School Choice: Both Sides Have It Wrong.
School choice is a controversial idea. On the surface, school choice makes a certain amount of sense. Give parents a voucher that allows them to use that money to send their kids to the school of their choice whether that be private or public. Our larger economy is based on competition that drives down prices and improves quality. But, that would never work with education, and I’ll tell you why.
In any industry where funding is provided by the government, prices always increase and quality suffers. I can give a few examples.
Higher education. If the free enterprise logic worked, we would see decreased college costs and increase education quality in higher education, but we don’t. College costs steadily increase and quality across all of the colleges in the country is inconsistent at best, and a failure if we take into account the number of people with college degrees who do not even make the median wage within 10 years of graduation. There is no way to measure the individual quality of thousands of independent institutions, but we can look at the net result. The mass-market college approach today is to offer easier, more convenient degrees; not BETTER degrees that lead to better outcomes.
Why has competition not improves the college experience? Public money and easy student loans. When outside, unearned money flows into an industry, the market focuses on getting as much of that money as possible. Since student loans are so easy to get for any degree, regardless of how useful, even majors that will never pay the median income will cost a hundred thousand dollars or more to earn. That is WHY we have the student loan crisis. There is no correlation between benefits and college access.
It has been repeatedly reported that college graduates make a million dollars more during their lifetime than those who do not go to college. This is only partially true. If we take all of those who attend college and average their career income, the numbers will support this conclusion. HOWEVER… those numbers include doctors and other medical professionals as well as engineers and computer scientists. Their incomes are so high that averaging hides the fact that those majoring in social sciences and arts earn far below the median American income even as far as 10 years down the road. These are the students who are stuck with student debt they cannot pay. The rise in the cost of higher education has no correlation to the benefit of higher education because the price is not influenced by the number of students enrolled. Instead, the price always goes up because the benefits are overstated in an effort to attract more students. The benefits of higher education are overstated by colleges and politicians who leverage easy access to education funding as a political weapon.
The next example. Medicine. Competition has not reduced the cost of medical costs. Why? Public money and indirect payments. Public spending account for 45% of healthcare spending. Our insurance model, much like education funding, distorts the cost of healthcare services to the public. If I could walk into a doctor's office and shop for the cheapest physical, prices might start to fall, but healthcare does not work that way. Instead, my focus is the cost of the insurance plan I pay into. I focus on my monthly payment, not actual costs of service. Most people become doctors to enjoy a certain level of prestige and lifestyle. Their goal is not to provide better service to attract more patients. Their time is finite. A doctor makes more money by being able to charge more for each patient. This is the market force that drives up ordinary costs. Prices have only gone down in specialties without insurance or public funding… namely specialties like plastic surgery, certain eye surgeries, and cosmetic tooth procedures. Even pharmaceutical costs trend upward because it is not legal to just make more sick people, so you have to get more money from the pool of people suffering from those diseases that need your drug.
So now, let’s talk about public education. The theory is that you can increase quality by introducing competition. In reality, a broad system of vouchers for school choice would result in a lot of low-quality schools being opened to attract those dollars. We have already seen this affect districts all over the county. In one district in Pennsylvania, parents were given school choice but the amount of money given for kids with disabilities was higher. In theory, this would create an incentive to better serve students who face learning challenges. The amount of money per student was higher for those with disabilities, but the money paid for a disabled student was the same no matter how severe the case. The net result was that schools sought mostly students with mild disabilities so that they could provide the lowest cost education for the highest reimbursement. There was even pressure to reclassify children who were not disabled into certain low-cost disability categories. The net result was that the price the state paid went up while quality went down due to a focus on low cost, and not high quality.
The issues in public education are systemic. Without a finite way to measure quality and progress that tracts to positive outcomes, how can school choice and vouchers result in a higher quality educational experience? It can’t. It is very difficult to measure quality to outcome in a complex system with human behavioral variables. In public education, we try to teach “critical thinking” and “creativity”, but we have no way to measure high-level education skills like “critical thinking” or “creativity” because their definitions and measurements are subjective. At the same time, teachers don’t like to focus on low-level education skills like “facts and figures”. Facts and figures are objective topics where objective measures can be applied. When we measure the objective subject matter in public education, it results in almost universal failure. In the end, it is not the high-level education skills that result in adult failure. It is the lack of basic low-level skills. Without a universal, objective way to measure education, school choice on a wide scale would cripple the education of many young people for generations before we even realized the damage was done.
School choice and voucher programs cannot be scaled. Let’s just look at Baltimore City. There are not enough school alternatives available to students. There are not enough qualified teachers and there are certainly not enough physical alternative classrooms in existence to service 80K plus students. The cost of new infrastructure alone would significantly drive up costs beyond what any state could afford.
Advocates of school choice and voucher programs don’t understand the dynamics of inner-city education and urban culture. The number one issue teachers report as the core reason for student failure is a lack of parental engagement. For school choice to have any effect, parental engagement would have to increase. If parental engagement was already high, there would be no need for school choice. School choice simply allows engaged parents to leave their existing school.
The net result of any large-scale school choice/school voucher program would result in a different kind of segregation. The reason why Harvard is Harvard rests in who enters the school, not in the school so much. It's easy to teach a group of self-motived students with vested parents. Most poor parents could never leave the school their kids are in. Job schedules and additional expenses would not allow it. Schools that attract students through school choice do better because they attract the kids with engaged parents. That is why graduate rates are high in specialty schools. Look back at the schools these students leave. Guess what? Those graduation rates go down. It is a shuffling of the deck.
The success statistics ignore that kids overall are not doing better. Kids in the select schools are doing better BECAUSE they attract the lion's share of the kids that were already doing better in the first place. People can drag out success stories, but underneath, the situation was not so simple. It is a myth that competition can improve education. And where it does seem to increase outcomes, it comes with an outsized expense that has been proven unsustainable. I can't tell you the number of schools that are near bankruptcy under that model.
If school choice worked, then outcomes would trend upward for given covered areas. They don't. It is just like the poverty improvement numbers. Different politicians have bragged about how their programs decreased poverty when there have only been 2 presidents to ever do it.. (Clinton and Trump). In all other cases where poverty goes down in one place, it rose in another. Turns out the incentive programs relocated poverty but had no net positive effect. The Black poverty rate has been about 22% since 1974 plus or minus a few points. 50 years of fighting poverty have been a net gain of zero. Kids in the inner city did not get bad grades because of the schools. They were ALWAYS underperforming students who were children if underperforming students. Media quotes a few exceptions, but the reality is that during the Black migration North, the average education level was the 8th grade. Blacks were never learning at high school levels in the INNER CITY. It has never been the case but that did not matter because Black Americans migrated north to the factories. Basic literacy skills were enough. As manufacturing dwindled, the knowledge worker became the center of the new economy. Now, the children of those who migrated North can no longer compete and their historical disadvantage has resulted in critical levels of inner-city poverty.