If “flipping” homework and class work should turn out in fact to be a great idea, we need the discipline of unhampered market forces to drive its adoption throughout our schools. In a free market for schooling, as the innovation shows itself to work well, more and more schools will embrace it or lose students to those that do.
It has taken Kunskapsskolan only twelve years to offer its personalized approach in thirty-three schools in Sweden. Why so fast? Because parents are free to take their tuition money wherever they choose. No bureaucracy needs to be persuaded to adopt the personalized approach. Schools determined to teach in the old way are free do to so; they just start to lose students if the old way is not as good. And Kunskapsskolan’s and Khan Academy’s approaches are surely not the last word in educational innovation. Indeed, they are just early applications of modern information technology in education. What other splendid innovations might be developed by free educational entrepreneurs? We can’t possibly know. We must free our education markets to find out. The results are likely to be far more impressive than we can foresee.
Who Would Determine What is Taught?
Should sex education be taught or not? If so, should the children be instructed in birth control techniques or taught to abstain from sex until marriage? Or both? Should creationism and the theory of evolution be taught as equally valid theories? Or is creationism not science? How about reading instruction? Should children learning to read be taught intensive phonics, learning to sound out words? Or should they be taught by the whole word, look-and-say method? And in mathematics, should schools use the “new math” or the old math? Or something else?
Who should answer such questions? How should we decide what goes into our schools’ curricula, what topics should be emphasized, and how they should be taught?
A common argument for government schooling is that, in common schools, we all learn a body of knowledge and a set of values common to all Americans; it is believed that this shared education holds us together. Without a common curriculum shared by all, it is feared, we would splinter into separate, isolated groups, each teaching its own ideas and values. Free-market schooling, it is believed, would divide us, while government schools unify us.
The argument is false on a number of counts. First, as the questions above make clear, we do not all share a body of knowledge and set of values. Second, the necessity for government schools to decide what to teach to all, regardless of parents’ values and beliefs, itself divides us. When, for example, the schools that we all pay for must decide whether to teach creationism or not, those with strongly held beliefs on different sides of the question battle with one another in the school board meetings to get their beliefs taught.
One of the great strengths of free market education would be to depoliticize these questions. What is taught and how would be decided jointly by many different schools and parents who would choose one another, in part according to shared beliefs and values. We would expect that those who establish schools in different areas, whether educational entrepreneurs, groups of parents, or religious institutions, would be sensitive to the beliefs and values of the parents in that area. Instead of having tough questions of what is to be taught decided centrally for all, they would be decided in different ways for different groups. No group would have to worry about having others’ values imposed on them. Hebrew schools and evangelical Christian schools and totally non-religious schools could coexist harmoniously in the same neighborhoods, the different parents mingling amicably in the afternoons as their children play together on the same recreational-league teams.
As for questions of instructional technique, such as the relative merits of intensive phonics versus the look-and-say method in reading instruction, or “new math” versus old math, and the many other such questions that will arise, our best approach is not to let experts dictate to an entire state school system. The market-based solution is to let the different techniques compete for parents’ favor on the basis of their actual results. Experts disagree, and they make mistakes. When experts who turn out to be mistaken win the political battle over how some subject shall be taught in some state school system, every child in the state suffers. In a free market lots of mistakes will be made, but profit or loss feedback from satisfied or dissatisfied parents will tend to correct those mistakes.
A free market’s continual testing of instructional techniques is a strength. Let’s find out by experience which ones work best; that’s the most effective way to discover better methods and means.
How Would Quality be Assured?
What about accountability? What would assure decent quality of teachers and schools in a free market for education? The key is this: Accountability should be to parents, not politicians.
Let’s approach this question with a thought experiment: Picture a school. Picture the children, perhaps in uniform, the buildings, the grounds. Now suppose that that school has begun to deteriorate, that teacher quality and motivation have eroded, that the children are not learning to read and write very well, that discipline has become lax, that there is bullying in the hallways and even a certain amount of drug-dealing in the schoolyard.
What would happen to the funding of that school?
It depends, doesn’t it? If that school is a non-government school, perhaps one affiliated with a church or other religious institution, its funding would drop, fast. Parents would not tolerate it. They would pull their children out and send them to school somewhere else.
But what if the school is a government school? What has happened to the funding of such government schools over the last twenty or thirty years? According to the National Center for Education Statistics, it has nearly doubled, in inflation-adjusted terms. Some wag has said that in American government schooling “nothing succeeds like failure.” With each new public outcry against the poor condition of our schools, the teachers’ unions and school bureaucracies cry to their state legislatures, “How can you expect us to perform with so little money!?” But it is not a matter of money. It is a matter of incentives.
