Misunderstanding Markets, School Vouchers Edition
I’m not one bit inclined to get into yet another argument with Freddie et al over public and private education, but this is just silly:
Private schools have far less accountability in the form of standardized testing than their public counterparts. Indeed, private school educational outcomes amount to self-reporting and the honor system. This is what people talk about when they say that private schools have “flexibility” or lack bureacracy [sic]. Public investment, however, requires public accountability, and indeed, accountability is precisely what many voucher proponents claim they want.
Which means that restaurants, grocery stores, dentists, and so on, not to mention the folks at Harvard, Columbia, and Yale, are held accountable by … whom, exactly? Oh, that’s right: they’re accountable to their customers, who by virtue of their participation in a market that – ideally, at least – enables them to choose between different providers are thereby enabled to vote with their feet on the question of who it is that they think most likely to meet their needs at the right price. This just is a sort of “public accountability”, albeit one that eschews official proxies and instead places its trust in the collective wisdom of those with the most direct stake in attaining the ideal outcomes. That’s how markets work, and while I accept Freddie’s point that a lack of proper educational data leaves us unable to say for sure whether vouchers will tend to improve educational outcomes on the whole, it’s simply wrong to make it out as if it’s a matter of definition that policy experts and government bureaucrats are the only ones capable of holding schools accountable, and determining which schools are working and which aren’t.
Filed under: education, government/law
By what mechanism, though? Grades are internally generated reviews. Schools have both total control over them and, if private, an intrinsic economic reason to fudge them. We can count on some number of them to be honest with grades out of the integrity of the people involved, but on a widespread, national level? I think that would be naive.
The next alternative would be standardized testing, but for many who champion private schools, standardized testing and the “teach to the test”, one size fits all vision of education is part of what’s wrong with public education. I’m open to hearing more avenues for determining economic output, but I can’t see having both real accountability and real flexibility in education.
Public investment, however, requires public accountability
As long as there’s a sufficient range of options [which I think is the real question about vouchers], the accountability comes from the individual choices of parents — they’ll make their judgments based on the information at hand (not just grades, but school philosophy, teacher resumes, etc.), and send their dollars to the schools that best satisfy them.
If by “public accountability” you mean that the government needs to mandate a certain level of performance, measured by some standard yardstick, then I agree, privatization is no solution for that. But why would we need that if parents were free to choose, instead of having their kids forced into a particular school based on zip code?
Freddie: What about the capacity of parents to talk to their kids, talk to other parents, observe how much their children are learning and how they’re progressing, and so on? Why can’t that suffice?
Can we please be honest and admit that it is not the schools that are the problem?
I’m going to ask an extraordinarily simple, obvious and probably stupid question: If vouchers become commonplace what will separate the private schools from the public ones?
I attended private (Catholic) schools for 12 years. I’m more than willing to admit that the strength of these institutions comes from their exclusivity. Problem kids are either removed or leave because they simply don’t like the level of dscipline/expectations. Between my freshman and sophmore years of high school we went from 350 to 275 kids. We graduated with 265. As you can tell from the numbers, many just chose the ‘easier’ public school route.
Opening the doors to every kid with a voucher in hand is not the answer. You will just be playing a shell game with kids and opening the system up to corruption. The trick to success, IMO, is to figure out a way to bring that exclusivity into the public school system in a real way.
I think those are fair questions, Mike, and the right strategies for addressing them would no doubt vary from case to case. (And I certainly agree that allowing public schools to be more exclusive would be a good thing.) But why can’t the option to transfer to a given school be available – and note that, as I’ve said before, it would be possible to have a voucher or otherwise choice-maximizing system that didn’t involve parochial schools; for example students might be allowed just to switch between different public schools – just to those students who could meet the relevant standards, much as public magnet schools (like I attended) often place more stringent demands on their students?
Freddie: What about the capacity of parents to talk to their kids, talk to other parents, observe how much their children are learning and how they’re progressing, and so on? Why can’t that suffice?
I don’t believe that is an appropriate system for determining success when we are using public money.
But why can’t the option to transfer to a given school be available – and note that, as I’ve said before, it would be possible to have a voucher or otherwise choice-maximizing system that didn’t involve parochial schools; for example students might be allowed just to switch between different public schools – just to those students who could meet the relevant standards, much as public magnet schools (like I attended) often place more stringent demands on their students?
But everyone does have that availability, just like those who aren’t happy with the bus have the ability to buy a car. They just can’t take public money to do it. Taxation should mean that everyone has the ability to use the public option, not that everyone has the right to use the public funds in whatever way they want.
