One major issue unaddressed in your proposal that stood out to me: working parents really really rely on school being a socially acceptable but affordable form of daycare. This became super obvious during school closures and how unpopular those closures became even in liberal areas. This issue becomes further complicated by social desirability bias: no one wants to admit that one of the school's most important functions is to provide daycare for their kids. It sounds bad. Parents want to think they are providing for their kids future and doing what's best for them. Teachers are insulted that one of their primary benefits is that they are a very expensive baby sitter.
So if your public policy gets rid of public schools, you are telling parents that their reliable, social acceptable form of daycare is going away. You also haven't described a solution to that problem that will be as good as they what they have (people are risk averse) nor packaged in a way that handles social desirability bias (you can't come out and just say hey here's how we'll address daycare for your kids because that'll make people feel bad).
And yes I know that helicoptoring parenting and our society's crazy aversion to letting kids be unsupervised is part of the issue. But that's just the thing: that would need to be part of the big cultural and legal changes. Parents should be able to work full time and have their young kids play at a park without fear they'd go to jail or have their kids taken away.
Agreed it’s important but I would assume the private sector would respond to this issue and create lots of full day options and maybe some without stupid teacher days where you have to scramble to get coverage for your kids.
Yep, I agree with this. School is a messed up institution, but I think it survives (and thrives) because it answers the needs of many different constituencies.
First, parents, who want three different things: day care, academic achievement, and socialization.
Second, government, who want to demonstrate largesse and keep young people off the streets.
Third, employers, who want kids so fed up with school that even the prospect of working in their horrible establishments is better than what came before.
Yeah, this is a really important point. For any family structure other than a two-parent household with a stay-at-home parent, having somewhere to stick the kids for much of the day is a critical logistical need.
You have effectively identified another major hurdle within the current status quo, but the answer must be relaxing ridiculously strict rules about having 3 post-grad educated adults per 10 children, _not_ the status quo.
This was written nearly 500 years ago, still relevant as ever. Educational change really does creep at a slow pace—
"For those who follow our custom and attempt to be a schoolmaster for so many minds diverse in kind and capacity, using the same teaching and the same degree of guidance for them all, it is no wonder if in a whole race of children they find barely two or three who reap any proper fruit from their teaching."
And not a word mentioned about a deformed culture riddled w so much idiocy. It doesn’t matter, public or private, education won’t improve until our perverse, penchant for anti-intellectualism reverses itself. I’ve taught in both settings and so many kids just don’t care. Throw in antisocial behaviors, phones, etc and we’re in a doom spiral. I’ve taught in both private and public settings. The kids at the public school were vastly superior to the rich knuckleheads at the private and yet, dysfunction from broken families still constantly derailed the learning process. So many of my competent public school students are now phds in science, entrepreneurs, engineers, psychologists etc that it’s what keeps me in the profession. So many of my former private school students flamed out and are living at home w mom and dad. There is no easy answer.
As a public school knucklehead that flamed out for a bit and lived at home who begat a private school kid with a graduate degree from Cambridge, I have to laugh at your generalization and apparent lack of a decent data pool. If you think the school defines the kid, you missed the whole point and it is shocking you would even attempt to make the point you did. The data, the real data, not your little myopic view of it shows the exact opposite of what you are saying. But, by all means send your kids to public school...lol.
Public school is a failed institution. Not that some privates aren't, but they can be avoided.
Sure- using test scores as a measure of success is insane.
Would be as if someone measured your success based upon the number of readers and subscription revenues over a year rather than on someone’s subjective opinion of the quality of your writing in each piece.
We need more qualitative, subjective, non-replicable, inconsistent measures of educational performance. Only then will results improve.
Your comment implied that Hanania was criticizing test scores on the grounds that they don't work at being a sign of good education. But Hanania doesn't reject test scores on those grounds. He rejects them on the grounds that they are just signs of signaling. Maybe you weren't trying to save face and it was a genuine misunderstanding, but I don't know how you misinterpreted my comment that badly.
Tests are merely a diagnostic indicator. The key thing is what one does when the tests show the majority of public school children cannot read, write or perform basic arithmetic and that precious few African-American students are literate or numerate. A tragedy should be met with a response.
The teacher union response is to lower standards and test less. Teaching the skills necessary to pass what are very basic tests is better than most of the time wasting done at the grammar school level and certainly better than lowering expectations. Intensive focus and all day schooling at very early ages (5-8) for all kids falling behind would be a start.