In government schools, supported by taxes, performance and funding are largely disconnected; hence the personnel in public schools have a weaker incentive to do a good job than they would if their incomes depended on satisfying parents, as tuition payments do at private schools. This is not to say that all private schools perform better than all public schools, nor to deny that there are many dedicated, superb—even heroic—teachers and administrators in government schools. There are. And I certainly don’t mean to suggest that teachers are motivated mainly, or even primarily, by money. I’m a teacher myself, and I could earn more doing something else; like many teachers, I teach because I love it and believe it is important.
The point is the much simpler one: People do respond to financial incentives, as well as the non-financial incentives of pride in one’s work and concern for the students’ learning. Teachers who stand to lose their jobs if their teaching is poor are more likely to work hard and teach well than if their jobs are effectively guaranteed. School principals whose budget dollars are paid over to them by state boards of education, almost regardless of how well their children learn, are less likely to strive to improve their schools than principals whose children’s parents can leave and take their tuition dollars with them. When performance and funding are connected, performance tends to be better than when they are disconnected.
This thought experiment captures why the regulation of school quality is fundamentally stronger in private than in government schools. The current system is bad because quality regulation is top-down, by legislation and bureaucracy. Such regulation can’t work well, because of the problem of who will regulate the regulators, and because every layer of regulators is farther away from the children and less interested in and informed about them. If teachers do a poor job, they are supposed to be regulated by their principals. If the principals do a bad job, they are supposed to be regulated by the school boards. If the school boards do a bad job, they are su
pposed to be regulated by their state legislatures. If the state legislatures do a bad job, they are supposed to be regulated at the ballot box, once every two years, by the voters—that is, the parents. Why have the parents four steps removed from the original problem, able to act only once every two years, and then only by majority vote? It’s nuts.
Make the accountability bottom-up. Let every different parent regulate schools directly by his freedom to say, “I’m not satisfied, and if the problem does not get fixed by next month, my child and her tuition dollars are going elsewhere.”
Here is a story about the ineffectiveness of top-down regulation, in this case all the way down from Congress in far-away Washington, through the No Child Left Behind Act. In the spring of 2009, Alex McCoy, twenty-two, just graduated from Haverford College, was teaching 9th grade math at William Penn High School in Philadelphia in the Teach for America program. She was told by her principal not to give any of her students a failing grade. The message was not framed in those terms, but that was the message. Under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), her school administration would get in trouble if too many of William Penn’s children got left behind—failed—so the principal instituted the no-failures policy. The dictate operated by making it too time-consuming and difficult for teachers to give a failing grade. In Alex’s words,
You [the teacher] had to prove that you had gone above and beyond to try to save the kid. You had to hold a number of conferences with parents. You had to prove that you had spoken to parents and gotten them involved. That was extremely difficult because you could only get parents’ phone numbers through the school, and usually the phone numbers were out of date. You spent hours just to make contact. And that was only the beginning of the process. There was lots of paperwork needed to prove that you had done a lot of intervention. It was almost impossible because it all required so much time. All of those things together seem to have been put in place to keep teachers from failing anybody. There were so many hoops to jump through that we [the teachers in the school] were not failing anyone.
Alex gave all her ninth graders passing grades, even though some were doing math at fifth, third, or even first grade level. She considered only a fifth of them actually prepared for the tenth grade.
Alex also describes a perverse response to the emphasis on testing in the government’s top-down approach to assuring quality. For purposes of NCLB, the students were categorized as “below basic,” “basic,” “proficient,” or “advanced” according to their test scores. The school needed to show “adequate yearly progress” in moving students up from “below basic” toward “advanced” in order to stay out of trouble.
All the focus was on the 11th graders, because that’s when they were tested. In the last month before testing we would pull kids thought to be on the edge of basic and proficient from their expressive arts classes to give them extra tutoring [in reading and math]. Because if they scored proficient, they satisfied NCLB.
Thus the well-roundedness of the children’s education was sacrificed to the desires of the school administration to meet the letter of the No Child Left Behind law.