Why the hell not? Who knows better what their kids need than parents do?
Surely as a liberal you know that’s nonsense, Freddie; one doesn’t really have the ability to do something if it’s entirely outside of his or her financial means. In any case I agree that people don’t have the right “to use … public funds in whatever way they want”; the question is whether a voucher-based or otherwise choice-increasing system would be better for the public good that is education, and the purpose of this post was to sketch one reason why we might think it would be.
Why the hell not? Who knows better what their kids need than parents do?
“My kid seems smarter!” is not verifiable, not falsifiable, not subject to outside analysis, not capable of meeting the level of solid evidence that I think the public should expect when it is paying for something.
No, Freddie, but “My kid is smarter” is all of those things.
More to the point, the argument of this post was just that parental accountability is a kind of public accountability; it’s entirely open to question whether it’s the best kind. I do, however, think that the collective wisdom of parents and students – together of course with whatever tools (rankings, test scores, graduation rates, word of mouth, etc.) they learn to put at their disposal – will do a better and more honest job of picking out the best schools than the dictates of some government bureaucrats.
Should there be schools and accreditation by government bureaucrats?
I think eventually technology is going to render schools obsolete. If public funds are to be used I’d rather have something like MIT OpenCourseWare and gutenberg.org. Then turn vacant schools into salons (open discussion/learning environments for citizens).
“My kid seems smarter!” is not verifiable, not falsifiable, not subject to outside analysis
But of course it is: we have all sorts of standardized testing at young ages to quantitately project how smart – or, more precisely, how good of a student – a child may ore may not be.
…not capable of meeting the level of solid evidence that I think the public should expect when it is paying for something
…and our current educational system is putting out a ton of solid evidence that our tax dollars are being well spent?
“More to the point, the argument of this post was just that parental accountability is a kind of public accountability; it’s entirely open to question whether it’s the best kind.”
The best option is still public accountability, which is why I do not support any sort of voucher program that allows kids to attend private school.
If a child qualifies to enter a private school, but cannot afford to do so, it is up to the school to provide financial aid. In order for the school to do this, it must use funds from it current tuition revenue and/or endowments. Both sources of funds force accountability at the private school level, because if tuition goes up, the parents of current enrollees will look long and hard to see where that money is going. If they do not like what they see, their kids can be pulled. The system is self-regulating.
The aforementioned scenario cannot happen in public school, and that’s the primary rationale for school vouchers that allows students to attend other public schools. It’s one thing not to be able to attend private school because you can’t afford it – or the parents don’t think it’s worth it. It’s another thing to be conscripted into a certain schooling system based on the neighborhood you were born in.
I feel this is relevant, somehow:
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/06/public-plans-critics-deem-it-too-affordable-too-high-quality.php
To the extent that it’s relevant, Freddie, it seems to support my case: with government-funded health care, we give people a choice of primary and secondary providers, and also – sometimes – a choice of insurance carrier. Everyone agrees that this is a good thing; the public plan is supposed to be a good thing insofar as it offers people more alternatives and makes the health care market less monopolistic. So why can’t the public financing of education work similarly?
Vouchers are an imperfect way to provide real choices for where parents send their kids to school. In Ohio, property owners are assessed to pay for local public/state schools. I haven’t checked lately, but I would say about 80% of my property taxes goes to support 2 different school systems: the local county school district (where I live) and a vocational high school which many area districts feed into. There is also a Catholic elementary and high school in the area, which surpass the public schools academically. Problem: parents who choose to send their kids to the Catholic schools have to also pay for the public schools, even though their kids aren’t enrolled there. How unfair is that?! If parents only had to pay for the school where their kids attend, private schools would be bursting at the seams.
To the extent that it’s relevant, Freddie, it seems to support my case:
Yeah, I know it does. I thought it was interesting even though it doesn’t support my larger position. Why, it’s almost as if I argue in good faith! It’s sad that this surprises you.
That food for thought aside, I believe that health care and education have vastly different factors that determine success, and very different evaluative criteria for what constitutes that success. Probably most important is that medicine, though deeply complicated in terms of how free of a market it is, is still funded by outside payment. It’s not a non-profit scheme. Vouchers and public education both amount to a single payer system.
Actually, the argument over a public option for health care is relevant, and I am glad you brought that up.
I don’t think many level-headed people would argue that opening up choices for people, whether in education or in health insurance, is a poor idea. The primary complaint I have with the idea of a public health insurance option is that we already have an idea how the federal government provides health care coverage – Medicare – and any honest person would have to say that Medicare, as a program, is on the verge of fiscal disaster. If the feds can come up with a way to a) fund/reform Medicare, and b) fund/reform a public option for everyone else, while still keeping our choices of coverage available, I would cautiously support the public option.