Late to this but isn’t a core issue that there isn’t really ‘choice’ for the average parent that this article claims to care about. You can only send your child to 2-3 schools in an acceptable radius anyway. The schools in poor areas would become even worse, they’d be even more neglected by parents. Uneducated parents are unlikely to be able to filter appropriately, and you just compound the issue between generations such that those who highly valued education and are well educated get even greater benefit than they currently do.
Further, polarisation would become even more out of control as parents would send their children to school on emotive political considerations (even more so than Texas school boards outlawing textbooks teaching evolution or New York one’s teaching CRT). These would likely form a huge part of the now necessary marketing budget for schools (money not going to kids).
Parents are not rational actors here. How you treat your children is under huge societal status based pressure and thus you’d be hard pressed to not just choose the school your social circle did.
Finally, you’d be selecting for senior leadership at schools that was good at pandering to parents more than teaching children. Parent relations would be a huge portion of the job in areas with lots of choice (dense cities) and rural areas not much would change at all.
Finally, when it is the gov choosing how much money you get and how it’s weighted (more for poor kids, special needs, rural etc is all political choice) they are effectively determining the outcome of the market. Even more so than now, the relative political power of groups would be brought to bear and the poor kids would be worse off.
This is a dreadful way to break the union stranglehold. There are so many examples of brilliant public education worldwide - why attempt this regressive drivel? Is it not far more important to have universal minimum standards upheld for all children and then those that want to / have the resources can pay their own money to home school or send them to a private school.
I think that a lot of non-libertarian support for public schools is rooted in the idea that they ought to be a site for the inculcation of a civic religion. The notion that that inculcation is simply not a proper purpose of government in a free society, and in fact undermines the highest values of such a society, is one of those things that, as David Friedman put it, seems natural and obvious to libertarians but very peculiar to everyone else.
The history of using public schools for civic religious indoctrination in the US is very long: it goes back at least to the mid-19th century drive to Protestantize Catholic immigrants. It's also bipartisan. Conservatives are quick to complain about the modern left using schools to push a novel leftist civic religion (and it has now become a cliche to analogize social justice leftists to Puritans) but they were happy to use the schools to impose their traditionalist civic religion back when they held the relevant commanding heights.
I think a conservative's response to that would be that their civic religion is good for society and the modern one, or whatever one parents think best, isn't.
That would probably indeed be some conservatives' response. Such a response, however, sits uneasily with rhetoric about "parental rights," as well as with the traditionally American conservative idea that no matter who you are, people you hate will be in power sometimes, so it is in your long-term interest to limit the damage those people can do, even if it means limiting your own power today.
One could argue the civic religion (and govt's role in inculcating it) is required for the #1 libertarian reason for gov't., national defense/military? (Not sure empirically if it's necessary, but seems plausible. So public schools would be a sort of subheading of #1 and therefore an appropriate gov't role?)
This actually tracks as a great little counterpoint. Hanania isn't a conservative--he's a libertarian, and states as much. He doesn't mind a fractured society because his values don't need or include such a society.
HS math teacher here. Richard you underestimate how aspirational many parents are and how much they overestimate their own child’s academic potential. I’ve sat in parent conferences with blue collar parents who are perplexed to hear that their son is not taking to Algebra II. Their reaction is usually not one of acceptance and they always ask how we can get him to prosper in my class. They may support these reforms for others but rarely for themselves.
While it contains a lot of good points, this essay tries to link two questions that are in fact largely separate. The narrower question concerns the funding and control of schools: vouchers versus direct funding; private versus public.
The broader question concerns the entire structure of the first several decades of life in advanced countries. Why does school last 13 or 17 years? Why not 5 or 10? Why is the school year 9 months long, rather than 6 or 12? Why can’t faster learners finish in half the time? Why isn’t the range of activities wider? Et cetera.
I agree that the current approach is highly arbitrary, irrational, and afflicted with status quo bias. (As John Derbyshire wrote of our education system, “that’s how we do things, because…that’s how we do them.”) But it’s not clear that a shift to private schooling would address this. Although they have their virtues, our private schools follow the same format as our public schools. The energetic boy is still trapped in his desk for a 50-minute history lecture, albeit a slightly less woke one.
And it’s already possible for parents to give their kids a very different childhood. Homeschooling is already legal, and its format can be much different than conventional schooling if parents want it to be. Finishing high school isn’t mandatory; you’re allowed to drop out. A smart kid already has the option of “homeschooling”; spending all of his time writing code and watching YouTube videos about ancient Rome before acing the GED.
