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| The Need For Change
Touted as an unsinkable ship of social progress for more than a century, public schooling
is leaking badly. Achievement is stagnant or declining, public opinion is low, and community conflict
over what is taught seems to be ever increasing. Some schools, especially in the inner
city, have already slid beneath the waves, extinguishing the educational hopes and dreams
of countless children. Literally thousands of would-be reformers have suggested patches
here and there, but the water just keeps flooding in.
If the education of the next generation is not to be completely
forsaken, we need to cast aside our assumptions about how schools should be run, and
consider not only major overhauls to the current system but entirely different approaches
as well. That task has been taken up in the book Market Education:
The Unknown History. (Education Week recently published a brief
article summarizing the book's findings.)
What People Want From Their Schools
As "Market Education" points out, we first have to understand
people's educational needs before we can determine which sorts of school systems most
effectively serve those needs. Based on public opinion research from around the world,
it's clear that there is a fundamental kernel of agreement among parents on the importance
of basic academic subjects. People expect that, at a minimum, their children will have
mastered reading, writing, and elementary math by the time they are out of high-school.
There is an equally strong emphasis on career preparation, since parents from Milwaukee to
Munich consider landing a good job to be one of the main purposes of education. Beyond
these basics, priorities diverge--wildly. Whenever a state-run school system adopts one
set of priorities at the expense of all others, conflict inevitably ensues. Consider the
battles over religion in the classroom that have plagued the U.S. for a hundred years, and
the rest of the world for centuries before that.
Clearly we need a system that can cater to differences between
families, but what about people without school-aged children? To the extent that the
general public subsidizes education--by whatever means--it can rightly ask that its needs
be met as well. Fortunately, parents and non-parents agree that basic academics and career
preparation are key. Any contribution that schooling can make to the harmony of social
relations and the productivity of economic ones is also considered desirable by most
people. Finally, citizens expect to get their money's worth from the schools. If costs
increase, student achievement should go up as well.
That said, we can now ask: Does public schooling have what it
takes? There's little question that it is failing to fulfill
the goals outlined above, so the question really becomes: Can it be fixed or should we cut
our losses and replace it with something fundamentally different?
Tweaks or Transformation?
How to Get the Best Schools We Can
Education reformers have suggested a whole range of strategies
for improving our schools, from new curricula and tougher standards, to charter schools, vouchers and even
complete privatization. To know which are likely to succeed and which
aren't, we need to identify the reasons why public schooling isn't working in the first place. The most promising way of
answering that question is to compare school systems from around the world, starting with ancient times and working forward all the way
to the present. By doing so, we can discover what has worked, what hasn't, and why. (A
small part of this research is available online). What history shows is that the problems of
high-spending, lack of successful innovation, unresponsiveness to the needs of families,
and social strife over what is taught are mainly caused by the way public schools are run,
not by the people who staff them or the particular standards or curricula they adopt.
As the articles and books referenced from this site argue, it is
precisely the absence of competition between schools that stifles innovation and inflates prices, the lack of potential profits that makes applied
educational research and development a waste of money (and hence greatly discourages it),
and the lack of parental freedom of choice that sets family against
family in a bitter fight for ideological control of the schools.
These are conclusions that few people want to hear, much less
believe. Public schooling has a long history in most industrialized countries and we have
all grown accustomed to it. But however much we may want public schooling to work, there
is insurmountable evidence that it has never worked as well as competitive
educational markets, and that it cannot work as well. What it all boils down to is
this: we can have the educational outcomes we want (higher academic achievement, effective
innovation, social harmony on school issues, responsive teachers, reasonable costs, etc.)
but we have to give up the cherished but false notion that they can be provided by
government. Government is only a tool, and for the purpose of education it simply happens
to be the wrong tool.
The Market Alternative
A summary of the policy recommendations offered by Market Education: The Unknown History can be found on the Position Statement page of this website.
Since these recommendations call for a complete transformation of the
way that we educate our children, it is crucial that they be fully and carefully debated.
To that end, a selection of critical works has been gathered
together on this site.
It is hoped that School Choices will help citizens to assess the
relative merits of public schooling and free educational markets, and make the best choice
for the future of their children and communities. |
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