At least with Social Security and Medicare, programs that we all pay into (but not all of us want), you tend to get what you pay for (or in the case of Medicare, more than you paid for.) You can’t say the same thing about education in this country, with regards to the individual. Parents and students will derive a variable amount of value from the X dollars spent per student in a district. Is this natural? Yes, since we know that parents and students are more influential in school performance outcomes then the school or the money that is spend on them. However, we can certainly estimate (mainly due to the success of programs like charter schools) that there is a percentage of students out there that could derive more value from another school then the one they are forced to attend, and cost constraints really do limit any choice in schooling, since most people are paying for their local school districts through property taxes.
edit: sorry for needless italics
There’s no need for analogy to other fields or for speculation on this question.The relative merits of market accountability versus bureaucratic accountability in education can be ascertained empirically. The results are overwhelming in favor of market accountability. Tabulations of the vast scientific literature in this field can be found in my recent paper in Vol 3, no. 1 of the Journal of School Choice, which brings together 156 findings from 65 studies stretching all over the globe (http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a909856259~db=all).
I’m glad we’re on a similar page, then, Freddie. I agree with you that figuring out the best way to evaluate success in education is difficult; my point is just that the kind of collective knowledge that markets enable seems clearly able to make at least some significant contribution to solving this problem.
John,
I have to disagree with you on the concept that education suffers from a lack of “market” forces. I understand why it’s easy to come to this conclusion, but the conclusion nonetheless is erroneous.
The fact is that America has a vibrant market for education, and all of its citizens do have the ability (possibility??) to tap that market for its services. There are thousands of private schools, and hundreds of private colleges and universities.
Additionally, the real estate market is very much connected with the education market. Many parents select the school district where their children will enroll by selecting the location where they live. It is a primary factor in home buying. While I sympathize with the families that do not have the ability, finanicially or otherwise, to select school districts in this manner, there are enough families that do to support the function of the real estate market as a secondary education market.
Finally, we know that market forces are active in public schooling simply because public school performances are variable, but trend higher in places of property wealth and more educated parents, and lower in poorer areas with less educated parents. Whether we like it or not, this is the market rendering a verdict on certain public school districts and their demographics. The data suggests that even with a voucher program, students who come from poor, uneducated parents are still going to underperform on average versus students from wealthy/educated parents. If you believe that humans have varying capabilities (for a variety of reasons, some natural and some socioeconomic), then this result is a phenomenon that cannot, wholely, be mitigated by bussing kids to different schools.
Ultimately, I do not support voucher programs for the reasons I have stated above. I am in full agreement with most people that the unions are a net negative for public education, teachers should be evaluated by merit and not by tenure, and that students should be in school longer each day and longer all year. But ultimately the responsibility for improving student performance rests on the shoulders of the parents that care for them and the students themselves, and there is little that society or the government can do to change that.
Matt C.: I never said that there was no market for primary and secondary education in the U.S., but only that increasing the power of market forces – which you’re not denying could be done, since there are many families whose financial situations leave them with no real options – would be one way to make schools accountable. And I entirely agree that the underperformance of poorer students can’t be entirely mitigated through school choice; clearly, though, there are many cases in which it can help.
[...] John Schwenkler responds to the idea of private schools having less accountability: Which means that restaurants, grocery stores, dentists, and so on, not to mention the folks at Harvard, Columbia, and Yale, are held accountable by … whom, exactly? Oh, that’s right: they’re accountable to their customers, who by virtue of their participation in a market that – ideally, at least – enables them to choose between different providers are thereby enabled to vote with their feet on the question of who it is that they think most likely to meet their needs at the right price. This just is a sort of “public accountability”, albeit one that eschews official proxies and instead places its trust in the collective wisdom of those with the most direct stake in attaining the ideal outcomes. That’s how markets work, and while I accept Freddie’s point that a lack of proper educational data leaves us unable to say for sure whether vouchers will tend to improve educational outcomes on the whole, it’s simply wrong to make it out as if it’s a matter of definition that policy experts and government bureaucrats are the only ones capable of holding schools accountable, and determining which schools are working and which aren’t. [...]
Dear Schwenk,
Inter-school transfer is not an option in many parts of the country, like the rural south, where the public school system may only operate one high school or one middle school, and the parochial school represents the only challenge to the publicly funded monopoly.
I think that the introduction of vouchers in the amount of a family’s tax support would inject competition into a closed market, and would be particularly useful in depressed, rural areas.
Your Pal,
Will