Why don’t more young people do that already? The proponents of the signaling model have the answer. Succeeding in the conventional system, all 17 years of it, provides the best signal to Goldman Sachs that you’ll make a good analyst. Choosing an alternative path marks you as a smart weirdo...at best.
So what we actually need is an alternative credentialing mechanism *with real momentum behind it*. If we had that, we wouldn’t have to worry too much about the whole K-12 voucher business. If only a few kids used it, they’d be swimming against the tide. But if powerful institutions gave the alternative system enough of a push, it could work.
I would love to see the federal government and state governments partner with big business to adopt some test-based alternative to conventional academic credentials. Any government jobs that currently require college degrees could accept this credential as well. Tech companies have prestige and contain a lot of people who are skeptical about school; they could get on board.
It’s all well and good to talk about different approaches to childhood, but unless you solve the credentialing problem, most parents will stick with the approach that leads to employment. Even if it’s inefficient and arbitrary.
And can't that smart kid you mentioned ace the SAT/ACT as well, get into a good college based on the score, get a degree, and then get hired by Goldman Sachs? Signaling is probably most of a college degree's value, but you can skip a lot of the earlier steps without anyone looking askance.
Only to a certain extent, because colleges look at more than SAT/ACT scores. They look at high school records. A kid who was vaguely "homeschooled" through 12th grade with no real transcript is going to be at a competitive disadvantage unless he's applying to some conservative outlier school like Hillsdale. And things are currently trending in the wrong direction, with standardized tests being deemphasized in college admissions for "equity" reasons.
That said, it really is true that the kid's academic record prior to 9th grade is irrelevant. Smart kids can just read books and mess around before showing up to the first day of high school. As long as they can do the work, what they did earlier is irrelevant. Most parents haven't figured that out, though.
It would also be worth looking at Australian schools as another example. In Australia for primary and secondary education parents can send their kids to private schools. Private schools get about 2/3 of the funding that government schools do with parents paying the rest. About 1/3 of primary and secondary students in Australia go to private schools.
The advantages of this setup are that if a local school is poor parents can send their kids to a private school. It also saves the government money. It also means the government school system has to try and compete with private schools. This can be done. In NSW, the largest state in Australia, there are many selective state schools that have the best results in NSW.
The disadvantage of the system is that some poor parents are trapped into bad schools because they are in an area with a bad school and cannot afford to send their kids to a private school.
I'm quite liberal or left-wing, and have worked in the education technology space for about a decade. I more or less agree we should look to reform education via ESAs. Don't be too quick to write off the left as being willing to try market based reforms.
But you are incorrect on one key point: dual language education is actually superior to monolingual learning. The research is quite strong here. Kids in dual language programs will be behind monolingual peers until about 6th grade, but at that point, their language skills in BOTH languages are stronger than their monolingual peers.
(There's a key point here that dual language is different than a transitional bilingual program... the former is far more effective)
In other words, teaching both English and Spanish from the get-go will make kids better at English by middle school than kids who only studied English.
This makes intuitive sense... how many of the smartest people you know grew up bilingual or multilingual? Why do so many wealthy families fight tooth and nail to get their kids into dual language schools?
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Also an aside: Republicans are not the dreamy school reformers you make them out to be. They are banning books, banning the teaching of "controversial topics" and getting the state even more involved in the classeoom in dangerous ways. This isnt a pro-liberty program. Shoving the pledge of allegiance down everyone's throats is the most dangerous form of wokeness pervading our schools to this day.
They also oppose educating undocumented children, nevermind the teaching of kids in languages other than English (see above). With 10% of the US student population (and growing faster than any other) being non-native English speakers with educational outcomes worse than low-income African Americans, a bullish republican reform policy would leave these students - those most in need of state interventions - completely unsupported.
I'd argue that a growing percentage of the student population in the U.S. being non-native English speakers is not a great thing and should be accounted for with a strong focus on a unified language. Since you have either no problem with that or celebrate that, you believe in a shared civic identity way less than I do. Too libertarian for me.
1) fundamental to American civic identity is multiculturalism and immigration. It's why the statue of liberty is a symbol of our nation, and why we don't have an official language. Our strength and superiority as a nation derives from our multiculturalism. We pull the smartest minds from all over the world, and that's why we have the most innovative and high-skill economy on the planet.
