Are School Vouchers (and Charters) Really the Free Market at Work? Does the Free Market Include Government Funding/Regulations?

School "choices".

Andrew Coulson from CATO writes about the idea of "choice" and why many "choice" proponents who espouse "free market" are actually promoting unconstitutional ideas.  We at MEW have some rather spirited discussions the last several days with "choicers" about our recent articles on "choice" questioning whether this "choice" actually is free market or markets propped up by tax dollars.

Education is free market when the government doesn't fund it and regulate its operation.  Coulson wonders how government funded vouchers can be considered free market by the choice movement.  How can does a government funded "choice" in education containing the same mandates as traditional public school be classified as free market?  Coulson explains why vouchers are not really choice at all in Obama, Romney, Teachers, and Choice:

Posted by Andrew J. Coulson

 

Jay Greene has an excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal this week revealing that the teacher workforce has grown dramatically over the past forty years—and at enormous cost—without improving student achievement by the end of high school. And he rightly disparages President Obama for arguing that even more teachers would somehow do the trick. Even better, Greene notes that American education will not reverse its productivity collapse and become efficient until we allow it to benefit from the freedoms and incentives of the marketplace.

But then Jay cites Governor Romney’s goal of “voucherizing federal education funds so that parents can take those resources and use them to send their children to schools of their choice,” and he does so with apparent approbation. Even ignoring the fact that the Constitution does not empower Congress to run education programs, this is a very dangerous idea.

There has been no civilization in the history of humanity in which governments have paid for private schooling without ultimately controlling what was taught and who could teach, erecting barriers to entry and thereby crippling market forces.

For that reason, I recommended against a federal voucher program under the Bush administration. Since then, additional evidence has come to light. When I studied the regulatory impact of U.S. private school choice programs last year I found that even the small existing U.S. voucher programs do indeed impose a heavy and very statistically significant additional burden of regulation on participating private schools.

Perhaps a way will be found to enact and maintain minimally regulated voucher programs in the coming years. Until that time comes, it would be the height of folly to introduce a federal voucher program whose regulations would suffocate educational freedom from coast to coast.

In my statistical study of choice program regulation, I found that K-12 tax credit programs do not impose a statistically significant extra burden of regulation on private schools. But even a national K-12 tax credit program would be far too dangerous. By leaving education policy to the states and the people, we can see which programs flourish and which become sclerotic. We must encourage and learn from that policy diversity, not squelch it with federal programs or mandates.

Coulson has the correct idea about educational delivery and the only solution that is constitutional:  leave education to the states and the people.    Don't try to sell the federally funded voucher idea as a viable alternative to traditional public schools when the private schools will have to conform to the same mandates and regulations of the traditional public schools. 

He doesn't mention charter schools in this CATO article, but I wonder if he would make the same argument when scrutinizing the free market argument made in favor of charter schools.  In this 2001 article from thefreemanonline.com critiquing a book on charters, he raises concerns about taxpayer funding of charters and understanding that once the government funds these schools, they lose their autonomy:

The risks and shortcomings of charter schools are several. For one thing, whenever the state rather than the consumer pays for a service, we have the breeding grounds for fraud and corruption. Parents cannot be duped into paying for children they do not have, but the same can’t be said of government agencies. The authors describe several fraudulent abuses, but fail to acknowledge that the problem is intrinsic to the separation of payment from consumption.

Allowing the government to hold the educational purse strings also draws the attention of charter schools away from families and toward the state. In a market, producers increase their income either by cutting costs or demonstrating improved services for which consumers are willing to pay more. Charter schools will only be able to raise revenues by lobbying the state. The 14-fold increase in inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending that has occurred in government schools over the past 75 years is a sobering harbinger of what to expect under charter schooling. The authors provide evidence of this lobbying already occurring among the country’s nascent charter schools, but seem not to understand its importance or inevitability.

Finally, charter schools preclude the direct financial responsibility of parents that history shows to be crucial for the maintenance of parental involvement in, and control over, their children’s education.

Based on historical and contemporary precedents, charter schools are likely to be re-regulated to the point where they are indistinguishable from traditional government-run schools. The authors are aware of this “ominous threat,” but can offer no solution.

The downside of charter schooling would be of negligible importance if their impact were limited to charter schools themselves. Charter schools would still constitute some improvement over traditional public schools. The real concern is that previously independent private schools are being lured into the charter fold. If large numbers of private schools adopt charter status, the eventual re-regulation of charter schools will expand the government education monopoly. The authors make no mention of this Damoclean sword hanging over the charter movement.

Don't try to pass charters off as free market when they are taxpayer funded.  Don't privatize education via charters where taxpayers and parents have no decision making abilities and mandates (not laws) dictate how and what standards/assessments will be taught to students and pre-determined vendors cash in on supplying the curricula and systems needed because of the mandates.  

If your state legislators espouse "choice" as conservative and free market ideas, send them a copy of Coulson's article.  These "choices" as they are currently constructed are neither. 

Do you have to go to College to be Successful?....The Sunday Education Weekly Reader

Below is a crosspost of a Tucker Carlson presentation to aspiring writers at a Cato Institute luncheon.  Carlson imparted blunt educational advice that not everyone should and/or needs to go to college to be successful.  His view of education  is antithetical to Arne Duncan's goal of 100% of students attending college.  Take away the political leanings of Carlson and Duncan and think about the ideas both men have put forward for students. 

Do all students need to attend college?  Should all students attend college? Can you learn life skills and be successful without a college degree?  What is most important: hard work or a college degree?

