No exit
Ezra says that my position on exit from the public school system makes no sense:
Her argument, in a nutshell, is, "Either you agree that poor kids should be allowed to exit until the system works for them, or they don't." What? Since when do libertarians think making something cost money is the same as prohibiting you to do it? Poor kids can exit the system. They just need to become rich kids. But does Megan apply this theory widely? Does she agree that the Federal Government should pay for all Americans to have health insurance from any insurer, either public or private, that they want, at least until Aetna begins working better? Because if she does, then I've massively misunderstood her writing up till this point. If she doesn't, however, then her constant screech of hypocrite throughout this argument makes no sense -- particularly given that she has awesome, employer-funded insurance, while all millions of Americans are trapped on the individual market.
But this . . . makes no sense.
We force kids to go to school. We are literally keeping them from exiting the system: between the ages of six and 16, they have to be there eight hours a day. Affluent parents get to choose which system they participate in; poor parents don't. I think poor kids also have a right to exit the schools if they aren't--as they are not--getting a decent education.
The critique also fails because the fact that I think (as I do) that the government should buy education for those who cannot does not mean that I think it should buy every other good out there. There are many goods that poor people can't afford to buy. Some of them we think of as basic goods that everyone should have the opportunity to secure for themselves, like food and housing. Some of them are not basic goods that everyone should have the opportunity to buy, like BMWs. As a society, we've decided that education is one of those goods, and I wholeheartedly agree. That's why, when the government system doesn't work, I think it has an obligation to provide those without means a way to exit the system, just as when the local county mental hospital has a fire, the government has an absolute moral obligation to put the patients somewhere else rather than forcing them to squat in the ruins because they're planning a big new building that will be available no later than 2031.
But that doesn't mean I think the government needs to allow us to exit from every system that is less than ideal. I can only buy pants at about four stores in America, and that's a damn shame, but it doesn't cry out to heaven for (government imposed) justice. The fact that Ezra believes that universal health insurance is also a good the government should supply does not impose on me the need to agree with him--and indeed, as I've said at unfortunate length, I don't. The "gotcha" only works if I really, secretly, in my heart of hearts, think healthcare is in the same class of goods as education. The notion that deep down, libertarians really know that liberals are right is widespread, but guys, I swear: honest, way down deep, in the uttermost depths of our souls, we really do think your ideas about domestic social programs are dead wrong.
What's even weirder--and Ezra is not the first person to bring this up--is that Medicaid works on my model, not theirs. Medicaid recipients meet the income barrier, and then they go to any doctor who will take their Medicaid card. No one forces them to go to the nearest doctor, or asks them to apply to the doctor lottery. That's what the NHS does, and almost everyone in the liberal health care policy establishment, including, IIRC, Ezra, agrees that it is a really bad system for providing health care. At least, I think that's what they believe, because every time the NHS comes up, they rush to assure me that when we have national health insurance, it won't be some crappy, government-run system like the NHS; it'll be like France where you get to (wait for it) choose your doctor and have the government pay. It's almost like the government was giving you a voucher or something.
What I want to know from Ezra, and other liberal policy wonks who support a France-type system is: why is education special? I have a model for what goods the government should buy versus what goods the government should actually provide directly; it has to do with geography, non-excludability, and transaction costs. But what is your model for saying that education is in a special class of goods that are rival and excludable, have ordinary levels of transaction costs, and yet nonetheless need to be provided directly by the government? Any of the problems that distinguish education from other goods, like inelastic demand, information asymmetries, and performance measurement difficulties, apply to health care as well, perhaps more so. So why do you want healthcare by la Sécurité sociale, but education by the NHS?
Vouching for vouchers
Forgive me--I'm about to get testy again--but this thread on 11D really does seem to me to showcase in stunning technocolor the moral bankruptcy of voucher opponents who have pulled their own kids out of failing inner city schools. They have no good answer for why their choice is morally worthy, but vouchers are horrifying; their response to the deep need of kids in failing schools is a slightly gussied up version of "screw you, I've got mine." Their children's future, you see, is an infinitely precious resource that trumps their principles of distributional justice and community solidarity, but they cannot imagine putting the futures of poorer, darker skinned children ahead of sacred principles such as "Thou shalt not allow children to attend schools run by the Catholic Church" and "Supporting the public schools (even when they suck)". I could do a better job arguing against school vouchers.