2) You missed the crux of the point: dual language programs result in adults better at speaking English than kids who are native English speakers in a purely English programs. If you care about American economic prosperity - or at minimum, everyone being skilled at a shared language - then you should support dual language programming.
America is unusually culturally heterogeneous compared to its peers. Because of this, America relies on its public schooling to forge a shared cultural identify from its many disparate subcultures. In a school choice model, we lose the melting pot effect that is critical to our success.
America now relies on public education and intelligence agencies to destroy the shared cultural identity in an attempt to reforge it into a central authoritarian craphole.
I’m not sure that pointing to status quo bias is really enough. I (centre lefty) am status quo biased, but am so for a couple of reasons.
1) As you note, it’s not obvious that other countries, with more private provision, are really doing better. For example, in the UK, those private academies are typically the best performing. Other countries also aren’t seeing a massive explosion of innovation and diverse approaches to education. So what’s the point? The only result might be what usually happens during privatisation pushes: a massive and corrupt transfer of public assets to private ownership. And if you relax the rules enough to allow for lots of variation, then you run into danger, because…
2) The status quo seems to be a somewhat fragile balance. It seems that in the past, education was not universal, and keeping it universal is valuable. Losing that would be devastating, and if the rules were relaxed sufficiently to allow for years out, half years, etc… then there could end up being a group who don’t go to school at all, and it’s likely to be the socioeconomic lowest.
> We can dismiss (4), since education is highly decentralized and there are unlikely to ever be private monopoly actors in this space. Moreover, education isn’t the kind of industry in which monopolization is likely.
This is true in densely inhabited areas where a free market in education will lead to several different schools within easy reach of most students. However, in rural areas or small towns, there may only be enough children to support one school within easy reach. (Virtual education could get around this but is likely to be unpopular with parents.) This would lead to such a school having, in practice, a monopoly on education for children in its area, & since it would be privately run but not subject to substantial competition, if it deviates substantially from the parents' wishes, it would be harder to avoid that than in a public school system where, in theory, outraged parents could run for the school board &c to try to change the public school system.
I also agree that we should not dismiss the idea that schools are monopolies. I don't know how it is in the United States, but my experience is that parents will send their children to the local school by default. After all, it's a good thing if children can walk to school by themselves.
I like the idea of a free market, but I'm not sure how well it would work in reality. In particular, how well can competition work in a village with one school?
Parents can move. Capitalism never promised you a rose garden, merely the maximum possible independence and wealth.
You like capitalism as a mystical ideal, not as an idea abstracted from the evidence of the senses. See Cantillon, Smith, Say, Bastiat, Menger, Schumpeter, Hayak, Mises, Friedman, and Rand. Mainstream economists are hidden mystics with arbitrary statistics.
“If someone proposed that any other population be placed in government buildings at set times organized by neighborhood and told what to do and think, people would recognize this as totalitarian. If told this was for their own good, citizens would demand extremely strong evidence for this claim and still likely oppose the program even if they found any evidence provided convincing.”
We needed status quo bias during the lockdowns but it disappeared.
There is a good theoretical case to be make for many reforms like private schools open borders banning handguns Balanced Budget Amendment. The Law of Unintended Consequences has not been repealed and we should be careful about tearing down Chesterton fences. I think we need to be cautions and make marginal reforms, see how the work before going farther. So back to centrist reforms of education, registration and tracking of guns, merit-based immigration, tax increases to reduce the deficit.
Well I'm sold. One thing you didn't really address though, that I think is extremely important, is managing the transition in the first places to implement true school choices. If they handle the transition disastrously, it will have a chilling effect on further spread. Though even if it's a stunning success, there will inevitably be lies and propaganda from the usual suspects that will still need to be countered.
I have to think it's important to phase it in gradually, giving new private providers plenty of advance notice and ensuring that they are working on coming to market, and to budget for minimal cuts to public school spending in the initial years so that there's an overcapacity of slots between public and private, before finally implementing massive downsizing cuts to public school budgets in later years and auctioning off most of their property.
I don't think you want parent choice to 100% determine public school budgets from the beginning, as I've heard discussed, because it has the potential to create a disaster in which a public school finds itself basically unable to function while the expanded private options are just getting started and now you don't have enough slots for all the kids.
