Good food. Good education. No subsidies.
Posted by Lynn Harsh - November 02, 2007After work today, I need to stop by the store to pick up some groceries. It will be a particular store based on what I need to buy this week. The store’s track record makes me reasonably confident that I can find what I need at a good price.
I do not expect this store to keep its doors open because they care about me in particular. I expect to find what I need because I care, and they need to meet needs of people like me to stay in business. If they sell products or services that enough people deem unacceptable, they will go out of business. And I will not pay a “grocery tax” to keep them afloat.
In fact, if the store did receive revenues from a grocery tax, one can safely say that the quality of the service and the products sold would suffer decline. This is because the store could afford to stay open even if it did not meet the needs of a significant number of its customers.
Also, if the store discovers it has a bad business model and cannot operate efficiently, I do not expect them to raise prices in response to make up for this inefficiency. It is reasonable to assume that they would fix the problems before attempting to raise prices—if they want to stay in business.
Furthermore, if some government entity forced me to pay money to that store just because it was in my neighborhood, whether I shopped there or not….
At some level, we must believe that getting a quality education for our children is less important than getting quality food. Otherwise, why would we support policies that force money out of our bank accounts to be sent to mediocre schools so they can keep their doors open? Why would we give even more money to the worst schools instead of giving it to top performers?
After all, human beings respond similarly to incentives whether they run a grocery store or a school. To expect outstanding service just because they care is foolish. It’s our care that creates incentives for the provider. The most well-meaning, talented people cannot create excellence in a subsidized system running off a bad business model.
Some of you reading this little missive are saying to yourselves, “Yeah, but education is different.”
Really? Please explain.
Thoughts? Add Comment -
Elaine Biggerstaff said on Nov 02 2007 at 9:40pm
The difference between failing schools and a grocery store is that schools are controlled by the government and bureaucrats who must keep their jobs.
Also the purpose of public schools is not to educate children but to groom them to be workers to either support corporations or contribute revenue to governments.
It isn't in the best interest of either those in government nor the bureaucrats that run the schools for children to be too intelligent. Otherwise, they might rebel against the brainwashing and indoctrination that is their "education" and demand they learn something useful such as critical thinking, realizing that the truth and facts are more important than mere opinion and that learning real history and how it relates to how human beings relate to each other is as important as getting a good score in math and accepting phony scientific scams as true.
Doug said on Nov 03 2007 at 9:14am
If a toy store kept offering cheap, but attractive toys and for 12 years they were making tons of money because they were doing their business well, then all of a sudden the govt. found that every toy they were selling should have been recalled and now there are millions of people out there poisoned with lead, that store may be sued and go out of business. But what good is that to the millions of people?
In education the similarity is that if the customers of the early 1980s wanted certain expectations from their school (i.e. teach math and reading well) and were aghast at the schools that were wasting their money on TRS-80s buying computers for their students to learn with then today those customers were left out in the cold while other children grew up to be the dot-commers, wealthy beyond description.
It's pretty simple, while we should require some sort of accountability, we have to be careful with what we are desiring the benchmarks of that accountability to be. Today's failing school very well may be tommorrow's cream of the crop. However, if school's are allowed to fail and disappear, then there will be nothing learned from that failure. Those schools right now must learn how to succeed from their failures so other schools can learn from them. If we just cut them off, that could be bad for everyone else.
We're seeing that with oil. Nothing has been as efficient at running our automobiles for a century. As a result all alternatives were never developed or went out of business. Sure would be nice now if there was an alternative babied along to provide competition now that oil is about $100 a barrel.
Anna said on Nov 05 2007 at 9:23pm
I agree with you Lynn! We cannot afford schools that do not produce an excellent product: an educated population. No excuses!
Lynn said on Nov 06 2007 at 4:05pm
Response to Doug: The beauty of the free market is its rapid response to important changes in demand. A marketplace school dies if it doesn't offer what students need to become productive, literate adults capable of competing in a global marketplace. Because it is relatively unencumbered by reams of regulations, a marketplace school can respond very quickly to necessary changes in knowledge or skills. The best teachers can be hired and retained. In fact, new demand is created for outstanding teachers.
In good conscience, we cannot condemn certain children to failure so we can use them as guinea pigs for what works and what doesn't. We know what works, and it doesn't much resemble the current structure. Despite the best intentions of thousands of educators and parents, the structure itself is wrong: it's unresponsive to necessary changes because it empowers the wrong people and funds the wrong incentives.
As for your oil analogy, you made my point. We should have a different energy policy just like we should have a different education policy. We don't because lawmakers won't change the tax code to stop penalizing energy entrepreneurs, just like it penalizes education entrepreneurs. Additionally, Congress passed protectionist legislation for certain energy interests, regardless of whether or not it was good long-term strategy for America. The same thing has occured in education, where a large special interest--unions--have been allowed to gain monopoly power over education policy despite the fact that it's not in the long-term best interest of America.
It's true; oil is almost $100 a barrel today. But getting a mediocre education costs more than $11,000 a year. Right now, that makes oil a better deal.
Ryan said on Nov 06 2007 at 11:38pm
Lynn, you keep trying this free market analogy for schools, but it never, ever works.
1) How would you propose your system would work in a town like Stehekin, or Asotin, or Washtucna, or any of the other small towns that pepper Washington state? Without this "subsidy" no school could possibly make it, yet we owe all our children an education--what would you do for them?
2) Show me a truly bad school like the dropout factories mentioned in the news last week and I'll show you an environment where school choice already is possible. Take Highline, for example--there's a perfectly good bus system in King County that could take those kids anywhere they wanted to go. The money follows the kids, thanks to open enrollment laws, so the incentive is already there to provide quality.
3) So let's close West Seattle High School. Then what? The research base on KIPP recently has been decidedly mixed. The Small High School fad is fading, despite all the money that Gates poured into it. The notion that dedicated teachers and administrators can turn things around is a happy one, but how long do you give them? What if they fail? If you give them a three year window and the kids learn nothing, haven't we failed in our ethical responsibility to the kids?
4) Let's play with the grocery store analogy. If that store gets a shipment of rotten fruit, they can send it back and bawl out the supplier. Can't do that in the schools--we teach everyone who shows up, ready or not, no matter what baggage they bring with them. I'm echoing Jamie Volmer here, since he's right.
5) Trying to compare the science of education to the simplicity of a cash transaction is a formula for failure from the beginning.
6) Don't like the reams of regulations on the schools? Me either. How about a position paper from the EFF on those school regulations that are superfluous, zany, or just plain useless so that our legislators can have some guidance?
Further, be careful what you wish for--should your marketplace schools be free of the WASL? Get to opt out of special ed regulations? Your grocery store can choose not to carry certain products--would you let schools choose not to carry certain kids?
You'd scrap the system and hope for the best. That's lunacy, and it'll hurt the kids in the process. Get creative, and you can fix the system from within. It might be hard work, but that's nothing to be afraid of.