Indeed, I shall, though of course largely for the purpose of illustrating why I find these arguments unconvincing:
1) Vouchers don't work This is the best argument against school vouchers. But it's still not very strong. For one thing, the studies that show this are small, and often funded by the teacher's unions. For another, the worst those studies purport to show is that vouchers don't make a difference in educational outcomes; the parents are still happier, and the vouchers cost less than the existing school system.
However, it's also not really all that clear that the vouchers had no effect; one effect school choice seems to have is that it forces schools that want to keep their doors open to improve.
But most tellingly, this argument is incompatible with removing your own children from failing schools. Either the school makes a difference, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, why are you moving to the suburbs in search of a better school district for your kids?
It is indeed true that poor kids have a huge number of problems that are resistant to change; even relocating the whole family to the suburbs seems to have little to no impact on outcomes. Vouchers are no panacea, and they may not work at all. But we know that what we're doing now isn't working, and moreover, hasn't worked for going on fifty years. Unless you've got compelling evidence that your plan will overcome all the barriers that have doomed urban school reform for decades, and actually succeed in educating more children (rather than enriching the lives of teachers, administrators, and curriculum salesmen, who certainly have been helped by the many failed educational overhauls), why not let a thousand points of light bloom?
2) Voucher advocates are total hypocrites too, because why don't they start private vouchers, huh? Bet you never thought of that! Actually, we did, my love, and thanks for giving me an opening to plug the Children's Scholarship Fund, my charity of choice. If you support vouchers, you should be supporting their amazing work.
3) The community doesn't want vouchers. Awesome. Then the community won't take vouchers, and you'll win by default. If what you mean is that some people claiming to speak for the community, want other people who are members of that community not to be able to have vouchers, then I'm less than interested in your argument.
4) Vouchers are a subsidy to rich people. Then means test them, by all means. Anyone who makes more than $100K a year can't have them.
5) Vouchers destroy the public school system So? Having a public school system seems like a dumb goal to me, but even assuming that the very existence of such a system is somehow a worthy thing to aim for, surely it's achievement should be a second-order priority. The primary goal, it seems to me, should be educating America's children to reach their fullest potential; after that goal has been achieved, we can turn our attention to things like having teacher's unions and public schools.
There's something very odd about the way that a lot of people treat health care and schooling--as if they were special, magical goods that can only be provided by the government. Yes, these are vital goods that people are ill-equipped to evaluate. But food, shelter, and clothing are even more vital, yet few of us believe that this means we should all get our produce from giant collective farms, or move into public housing projects. We recognize that the way to ensure that everyone has what they need is to give them the money to buy it . . . and, arguably, to have building codes, the FDA, the USDA, and so forth to ensure that consumers are protected from hidden dangers.
Why don't we want to have giant collective farms? After all, the government could realize marvelous economies of scale and huge cost savings from its enormous purchasing power. The administrative costs would fall too--after all, almost all of the money you pay for food goes, not to the farmer, but to the various middlemen who purchase, process, store, ship, and distribute it. We could probably cut our national food bill in half!
Somehow, we recognize the factors in production of food and clothing that make the government a less attractive provider than the market. And even most of the left has recognized that Section 8 vouchers are better than housing projects--they didn't yank people out of poverty, or magically solve all the problems attendant upon being poor, but they did improve peoples' lives by giving them some of the control over where they live that the rest of us enjoy as of right.
But honestly, there's no reason that vouchers will destroy the public school system provided that the public school system is doing a decent job of educating our kids. This argument sounds to me like an implicit confession that public schools can't compete with private ones.
6) There aren't enough private schools Right. Do you realize that in 1995, not a single iPod had been manufactured? That must mean that the iPod I am currently holding in my hand doesn't actually exist! I'm living a lie . . .
The fact that there are not now enough private schools to educate kids doesn't mean that there won't be, if we offer to pay private schools to educate kids.
7) Public education is vital to creating a common identity as American citizens I would find this a slightly more compelling argument if it weren't made mostly by people who live in affluent communities where their fellow citizens are strongly discouraged from moving by zoning and other ordinances that bar the construction of cheap housing. You think some kid growing up in East New York, looking at the crumbling walls as an inexperienced teacher fumbles the lesson plan, thinks to himself "But at least I share a common identity with the kids in Bronxville's public school system whose cars I will someday have the privilege of parking"?