To see how market forces would regulate the quality of schooling better, if only market forces were allowed to work, consider the case of Kelley Williams-Bolar, an Ohio mother of two who recently spent nine days in jail and was convicted on two felony counts of grand theft. Her crime? “Educational theft.” She had “used her father’s address to enroll her two daughters in a better public school outside of their neighborhood.” The Wall Street Journal reported on the case:
[P]arents in Connecticut, Kentucky and Missouri have all been arrested … for enrolling their children in better public schools outside of their districts. …
From California to Massachusetts, districts are hiring special investigators to follow children from school to their homes to determine their true residences and decide if they “belong” at high-achieving public schools.
Here are American parents acting so as to reward better-performing schools with more business and to penalize worse-performing schools with less business. This is the kind of natural behavior that in a free market underlies profit-and-loss selection of high-quality goods and services. In our government schooling system, however, the bureaucracies spend additional taxpayer money to keep new customers out. Something is wrong.
The only kind of quality regulation schooling needs is to have Kelley Williams-Bolar and other parents in charge of their children’s tuition dollars. Let them spend those dollars at any school that chooses to accept the child. The millions of Kelley Williams-Bolars in the country, all choosing educational options for their children based on their particular knowledge of their children’s needs and the options available, would provide much stronger and more immediate accountability than Congress and the president can devise in dozens of tries at managing education top-down. No matter what schemes they devise for measuring children’s progress or evaluating teachers and schools, they will never regulate as precisely and promptly as will parents with the freedom to say, “We’re not satisfied; we’re leaving.” That, coupled with freedom for educational entrepreneurs to say, “Try our school! Look at what we offer!” would be the best possible regulator of quality. Again, it would not be perfect—nothing we fallible humans create can be perfect—but it would be the best possible.
But what about the children of parents who don’t pay attention to school quality, whether because they must struggle so hard to put food on the table that they don’t have time, or because they are just not good parents? They might just send their children to the closest school, even if it were a poor one. Wouldn’t some children get sent to poor schools for this reason?
I don’t think so; not in a free market for schooling. Many parents also can’t take time to research the merits of different grocery store chains or kinds of shoes they might buy, or the different churches they might attend. Nevertheless, they have only pretty good grocery, shoe, and church options to choose from. Why? Because in a free and competitive system enough other people do do such research and do make such informed choices that only reasonably decent grocery stores and shoe brands and churches can stay in business. So it would be for schools. If only, say, half of all parents made careful school selections in a free system, no poor schools could survive.
Would Free-Market Schools be Affordable?
What about expense? Aren’t private schools too expensive? Would they be affordable?
Yes, they would be affordable. Remember that the essential schooling children need in order to get to that take-off point where they can learn on their own is the three R’s: reading, writing, and ’rithmetic. That can be provided very inexpensively, so the lowest-budget schools might teach just those skills. Entrepreneurs earn an acceptable return selling clothes and shoes and groceries to low-income people and renting them places to live; why shouldn’t entrepreneurs make an acceptable return selling low-income people affordable instruction in reading well, writing clear paragraphs with correct sentences, and doing basic math?
If that sounds like far too little schooling to offer, remember that government schools in low-income areas today systematically fail to give children even that. Free-market schooling just needs to be better to be preferable.
Slightly more expensive schools might offer history or science, too. The next most expensive might add art, music, and foreign language instruction. Some schools would offer athletic programs; some would not. Increasingly expensive schools might offer additional options and increasing depth of instruction. Competition would tend to assure variety and good value at each level.
Also on affordability, remember that we citizens bear the cost of government schooling now; we just do so indirectly through the taxes we pay. If those taxes were repealed, we would have all that money in hand to pay for schooling directly, rather than through the tax man and school bureaucracy.
And we’d get far more for our money. Government school systems are government bureaucracies, w
ith guaranteed funding and guaranteed customers. Like all such bureaucracies, they are grossly inefficient. Think of the Post Office, Amtrak, the Department of Motor Vehicles, or Medicare. If schools had to compete for their students and their funding, and if they had to compete not just on quality but also on price, competition would force them to find cost savings.
Peje Emilsson, the founder of Kunskapsskolan, is often asked how his schools in Sweden can earn a profit, when the voucher they receive for each student is no more than the amount spent per student at government schools. He responds, “Anything the government does, you can of course get a better result at twenty percent lower cost. Seriously.”
Emilsson’s “twenty percent” may be way off. What do you suppose is the median tuition charged by the private sector schools in Baltimore attended by Children’s Scholarship Fund Baltimore students? How do you suppose that compares to the spending per child in the Baltimore City Public Schools? I have looked up the figures for the 2010-2011 academic year. How large do you suppose the difference is? Please take a moment to make some estimates.
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