Charter schools aren’t the future of public education, writes Andrew Coulson on Cato@Liberty. Bureaucratic, union-dominated public schools are the future of charters.
The pattern in publicly funded education, both domestically and internationally, has always been one of increasing regulation over time, and of the triumph of producer interests over the interests of parents and children. Public schools in the late 1800s had considerably more autonomy than do most modern charter schools. Over time, public schools have come under the sway of centralized bureaucracies dominated by employee unions.
The American Federation of Teachers has signed collective bargaining agreements for charter school teachers in New York City and Chicago, Coulson notes. If more charters unionize, they’ll lose their flexibility.
Meanwhile, federal education secretary Arne Duncan has been calling for more government “accountability” (read: “regulation”) for charters, singing from the union’s hymnal.
. . . If you want to know what charter schools will look like in a generation or so, just look at the public school status quo.
Let parents decide, writes John Stossel, co-anchor of ABC’s 20/20 on his new blog.
Education secretary Arne Duncan told the New York Times that he will tell the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools “to become more active in weeding out bad apples.”
This is foolish top-down government-think. National Alliance bureaucrats weeding out bad schools will fail as government bureaucrats failed. Real accountability comes from customers. If we attached the money to the kids (government spend big: $10,000 per student is the American average–$200,000 per classroom), and let them take it to ANY school, we’d have a real market. That would bring us better schools just as its brought us better cars, computers, movies, phones, etc.
Sure, some charter schools are lousy. But failure is part of innovation. Parents will quickly figure out if their kids’ school is lousy, and if they are allowed other choices, they’ll pull their kids out. The weak schools will die from lack of customers. The best schools will grow, and help more kids.
By contrast, weak PUBLIC schools NEVER die. They wreck children’s lives decade after decade.
I think re-regulation is a risk, but not a certainty. The charter movement is trying to support the growth of high-quality charter schools and strengthen accountability for performance.
Sadly, I think Andrew Coulson’s case is very plausible.
Dan Willingham pokes Stossel’s brand of argument full of holes: http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2009/06/what-happens-to-school-choice-if-people-arent-rational-and-choose-bad-schools/.
Stossel is, however, not the sort of person who yields to persuasion or evidence.
It is possible that a union organized charter school could still be successful. Not all heavily unionized industries are failing. For example: UPS and the railroads are considered well run and very efficient. I agree the railroads were not always that way.
I wsa always surprised that a teacher’s union would not organize and run its own charter schools to show it was the management that was at fault and not the teachers or their union.
Of course the fact that this has not happened makes the future less bright.
Claus,
I agree with you that the man economists talk about does not universally exist. Some parents just want the schools to baby sit their kids.
The Cato Institute (Coulson’s home) has argued for tuition tax credits over school vouchers, more for cosmetic differences which make them politically palatable, seems to me. Years ago, Milton Friedman expressed a preference for vouchers over charter schools for exactly the reason Andrew Coulson discusses: with charter schools on a shorter leash than voucher-receiving schools, legislators and bureaucrats more easily place restrictions on charter schools than on independent, voucher-receiving schools.
The State (government, generally) cannot subsidize education without a definition of “education”. Stidents, teachers, parents, and schools are then bound by the State’s definition.
It does not take twelve years at $12,000+ per pupil-year to teach a normal child to read and compute. Most vocational training occurs more effectively on the job than in a classroom. State provision of History and Civics instruction is a threat to democracy, just as State operation of newspapers would be (is, in totalitarian States).
Mr. Willingham’s argument contains a serious flaw: How can parents who cannot rationally select teir children’s schools in a voucher-subsidized market in education services select the politicians who hire the burreaucrats who select teachers and curricula? The argument than State institutions out-perform the market is fundamentally undemocratic.
For these and other reasons, I prefer direct subsidization of parent control, in the form of Parent Performance Contracting, to the State-monopoly school system, charter schools, school vouchers, or tuition tax credits.
The other mode commonly employed is for highly trained schemers – who know exactly how to market the cheapest, shoddiest piece of crap – to convince consumers that crap is great, and that it is totally worth buying. Typical companies are out to make as much of a buck as they can – many times at any cost. They totally depend on unknowing customers to be their ignorant suckers.
