Free Market Education?

Milton Friedman became a conservative rock star by espousing the idea that every societal function could be dramatically improved by making it part of the ‘free market’.  In the religious pantheon of true-believer capitalists, Milton is right up there with Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, William Buckley, Friedrich Hayek and a few others.

One of Milton’s most famous assertions is that education needs to be privatized.  Parents should be given a ‘voucher’ for education and they should have freedom of choice.  This, in Milton’s opinion, would create a competitive industry for schools that would ensure high quality education and provide a means for low-income students to escape the poor educational environment that currently exists.

On the surface, this sounds reasonable.  Why not have schools compete for students?  Wouldn’t this result in better run schools with great results?  Wouldn’t the competition be the crucible out of which an excellent education would emerge?

But is education close enough to traditional capitalist endeavors to work in this model?  How is the success of education measured?  If schools become commodities that parents choose based on effectiveness, how will the logistics work?  Will ten first-graders in a neighborhood be going to ten different schools all over the city as the parents attempt to find the best school for their child?  How would transportation work in such a scenario?  What kind of sociological nightmare would that engender?

The first question that needs to be answered is whether schools are indeed broken today.  From a public perception perspective, it is not entirely clear what people think.  About 75% of parents are happy with their oldest child’s education, while only 50% of the general public is happy with education in general.   This is similar to the fact that only 16% of people have faith in the government yet 75% like their own representatives!!

 And in the last 5 years the partisan divide has worked its way into these polls.   Republicans are more likely to be unhappy with public education than democrats.  There is some suspicion that the Common Core plays a big role in this divide, as more conservative parents regard this as a governmental way to control and impact the culture through education.

What is clearly broken is education for the poor.   Schools in poor neighborhoods are typically dramatically different and inferior to those in middle-class or wealthy neighborhoods.  The charter school movement, a publicly funded, privately-run option, has become increasingly popular in poor neighborhoods and 50% of charter school students are either black or Hispanic.  There appears to be some success in these programs, though it is not clear that it is really helping those students who most need help.

Another option, floated more often by conservatives, hearkens back to Friedman’s ‘voucher’ concept.  In this case, a voucher is given to a certain number of applicants who can then use it to pay for private school.  Critics argue that these vouchers simply siphon money away from hard-pressed public schools and gift it to religious and other private schools to help them make ends meet.  They also skim off the best of the minority students, who are not really the disadvantaged or under-performing population in the public education system.

One does not have to be a liberal or even a cynic to believe that the current school voucher system is simply a way for middle or upper middle class parents to get their private and religious schools funded so that their own tuition bills are either reduced or eliminated.

For the sake of analysis, let us imagine two different future public education options.  One is where every family is given a voucher for education and their children can go to whatever school they choose, and all schools are privately run.  The second would also have privately run schools, but otherwise it would be similar to the current public school situation in that children would go to the schools in their neighborhoods.  There would be no vouchers – everyone would attend a for-profit, privately-run school.

In both cases the schools would have to be certified and evaluated on a regular basis.  In the first case, it seems likely that every competing school would want to minimize the attendance of weak or problem children because those children would drag down the metrics and make the school less competitive.   It would introduce two interwoven but problematic competitions – the one to maximize metrics and educational benefit, and the other to attract the best students.  The natural evolution of such a system would be for the best students to aggregate at certain schools and the poorest (and probably underprivileged) to collect at schools that are struggling.  Sound familiar?

Additionally, unless there were rules to prohibit parents from sending their children to schools outside their geographical area, a true voucher system would create havoc in terms of neighborhoods, busing, and many other aspects of family life.  Parents would very likely hop from school to school, seeking out the best program for their children.

The second scenario, where the schools are for-profit, but structured in the same way that they are now, might be an interesting experiment.  The big challenge would be to effectively measure how successful schools are.  Comparing one school to another to determine whether each privately run school should continue to get funding would be a tremendously complicated process. 

Schools would focus entirely on whatever criteria allowed them to stay in business and would cut back any expense that did not contribute to that goal, because cutting back expenses means more profit.  For all their inefficiencies, public schools and their staff have the mostly intangible, overall welfare of the child at heart.  A for-profit school would not be motivated in a similar way.

School populations that are resistant to improvement because of a variety of issues – absenteeism, lack of parental support, behavioral issues, pre-school preparation, etc. – would be unattractive targets for the for-profit corporations.  It is not hard to imagine a revolving door of companies attempting to work their magic in these low-income, traumatized neighborhoods with no more success than the public schools that preceded them.  It is not clear at all that education in these environments will ever improve substantially until the basic problems of poverty, broken homes, unemployment and drug abuse are addressed.  To believe that some clever entrepreneur is going to come up with the silver bullet is a kind of naïve fantasy.

In general, I am highly skeptical of claims that the invisible hand of the free market is the solution to such thorny issues as education and healthcare.  These are complex systems that are quite different than the basic consumer/product model that works so well in basic capitalism.  We need to accept the fact that some aspects of our society truly need to be analyzed and planned, rather than blithely consigned to the whims of the free market.