One major issue unaddressed in your proposal that stood out to me: working parents really really rely on school being a socially acceptable but affordable form of daycare. This became super obvious during school closures and how unpopular those closures became even in liberal areas. This issue becomes further complicated by social desirability bias: no one wants to admit that one of the school's most important functions is to provide daycare for their kids. It sounds bad. Parents want to think they are providing for their kids future and doing what's best for them. Teachers are insulted that one of their primary benefits is that they are a very expensive baby sitter.
So if your public policy gets rid of public schools, you are telling parents that their reliable, social acceptable form of daycare is going away. You also haven't described a solution to that problem that will be as good as they what they have (people are risk averse) nor packaged in a way that handles social desirability bias (you can't come out and just say hey here's how we'll address daycare for your kids because that'll make people feel bad).
And yes I know that helicoptoring parenting and our society's crazy aversion to letting kids be unsupervised is part of the issue. But that's just the thing: that would need to be part of the big cultural and legal changes. Parents should be able to work full time and have their young kids play at a park without fear they'd go to jail or have their kids taken away.
Agreed it’s important but I would assume the private sector would respond to this issue and create lots of full day options and maybe some without stupid teacher days where you have to scramble to get coverage for your kids.
Yep, I agree with this. School is a messed up institution, but I think it survives (and thrives) because it answers the needs of many different constituencies.
First, parents, who want three different things: day care, academic achievement, and socialization.
Second, government, who want to demonstrate largesse and keep young people off the streets.
Third, employers, who want kids so fed up with school that even the prospect of working in their horrible establishments is better than what came before.
Reading, writing and arithmetic. Build the core and leave the social programming.
Yeah, this is a really important point. For any family structure other than a two-parent household with a stay-at-home parent, having somewhere to stick the kids for much of the day is a critical logistical need.
You have effectively identified another major hurdle within the current status quo, but the answer must be relaxing ridiculously strict rules about having 3 post-grad educated adults per 10 children, _not_ the status quo.
This was written nearly 500 years ago, still relevant as ever. Educational change really does creep at a slow pace—
"For those who follow our custom and attempt to be a schoolmaster for so many minds diverse in kind and capacity, using the same teaching and the same degree of guidance for them all, it is no wonder if in a whole race of children they find barely two or three who reap any proper fruit from their teaching."
- Montaigne (Enlightened Centrist)
Montaigne is always a delight to read
And not a word mentioned about a deformed culture riddled w so much idiocy. It doesn’t matter, public or private, education won’t improve until our perverse, penchant for anti-intellectualism reverses itself. I’ve taught in both settings and so many kids just don’t care. Throw in antisocial behaviors, phones, etc and we’re in a doom spiral. I’ve taught in both private and public settings. The kids at the public school were vastly superior to the rich knuckleheads at the private and yet, dysfunction from broken families still constantly derailed the learning process. So many of my competent public school students are now phds in science, entrepreneurs, engineers, psychologists etc that it’s what keeps me in the profession. So many of my former private school students flamed out and are living at home w mom and dad. There is no easy answer.
As a public school knucklehead that flamed out for a bit and lived at home who begat a private school kid with a graduate degree from Cambridge, I have to laugh at your generalization and apparent lack of a decent data pool. If you think the school defines the kid, you missed the whole point and it is shocking you would even attempt to make the point you did. The data, the real data, not your little myopic view of it shows the exact opposite of what you are saying. But, by all means send your kids to public school...lol.
Public school is a failed institution. Not that some privates aren't, but they can be avoided.
Sure- using test scores as a measure of success is insane.
Would be as if someone measured your success based upon the number of readers and subscription revenues over a year rather than on someone’s subjective opinion of the quality of your writing in each piece.
We need more qualitative, subjective, non-replicable, inconsistent measures of educational performance. Only then will results improve.
You have a signaling model for Substack that shows that subscription counts and other objective metrics don't work?
Yes! I have named my model “the inability to understand sarcasm”
Your comment implied that Hanania was criticizing test scores on the grounds that they don't work at being a sign of good education. But Hanania doesn't reject test scores on those grounds. He rejects them on the grounds that they are just signs of signaling. Maybe you weren't trying to save face and it was a genuine misunderstanding, but I don't know how you misinterpreted my comment that badly.
😂😂😂. Randi, is that you?
Tests are merely a diagnostic indicator. The key thing is what one does when the tests show the majority of public school children cannot read, write or perform basic arithmetic and that precious few African-American students are literate or numerate. A tragedy should be met with a response.
The teacher union response is to lower standards and test less. Teaching the skills necessary to pass what are very basic tests is better than most of the time wasting done at the grammar school level and certainly better than lowering expectations. Intensive focus and all day schooling at very early ages (5-8) for all kids falling behind would be a start.
