From The Entrepreneurial Mind: Watch What They Do; Don’t Listen to What They Lobby For.
Competition in domains that were once thought to be permanent governmental monopolies is proving to be effective in many arenas. Certainly schools have been one of the modern success stories of privatization. In today’s Tennessean it seems that public school teachers in Nashville (yes, those same public school teachers who fight the creation of charter schools and lobby for more and more and more money without any accountability) agree that competition and markets really do work.
“More than one out of every four Metro teachers, or 28.6%, send their children to private school, according to a study released last week.”
So, how does this compare to the overall population in Nashville? Teachers are twice as likely to send their kids to private schools as the average family in Nashville.
What could possibly be the reason behind this startling statistic?
Read the whole thing.
Personally, I am a fan of Milton Friedman’s idea of a voucher system. Instead of their children being forced to attend a specific public school, parents should receive a voucher for some dollar amount that they can spend any school they wish, public, private, or parochial. Schools that provide poor education will go under, of course, but then the taxpayer-provided capital funds that are being used to prop it up will be released to other schools that provide better education; the neat thing is that the magic of the voucher-driven market will perform that action automatically without extra government interaction.
Vouchers provide real accountability. Right now, if a public school is doing poorly, that is often used as a claim that they need more money; this is because they are accountable to another government agency, not to the parents directly. If the parents themselves get to directly choose which school their child attends, they money follows the child; as such, schools that do poorly get less money and eventually go away, leaving an opportunity for other schools to take up the students (and an opportunity to open a new school under better management).
More on this later, as I refine my ideas. Really, all the best work is from Milton Friedman, whom I will link extensively in the future. For now, get your hands on “Free to Choose” which goes over much more than just school vouchers.
You should probably check back to the sources before getting too excited. The study actually ranked Nashville 38th not 11th (which was another of many stats). You might also want to note that the study showed that it was the poorest teachers who sent their kids to private schools. The wealthier the teacher the less chance of sending kids to private school. Compare that to your statement, “Right now, if a public school is doing poorly, that is often used as a claim that they need more money” and it seems that poor schools do a poorer job teaching according to teachers.
You quote Jeff Cornwall who is trying to make his point, but you exclude other reasons for the numbers mentioned, such as racial and religious reasons for putting kids into private schools.
And finally, quoting Milton Friedman is intellectually interesting, but have you really thought of the result of your statements like “schools that do poorly get less money and eventually go away…” Fine to say, but do you really want to treat kids like Enron employees? I think you need believe that education is a priviledge not a right to want it to be a free market.
I am for vouchers myself, but there does need to be some system in place that would hold the school accountable to both the parents and the government. Example: Parents get the vouchers to move their kids around if they feel they can get them a better education elsewhere, if a public school looses 10% of it’s students due to movement, it comes under some sort of review. At some other threshold level, the school’s administration would be immediately suspended with an intermediate “clean up team” coming in to fix the school and set it right again.
This way the schools are always there. They wouldn’t just disappear. Instead, if a certain threshold of students started leaving alarms would start going off and the school would be fixed.
Another method without the voucher system would be some sort of feedback system. If X number of complaints are lodged against a school, it comes under review. That would provide the dual accountability as well. The school has to keep the students/parents happy with results and has to answer for not doing so.
Of course, neither of these solutions will do anything for the kids out there whose parents just don’t give a damn and that is if not the root at least of the major causes of this issue.
I think vouchers claim to solve the problem that public education has already solved: parents just don’t give a damn or are to poor to be able to give a damn. Those kids used to just not go to school. There is much more evidence that the drivers behind vouchers are anti-secular and anti-segregation that use the guise of “the schools are failing.”