion is confusing schools with teachers.
> As far as I know, no one outside of libertarian absolutists actually has a goal like this.
Plenty of Republicans at all levels have openly advocated for this and even advanced bills for it. Whether they are all libertarian absolutists I'll leave to.you, but it's a real viewpoint with substantial support in the political sphere.
> If "publicly accountable" means less micromanaged by a centralized bureaucracy, I don't see how this is necessarily bad.
If they really believed that excessive central regulation was the problem, then rather then promoting charter schools exempt from the bureaucratic rules along with greater central accountability and regulation for traditional public schools, advocates would instead simply reduce central control and increase local (district and even site-level) control of traditional public schools. They don't, because what they really want is a subsidy for private, for-profit entities while engineering maximized paralysis in traditional public schools to drive an exodus to the subsidized private providers.