Late to this but isn’t a core issue that there isn’t really ‘choice’ for the average parent that this article claims to care about. You can only send your child to 2-3 schools in an acceptable radius anyway. The schools in poor areas would become even worse, they’d be even more neglected by parents. Uneducated parents are unlikely to be able to filter appropriately, and you just compound the issue between generations such that those who highly valued education and are well educated get even greater benefit than they currently do.
Further, polarisation would become even more out of control as parents would send their children to school on emotive political considerations (even more so than Texas school boards outlawing textbooks teaching evolution or New York one’s teaching CRT). These would likely form a huge part of the now necessary marketing budget for schools (money not going to kids).
Parents are not rational actors here. How you treat your children is under huge societal status based pressure and thus you’d be hard pressed to not just choose the school your social circle did.
Finally, you’d be selecting for senior leadership at schools that was good at pandering to parents more than teaching children. Parent relations would be a huge portion of the job in areas with lots of choice (dense cities) and rural areas not much would change at all.
Finally, when it is the gov choosing how much money you get and how it’s weighted (more for poor kids, special needs, rural etc is all political choice) they are effectively determining the outcome of the market. Even more so than now, the relative political power of groups would be brought to bear and the poor kids would be worse off.
This is a dreadful way to break the union stranglehold. There are so many examples of brilliant public education worldwide - why attempt this regressive drivel? Is it not far more important to have universal minimum standards upheld for all children and then those that want to / have the resources can pay their own money to home school or send them to a private school.
I think that a lot of non-libertarian support for public schools is rooted in the idea that they ought to be a site for the inculcation of a civic religion. The notion that that inculcation is simply not a proper purpose of government in a free society, and in fact undermines the highest values of such a society, is one of those things that, as David Friedman put it, seems natural and obvious to libertarians but very peculiar to everyone else.
The history of using public schools for civic religious indoctrination in the US is very long: it goes back at least to the mid-19th century drive to Protestantize Catholic immigrants. It's also bipartisan. Conservatives are quick to complain about the modern left using schools to push a novel leftist civic religion (and it has now become a cliche to analogize social justice leftists to Puritans) but they were happy to use the schools to impose their traditionalist civic religion back when they held the relevant commanding heights.
I think a conservative's response to that would be that their civic religion is good for society and the modern one, or whatever one parents think best, isn't.
That would probably indeed be some conservatives' response. Such a response, however, sits uneasily with rhetoric about "parental rights," as well as with the traditionally American conservative idea that no matter who you are, people you hate will be in power sometimes, so it is in your long-term interest to limit the damage those people can do, even if it means limiting your own power today.
One could argue the civic religion (and govt's role in inculcating it) is required for the #1 libertarian reason for gov't., national defense/military? (Not sure empirically if it's necessary, but seems plausible. So public schools would be a sort of subheading of #1 and therefore an appropriate gov't role?)
This actually tracks as a great little counterpoint. Hanania isn't a conservative--he's a libertarian, and states as much. He doesn't mind a fractured society because his values don't need or include such a society.
HS math teacher here. Richard you underestimate how aspirational many parents are and how much they overestimate their own child’s academic potential. I’ve sat in parent conferences with blue collar parents who are perplexed to hear that their son is not taking to Algebra II. Their reaction is usually not one of acceptance and they always ask how we can get him to prosper in my class. They may support these reforms for others but rarely for themselves.
While it contains a lot of good points, this essay tries to link two questions that are in fact largely separate. The narrower question concerns the funding and control of schools: vouchers versus direct funding; private versus public.
The broader question concerns the entire structure of the first several decades of life in advanced countries. Why does school last 13 or 17 years? Why not 5 or 10? Why is the school year 9 months long, rather than 6 or 12? Why can’t faster learners finish in half the time? Why isn’t the range of activities wider? Et cetera.
I agree that the current approach is highly arbitrary, irrational, and afflicted with status quo bias. (As John Derbyshire wrote of our education system, “that’s how we do things, because…that’s how we do them.”) But it’s not clear that a shift to private schooling would address this. Although they have their virtues, our private schools follow the same format as our public schools. The energetic boy is still trapped in his desk for a 50-minute history lecture, albeit a slightly less woke one.