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From  redalertpolitics.com, "Tucker Carlson gives a Brutally Honest Speech to Aspiring Writers at Cato Luncheon":

Conservative media mogul Tucker Carlson had blunt advice for young people at  a Cato Institute luncheon in Washington, DC on Wednesday afternoon.

At an event intended to teach aspiring journalists how to get noticed, Carlson told young people that the mantra that, ‘You can be anything you want to be,’ isn’t true.

“No you can’t. You can’t be most things that you want to be. Why? Because you’re not capable of it,” Carlson told the audience.

The theme of Carlson’s brutally honest speech could be summed up with this direct quote. “Most people’s voices are not worth being heard.”

 

Carlson compared working for The Daily Caller (TheDC) to being part of the Viet Cong and said writers are expected to work 20 hours . . . a day.

“And if you suck, guess what, we’re gonna fire you,” Carlson said to laughter from a room full of wannabe writers who didn’t seem to grasp that Carlson wasn’t joking.

“Our criteria for hiring are really straight forward – you need to be a ferocious and aggressive worker,” he said. “Laziness” is the one thing he said they would not put up with at TheDC.

Don’t have a journalism degree? Don’t need one, Carlson said. In fact, don’t go to college at all.

“I’m not the only crackpot who believes this,” he said. “I bet you $1,000 [sic] that five years from now, it will be a common place opinion that a lot of people should not go to college.”

Carlson said that he wishes he had not gone to college himself because it was a waste of time. He told students college was too expensive and the costs are “unsustainable.”

“It was never designed for everybody,” he said. “And I’m not being a snob here. Just let me restate – I should not have gone to college.”

Carlson told the students it would be better to work at an internship at a newspaper and get hands on experience than sit through some “government-subsidized college course” or “underwater basket-weaving for feminists or whatever” they talk about in class. To those students who think college professors are akin to sages, he told them to go work at The Washington Post.

After his uplifting speech, Carlson did take time to address questions from the audience on several unrelated issues, including his thoughts on Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart calling him a “d**k” and his personal feelings about likely GOP nominee Mitt Romney.

“Like I didn’t know I was a d**k before that?” he said. “Shocking.”

Of Romney, he said he didn’t know exactly how he felt about the former Massachusetts governor despite the fact that he had covered him as a reporter for years.

“My politics are not Mitt Romney’s politics,” he said, explaining that he is further to the right, or more libertarian, than Romney. “I think he would be preferable to Barack Obama that’s for sure, but so would my kids.

“Not that he’s a bad guy, but he doesn’t understand the market at all. He thinks government is the solution,” he said in a reference to Massachusetts’ health care law, AKA Romneycare.

Carlson said he was surprised Romney ended up as the nominee because Romney is the one person in the country who cannot run against Obama’s unpopular health care mandate that everyone buy insurance.

“There are only two people in world history who have signed laws containing an individual mandate. One’s the president, the other’s running against him,” he said. “So somehow out of three hundred and fifteen million Americans, The Republican Party managed to find the one guy who couldn’t run on Obamacare.”

In the end, it turned out the most inspiring part of Carlson’s speech came at the very  beginning of his speech when he told young people to “Live for today” and to “always do the most interesting thing available at the time.”

Young, positive thinkers may want to stop watching the replay of the speech there.

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 The comments on this article run the gamut, as do Carlson's and Duncan's views on college enrollment.

Another Article on the Fallacy of Parent Trigger being Considered School "Choice"

Neal McCluskey of Cato eloquently states why the parent trigger option the ed reformers tout as school "choice" falls short.  From "Power Yes, Trigger No":

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Posted by Neal McCluskey

 

There is little question that parents have too little power in elementary and secondary education. In fact, they have almost no power: they can vote, but are otherwise usually relegated to being class moms, or holding bake sales, or some other fluffy “involvement” that gives them no real say over how their children are educated. Adding insult to injury, that doesn’t often stop professional educators from blaming parents when students don’t do so well.

To remedy the problem, the trendy thing seems to be “parent trigger” laws that would, generally speaking, allow a majority of parents at a school declare that they want to fire the staff, or bring in a private management company, or some other transformation. It’s been the spark behind some especially heated conflicts in California, as unions and parents of different stripes have been doing battle with each other. It is also the subject of a New York Times “Room for Debate” exchange today.

While I sympathize—obviously—with those who advocate giving parents more power, I cannot help but conclude that the parent trigger is a very poor way to do this. For one thing, it is inherently divisive: what about the 49 percent, or 30 percent, or whatever percent of parents who don’t want the changes the majority demands? They’ve got no choice but to fight it out with their neighbors. It is also inefficient: individual children need all sorts of options to best meet their unique needs and abilities, but the trigger would just exchange one monolithic school model for another.

The trigger, quite simply, is no substitute for real educational freedom: giving parents control of education funds, giving educators freedom to establish myriad options, and letting freedom, competition and specialization rein. (emphasis added by MEW)

There is, however, one gratifying thing about the parent trigger: it has made historian Diane Ravitch—who constantly decries the destruction of “democracy” were we to have educational freedom—express outrage about ”51 percent of people using a public service hav[ing] the power to privatize it.”

Um, isn’t majority rule what democracy is all about? Or do government schooling defenders really just invoke the term because it sounds so nice and is such a potent rhetorical club?

The answer, it seems, is getting more clear.

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A MEW thought: substitute the word "charters" for the bolded sentences above.  Charters don't offer the education freedoms the triggers don't offer either.  Charters and triggers are still public schools under public school mandates.  What choice is that?