Review of Market Education by Myron Lieberman

REVIEW OF MARKET EDUCATION
BY MYRON LIEBERMAN

THE WEEKLY STANDARD, MAY 10, 1999 (p. 35)

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School’s Out
The Case for Competition

By Myron Lieberman

   I’ve been reading books about education since 1948—book after book, in what seems now, fifty years on, to have been a never-ending stream. But I still have no hesitation in saying that Andrew J. Coulson’s new study, Market Education: The Unknown History, is the most challenging book on the subject I’ve read. It’s an international history of education, a critique of contemporary education, and a proposal for the future—all woven together in a very readable style.
     Coulson’s thesis is simple: An analysis of history demonstrates that education provided by open markets is consistently better than education funded and operated by government. This thesis holds as far back as the ancient Greeks. The open markets of Athenian education gave us Plato and Socrates, Sophocles and Aristophanes. The Spartans’ governmental monopoly on education has left us, as Coulson remarks, with a nickname for football teams.
     You can see the same pattern occur over and over again: in classical times, the middle ages, and the early modern era; in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The fat that this outcome appears in so many different cultures in so many different eras is an exceedingly strong indication that the deficiencies of government-sponsored education cannot be overcome.
     Coulson’s analysis of contemporary education, especially charter schools and private scholarship programs for students from kindergarten to twelfth grade, is particularly insightful. Market Education is the first book to show why privately funded scholarships for these students in the United States today will result in better education than government-funded vouchers. He presents an imaginative but plausible scenario of how they might replace government funding as the dominant system for financing elementary and secondary education. But he is at his best in demolishing the arguments for the public school monopoly. Anyone who thinks that public schools foster harmony among the American people should read Market Education. The reader who isn’t convinced is probably immune to evidence and logic on the issue.
     The story of how Market Education came to be written is as astonishing as the book itself. Coulson is a graduate of McGill University, where he majored in mathematics. After working for Microsoft until the ripe old age of twenty-six, he left the company to spend the next four years working on Market Education.
     That’s not to say that the book is perfect (even though the author does thank me in his introduction, when all I did was recommend it for publication.) The weaknesses of Market Education result from Coulson’s effort to squeeze too much into one book. Fortunately, this doesn’t affect the main argument; in fact, the problems relate to matters that could simply have been deleted or shortened. The book, for instance, sets forth an extensive argument that public schools are failing—when this issue, which preoccupies a great deal of current discussions, is substantively irrelevant to the desirability of a market system of education. Henry Ford’s Model-T was not a failure. On the contrary, it was a huge success, but it was the product of an industry in which improvement is essential to survival. Our schools are not such an industry, however, and the arguments over whether it is a "failure" do not matter as much as the attention given to them suggests.
     Of course, such discussions have an important political dimension: Citizens who believe that our public schools are failing are more receptive to proposals for a different system. But there is a downside even to the political case for emphasizing it: Many Americans (especially older ones) remember their public schools with affection; labeling their schools "failures" can generate resistance as well as support for alternative systems of education.
     Like most supporters of school choice, Coulson devotes too much attention to issues that would be settled by the system he advocates. His lengthy discussion of the best way to teach reading illustrates this point. Instead of showing why phonics is superior to the whole-language approach, Coulson would have been better served by emphasizing how such issues would be resolved under markets instead of bureaucrats. In his discussion of teacher training, he is critical of the fact that teachers take courses in the history and philosophy of education—an odd objection from a man who has just spent four years researching and writing on these topics.
     One advantage of the careful work Coulson has done is that his Market Education cannot be characterized as the product of a zealous right-wing extremist. His case for a competitive education industry does not rest upon any particular denominational or political or cultural position. Instead, Coulson argues that a market system is the most effective way to achieve better educational outcomes at a lower cost. Such a system would greatly diminish the pervasive conflicts that result from efforts to impose majoritarian educational policies on widely diverse groups in our society.

Myron Lieberman is president of the Education Policy Institute, and Senior Research Fellow of the Social Philosophy and Policy Center of Bowling Green State University.

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