And it’s already possible for parents to give their kids a very different childhood. Homeschooling is already legal, and its format can be much different than conventional schooling if parents want it to be. Finishing high school isn’t mandatory; you’re allowed to drop out. A smart kid already has the option of “homeschooling”; spending all of his time writing code and watching YouTube videos about ancient Rome before acing the GED.
Why don’t more young people do that already? The proponents of the signaling model have the answer. Succeeding in the conventional system, all 17 years of it, provides the best signal to Goldman Sachs that you’ll make a good analyst. Choosing an alternative path marks you as a smart weirdo...at best.
So what we actually need is an alternative credentialing mechanism *with real momentum behind it*. If we had that, we wouldn’t have to worry too much about the whole K-12 voucher business. If only a few kids used it, they’d be swimming against the tide. But if powerful institutions gave the alternative system enough of a push, it could work.
I would love to see the federal government and state governments partner with big business to adopt some test-based alternative to conventional academic credentials. Any government jobs that currently require college degrees could accept this credential as well. Tech companies have prestige and contain a lot of people who are skeptical about school; they could get on board.
It’s all well and good to talk about different approaches to childhood, but unless you solve the credentialing problem, most parents will stick with the approach that leads to employment. Even if it’s inefficient and arbitrary.
And can't that smart kid you mentioned ace the SAT/ACT as well, get into a good college based on the score, get a degree, and then get hired by Goldman Sachs? Signaling is probably most of a college degree's value, but you can skip a lot of the earlier steps without anyone looking askance.
Only to a certain extent, because colleges look at more than SAT/ACT scores. They look at high school records. A kid who was vaguely "homeschooled" through 12th grade with no real transcript is going to be at a competitive disadvantage unless he's applying to some conservative outlier school like Hillsdale. And things are currently trending in the wrong direction, with standardized tests being deemphasized in college admissions for "equity" reasons.
That said, it really is true that the kid's academic record prior to 9th grade is irrelevant. Smart kids can just read books and mess around before showing up to the first day of high school. As long as they can do the work, what they did earlier is irrelevant. Most parents haven't figured that out, though.
This is an excellent piece.
More choice would really help US schools.
It would also be worth looking at Australian schools as another example. In Australia for primary and secondary education parents can send their kids to private schools. Private schools get about 2/3 of the funding that government schools do with parents paying the rest. About 1/3 of primary and secondary students in Australia go to private schools.
The advantages of this setup are that if a local school is poor parents can send their kids to a private school. It also saves the government money. It also means the government school system has to try and compete with private schools. This can be done. In NSW, the largest state in Australia, there are many selective state schools that have the best results in NSW.
The disadvantage of the system is that some poor parents are trapped into bad schools because they are in an area with a bad school and cannot afford to send their kids to a private school.
I'm quite liberal or left-wing, and have worked in the education technology space for about a decade. I more or less agree we should look to reform education via ESAs. Don't be too quick to write off the left as being willing to try market based reforms.
But you are incorrect on one key point: dual language education is actually superior to monolingual learning. The research is quite strong here. Kids in dual language programs will be behind monolingual peers until about 6th grade, but at that point, their language skills in BOTH languages are stronger than their monolingual peers.
(There's a key point here that dual language is different than a transitional bilingual program... the former is far more effective)
In other words, teaching both English and Spanish from the get-go will make kids better at English by middle school than kids who only studied English.
This makes intuitive sense... how many of the smartest people you know grew up bilingual or multilingual? Why do so many wealthy families fight tooth and nail to get their kids into dual language schools?
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Also an aside: Republicans are not the dreamy school reformers you make them out to be. They are banning books, banning the teaching of "controversial topics" and getting the state even more involved in the classeoom in dangerous ways. This isnt a pro-liberty program. Shoving the pledge of allegiance down everyone's throats is the most dangerous form of wokeness pervading our schools to this day.
They also oppose educating undocumented children, nevermind the teaching of kids in languages other than English (see above). With 10% of the US student population (and growing faster than any other) being non-native English speakers with educational outcomes worse than low-income African Americans, a bullish republican reform policy would leave these students - those most in need of state interventions - completely unsupported.
I'd argue that a growing percentage of the student population in the U.S. being non-native English speakers is not a great thing and should be accounted for with a strong focus on a unified language. Since you have either no problem with that or celebrate that, you believe in a shared civic identity way less than I do. Too libertarian for me.
A few points on this:
1) fundamental to American civic identity is multiculturalism and immigration. It's why the statue of liberty is a symbol of our nation, and why we don't have an official language. Our strength and superiority as a nation derives from our multiculturalism. We pull the smartest minds from all over the world, and that's why we have the most innovative and high-skill economy on the planet.