Just think of the current crop of lousy popular cars, stupid blockbuster movies, and the gobs of successful junk food eateries. The schemers have convinced everyone that these things are wonderful, but they are actually of quite low, and sometimes harmful, quality.
Just because people buy something doesn’t make it better.
And if charters lose their flexibility due to union work rules, and that impacts learning in a way that’s both visible to parents and displeases parents then, Dan Willingham’s contrived arguments notwithstanding, those charters will fold.
What other outcome could there be?
I find the implication that parents who know the school their child is going too is lousier then another school that’s equally or sufficiently accessible, won’t send their child to that school to be amusing suggesting as it does that only the experts would be able to form the right conclusion under those conditions. Those would, I assume, be roughly the same experts who oversee the current public education system.
On the evidence the assumption that those worthies would make better choices then uneducated parents is less then convincing.
So Stossel’s right and the folks at National Alliance for Public Charter Schools are fools.
My prediction is that most charter operators will evince a degree of independence that makes a hog on ice look positively cooperative by comparison and further those charters will enlist current and past parents to help them stave off increased oversight by politically-motivated “experts”. Steve Barr’s already trying to develop an organized constituency and if tapped into properly I think such a constituency would be a formidable political force.
For a wonderfully on-point criticism of the public school system, see this by Pondoora:
“The other mode commonly employed is for highly trained schemers – who know exactly how to market the cheapest, shoddiest piece of crap – to convince consumers that crap is great, and that it is totally worth buying.”
He is talking about the public school system, isn’t he?
(Pondoora): “The other mode commonly employed is for highly trained schemers – who know exactly how to market the cheapest, shoddiest piece of crap – to convince consumers that crap is great, and that it is totally worth buying.”
“The other mode…” of what?
“Cheap”, “shoddy”, “crap” usually come from a highly judgmental attitude, but rational judgment requires comparison. “The market” is the sum of human resource allocation decisions in the absense of State compulsion. The alternative is compulsory (State) allocation of resources. This compulsion is either dictatorial or democratically controlled. If it is democratically controlled, “Pondoora’s criticism of markets applies with equal force to the marketing of political candidates and their policies.
As a wise Israeli politician once said: “No solution? No problem.”
What can’t be cured must be endured.
I read the Willingham post that Claus referenced, and I thought his argument was, shall we say, less than rigorous.
Willingham suggest that parents might not make the “correct” decisions, but entirely ignores the fact that the public school system has made the wrong decisions for lo! these many years.
So you have a possibly misguided apple vs. a provably bad apple, and he’s siding with the provably bad apple!
This is quite distressing. If this is really the best Willingham can do, it raises serious questions about the level of his post.
As for Senor Claus, I suppose he’s doing the best he can with his laboured (and, of course) mistaken) sermons.
Sorry, forgot to credit Malcolm Kirkpatrick for making an almost identical argument.
Also it appears that Dr. Willingham majored in Psychology.
Whenever a psych major starts to talk about probability I get very nervous. He may be an exception, but in general psychologists are fairly blunt knives.
Dan Willingham, a commentator I usually enjoy reading, is just flat out wrong on this one. The real improvement brought by school choice will not be at the high end, but at the low end. Public schools enable abominable lows that simply aren’t possible when parents have viable choices.
The current model, where “free” public schools compete against private schools that charge make public schools the only rational choice for families, even if the conditions are downright abusive. Under the current system, private schools have to be many times better than their “free” public competitors to make them worth the price. Anything that can be done to level the playing field some, like a decent-sized tax credit or voucher that can be used at any school, would go a long way to prevent the worst of the worst in the public schools.
Incidentally, the Democrats’ “public option” is a play very similar to “free” public schools to drive private parties out of the health care space. The horror stories of denials and abuse at the hands of the new monopoly will come in time.
“The horror stories of denials and abuse at the hands of the new monopoly will come in time.”
You may be right; there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence about the things that are wrong with single-payer systems in many countries.