Actually, this makes me think that a lot of the opposition to vouchers is about that affluent suburbanite's need to maintain the delusion that they care about inner city public schools. Memo to suburban voucher opponents who "support public education": you're already sending your kid to private school. You're just confused because your tuition fees came bundled with granite countertops and hardwood floors.
8) Vouchers don't make things any better; they just give the appearance of working by pulling the successful away from the unsuccessful, in the process dooming the latter to failure As I said before, you can't have it both ways. Either the school environment matters--in which case, this argument is false--or they don't matter, in which case it can't harm the unsuccessful kids to lose the successful ones.
Or perhaps you think peer effects are the only thing that matters--in which case, we should close the damn schools and let the kids go to work, where at least they'll get some money in exchange for not learning much.
And morally, as I said in my earlier post, unless you have chosen to live in the inner city and allow your kids to bring up the tone of the place, you have no [expletive deleted] right to say that someone else's kids should be left in a failing school for the benefit of a third set of kids.
9) I don't want my tax dollars used to pay for religious education Waaaaaaah. The fundamentalist down the block doesn't want his tax dollars used to pay for teaching evolution. I don't want my tax dollars used for 97% of the things my tax dollars are used for; welcome to representative democracy. And in Catholic schools, where most of the vouchers would be used, the religious education is voluntary; lots of non-Catholic kids go there without being proselytized. If this bothers you that much, we can discuss requiring schools that accept vouchers to make religious education optional. But let's go back to why we're debating this policy in the first place: the kids. This is about the kids, right? And which is worse: that junior might hear, once a week, some sort of religious message which, to judge by the people I know who went to parochial school, has a fairly dim chance of sticking; or that junior won't be able to read and write and will spend the rest of his life moving heavy things from one place to another?
10) Vouchers wouldn't pay the tuition at a top-notch private school Okay, I went to the school that is now vying with Matt Yglesias' alma mater for the title of "Most expensive private school in New York City". It gave me a terrific education, better than that received by any of the kids from expensive suburban public schools with whom I went to college. But talk about making the perfect the enemy of the good! A private school doesn't need to be Groton in order to make it worthwhile sending needy kids there; it just needs to be better than the hell-hole they currently attend. And frankly, that's a really, really low bar. There are a lot of kids for whom a trip to Chuck E. Cheese would be safer and more educational than a day at their district school. I could just as easily turn around and use this argument to prove that we oughtn't to have public schools unless every last one can be Dallas's Talented and Gifted magnet school.
11) There's no way to assure the quality of private schools Ha. Ha. Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Seriously? The problem with private schools is that they can't match the same level of quality we've come to expect from our urban public school system? And what else have you learned in your visit to our planet?
Improving education
This article on education policy from The Economist makes an observation about improving schools that seems obvious to the point of banality:
Now, an organisation from outside the teaching fold—McKinsey, a consultancy that advises companies and governments—has boldly gone where educationalists have mostly never gone: into policy recommendations based on the PISA findings. Schools, it says*, need to do three things: get the best teachers; get the best out of teachers; and step in when pupils start to lag behind. That may not sound exactly “first-of-its-kind” (which is how Andreas Schleicher, the OECD's head of education research, describes McKinsey's approach): schools surely do all this already? Actually, they don't. If these ideas were really taken seriously, they would change education radically.
But this is surprising:
You might think that schools should offer as much money as possible, seek to attract a large pool of applicants into teacher training and then pick the best. Not so, says McKinsey. If money were so important, then countries with the highest teacher salaries—Germany, Spain and Switzerland—would presumably be among the best. They aren't. In practice, the top performers pay no more than average salaries.
School systems that get good teachers do so not because the pay is extraordinary, but because teaching is a high status job. In fact, successful countries may be successful because they restrict the number of teacher training slots, which makes teaching hard to get into, and therefore well-respected.
But I don't know what that suggests for America. How do you make teaching into a highly respected job, one that top graduates (rather than, as now, mostly the bottom third of the class) want to go into? It seems like there's a chicken and egg problem.
My solution (and here I violate everything I just said earlier by advocating a Federal program): create a Federal corps of really, really, well paid teachers (starting salaries in the high five-figures). Let those teachers take their salaries anywhere, which should help solve the problem of underserved rural districts; $75K is a fortune in a country area. Make admission to the program dependent on having a four-year degree in something other than education, and passing a really, really hard test that combines general knowledge and knowledge about whatever subjects they want to teach. Gradually expand until teaching is on par with banking, consulting, law, medicine, or journalism as a preferred destination for high-performing graduates.
| 