2) You missed the crux of the point: dual language programs result in adults better at speaking English than kids who are native English speakers in a purely English programs. If you care about American economic prosperity - or at minimum, everyone being skilled at a shared language - then you should support dual language programming.
The ideal moderate school will teach children to masterbate while reading The Bible.
America is unusually culturally heterogeneous compared to its peers. Because of this, America relies on its public schooling to forge a shared cultural identify from its many disparate subcultures. In a school choice model, we lose the melting pot effect that is critical to our success.
America now relies on public education and intelligence agencies to destroy the shared cultural identity in an attempt to reforge it into a central authoritarian craphole.
I’m not sure that pointing to status quo bias is really enough. I (centre lefty) am status quo biased, but am so for a couple of reasons.
1) As you note, it’s not obvious that other countries, with more private provision, are really doing better. For example, in the UK, those private academies are typically the best performing. Other countries also aren’t seeing a massive explosion of innovation and diverse approaches to education. So what’s the point? The only result might be what usually happens during privatisation pushes: a massive and corrupt transfer of public assets to private ownership. And if you relax the rules enough to allow for lots of variation, then you run into danger, because…
2) The status quo seems to be a somewhat fragile balance. It seems that in the past, education was not universal, and keeping it universal is valuable. Losing that would be devastating, and if the rules were relaxed sufficiently to allow for years out, half years, etc… then there could end up being a group who don’t go to school at all, and it’s likely to be the socioeconomic lowest.
> We can dismiss (4), since education is highly decentralized and there are unlikely to ever be private monopoly actors in this space. Moreover, education isn’t the kind of industry in which monopolization is likely.
This is true in densely inhabited areas where a free market in education will lead to several different schools within easy reach of most students. However, in rural areas or small towns, there may only be enough children to support one school within easy reach. (Virtual education could get around this but is likely to be unpopular with parents.) This would lead to such a school having, in practice, a monopoly on education for children in its area, & since it would be privately run but not subject to substantial competition, if it deviates substantially from the parents' wishes, it would be harder to avoid that than in a public school system where, in theory, outraged parents could run for the school board &c to try to change the public school system.
I also agree that we should not dismiss the idea that schools are monopolies. I don't know how it is in the United States, but my experience is that parents will send their children to the local school by default. After all, it's a good thing if children can walk to school by themselves.
I like the idea of a free market, but I'm not sure how well it would work in reality. In particular, how well can competition work in a village with one school?
Parents can move. Capitalism never promised you a rose garden, merely the maximum possible independence and wealth.
You like capitalism as a mystical ideal, not as an idea abstracted from the evidence of the senses. See Cantillon, Smith, Say, Bastiat, Menger, Schumpeter, Hayak, Mises, Friedman, and Rand. Mainstream economists are hidden mystics with arbitrary statistics.
“If someone proposed that any other population be placed in government buildings at set times organized by neighborhood and told what to do and think, people would recognize this as totalitarian. If told this was for their own good, citizens would demand extremely strong evidence for this claim and still likely oppose the program even if they found any evidence provided convincing.”
We needed status quo bias during the lockdowns but it disappeared.
There is a good theoretical case to be make for many reforms like private schools open borders banning handguns Balanced Budget Amendment. The Law of Unintended Consequences has not been repealed and we should be careful about tearing down Chesterton fences. I think we need to be cautions and make marginal reforms, see how the work before going farther. So back to centrist reforms of education, registration and tracking of guns, merit-based immigration, tax increases to reduce the deficit.
Well I'm sold. One thing you didn't really address though, that I think is extremely important, is managing the transition in the first places to implement true school choices. If they handle the transition disastrously, it will have a chilling effect on further spread. Though even if it's a stunning success, there will inevitably be lies and propaganda from the usual suspects that will still need to be countered.
I have to think it's important to phase it in gradually, giving new private providers plenty of advance notice and ensuring that they are working on coming to market, and to budget for minimal cuts to public school spending in the initial years so that there's an overcapacity of slots between public and private, before finally implementing massive downsizing cuts to public school budgets in later years and auctioning off most of their property.
I don't think you want parent choice to 100% determine public school budgets from the beginning, as I've heard discussed, because it has the potential to create a disaster in which a public school finds itself basically unable to function while the expanded private options are just getting started and now you don't have enough slots for all the kids.