A Few Education Problems - Part 1

So, needless to say, as a first-year college student, I'm decidedly not the most qualified person to discuss education policy. But, since it seems that most people discussing policy matters online are routinely just as unqualified, I figure I might as well give it a go, nevertheless. Here, as such, is the first of a few policy problems on the education front that I've been pondering, lately.

1. Free Market Solutions in an Anti-Free Market Area - In Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, the veritable grandpappy of free market economics essentially rejected the idea of free education, on the grounds that, as soon as you take teachers' payment out of the hands of parents and students, you lose all hope of quality control. If the teachers are in charge of administration, he says, they'll inevitably band together and reduce their workload as much as possible, while, if a non-teacher is put in charge, they'll likely be incapable of effectively managing teachers, not being one, themselves. As such, he concluded that even working class parents ought to pay at least some pittance to send their children to school.

This is particularly striking because two of the most constantly repeated policy proposals on the education front essentially rely on the magical powers of the invisible hand - performance pay for teachers and "school choice" programs. In the former case, we assume that added financial incentive will result in a superior work ethic for teachers, whereas, in the latter, we attempt to make the federal and state money attached to the individual child's attendance have an effect equivalent to a private payment on the parent's part.

It's entirely possible, of course, that both of these programs would work just as their proponents insist they would, and it's likely that only actual application and analysis of the proposals would give us the beginnings of a straight answer either way. But, regardless, the ease with which these suggestions are put forward, as if they were obviously theoretically sound, strikes me as decidedly wrongheaded. Why, after all, should we expect free market solutions to have the desired effect in a system almost entirely cut off from the free market?


Take school choice, for instance. (And suppose, for the moment, that this means a policy in which parents are free to send their child to any school within the public school system.) An advocate of this plan might tell you that free market forces will result in parents sending their children to better schools, rather than worse, which will, in turn, starve the poor schools for funding and force the system to either improve or replace them.


But this is hardly intuitively obvious. On the contrary, there's good reason to suspect that the majority of parents would, thanks to transportation restrictions, prove unable to send their child to the school of their choice, still, even if they found time to discern which of the local schools was best. The ability to take advantage of the higher quality, public schools, as a result, would likely be limited to those families with the time and money to make such detours. (These families, in turn, are the most likely to already be in areas with superior public schools.) Moreover, this supposedly free process will still be boxed in by enrollment limits - we can't reasonably expect a good school to remain good, if it's flooded by more students than it can maintain. For the same reason, we cannot expect failing schools to disappear thanks to supposedly "free market" forces, because there will still have to be a school somewhere to handle the children left over.

If, then, we're interested in making life easier for a few more upper-middle class parents, broad school choice might be a great way to go - but I fail to see how it could be a very useful program for an school district as a whole, assuming (reasonably, I think) that implementing such a program has some sort of significant opportunity cost. (And, perhaps, even if it does not.)

Of course, the above is just an abstract discussion of the idea. My point, though, is that people who claim that such "free market" programs in education are, by their very nature, likely to be effective are doing just the same - basing conclusions on abstract hypotheticals about the function of the invisible hand and all that. They fail to take into account how detached the public school system is (and must be) from the free market, and, unless they can provide empirical evidence for their proposals' efficacy or justify their claim that the free market mechanism will function as they expect, they ought to admit that they're just blowing smoke and raising meaningless paeans to the gods of privatization.