But the horror stories about the current monopoly are here and now.
Ragnarok –
That’s the problem with health care and public education… offering the same broken, warmed-over **** for a lower price is not going to solve anything. If you look at which sectors of our society are considered consistently broken, it’s those where one group pays for the product/service but another receives it. That incentive structure is fatally flawed.
The only reason health care isn’t as bad as in single-payer systems like Great Britain is because the people paying for health care right now at least have to nominally care about the satisfaction of their customers. The Democrats are pushing for a system where not even that matters.
If this were to happen in a school where parents payed even a token amount for their children to attend, that school would not have enough students to operate in the fall. Parents would take their money elsewhere. However, I’m sure Clayton Valley High School will continue to operate because it’s free, and that makes it good enough for a lot of parents.
Now, just imagine what kind of horror stories are possible in a hospital system run with the same incentive structure as public schools.
Just think of the current crop of lousy popular cars, stupid blockbuster movies, and the gobs of successful junk food eateries. The schemers have convinced everyone that these things are wonderful, but they are actually of quite low, and sometimes harmful, quality.
Yet cars have been getting more reliable and more energy efficient over time – this is causing problems for road maintenance which is funded by petrol taxes in NZ, as the money is falling despite more cars on the road.
Stupid blockbuster movies – have you seen the special effects on those babies? Yes, sometimes the plots are stupid, but that’s common in popular culture – consider for example how Shakespeare resolves As You Like It by having Orlando’s brother Oliver fall instantly in love with Celia.
And junk food eateries use the cooking technique of adding fat to make the food taste better – this is the second-most common cooking technique in the world, used in every cusine I know of (lard in Mexican cooking, bread-and-butter in English cooking, ghee in Indian curries, coconut milk in Thai curries, stirfries, confit in French cooking, potatoes cooked au gratin) etc (the most-common technique is if you heat the food it gets easier to chew). The trouble with our current diet is that fat is a lot easier to get nowadays than it was for most of human history so we have tastebuds attracted to the wrong things, it’s not the fault of schemers consciously convincing everyone that these foods are wonderful, instead the schemers are making food that we find wonderful.
Ragnarok, you said it better.
Tracy, thanks for the cute detail on cooking. You are 100% right to assign blame to our evolutionary history for excess fat in the diet.
Quincy said:
“If you look at which sectors of our society are considered consistently broken, it’s those where one group pays for the product/service but another receives it.”
I absolutely agree.
I think, in fact, that all parents should pay something towards tuition.
Absolutely none of this school choice nonsense will even be remembered 10 years from now. Charters are failing (Stanford research), vouchers, massively unpopular (can’t win a vote anywhere, Republicans are turning against them), testing- weighing the cow doesn’t make it fatter, Finland with virtually no testing wipes out USA in international tests. These are all right wing ideology not innovation.
For the love of GOD get on with what works, reducing class sizes (STAR research Tennessee), improved teacher training (no not alternative certification that is a loser as well). Finland demands two masters degrees from teachers and then turns over control to them. Hmmmm I wonder why they are on top? Big improvements in teacher pay need to come before any increase in accountability. History shows without it all you get is a teacher shortage. Who the hell wants to teach in Louisiana or Mississippi or inner city LA or NYC? Only a few very dedicated teachers and that fills about half the jobs.
Doug Little said:
“Absolutely none of this school choice nonsense will even be remembered 10 years from now.”
Please explain to me why school choice is bad.
“…testing- weighing the cow doesn’t make it fatter”
It does tell you when you’ve reached the desired weight, though, doesn’t it?
“Finland with virtually no testing wipes out USA in international tests.”
And what about TIMSS? Korea? Singapore?
“Big improvements in teacher pay need to come before any increase in accountability.”
So that we can attract a better class of teacher, I presume? But then it follows that we should fire the current crop of incompetents, don’t you agree?
And a nit; on your home page I found this rather odd sentence:
“Could I knit-pick on this policy?”
Is this the English you’ve been teaching your students? You might claim that I’m nit-picking, but this is your field, isn’t it?