The Obamas Go to School
Barack and Michelle Obama ought to be commended for choosing the best school possible for their two young girls, Malia and Natasha. Only a couple of days after Barack won the presidential election the Obamas announced that their children would attend Sidwell Friends School, a prestigious, Quaker-run institution that has a long pedigree of educating first sons and daughters. The school is of course private and the tuition prohibitive. But since the Obama’s get free government provided housing, a meal allowance, and a generous stipend they can well afford the best. After all, don’t all children, the future of America, deserve the best?
Only the richer ones apparently. You see, Barack and Michelle have the luxury of choosing where their kids attended because they have money. Only parents who can afford the tuition of a private school can send their kids there. Obviously the Obamas and Sidwell Friends School is an extreme example, but the inequity is very real. A middle aged woman at my teller window the other week needed to change her address with the bank because she had moved. I asked her why and she said that she had decided to move from her old neighborhood in Philadelphia to Bensalem, PA because she wanted her kids to attend a better quality suburban public school in Bensalem rather than having to go to the failing inner city public schools in Philadelphia. She appeared, and Bensalem is, solidly middle class. Even though she was not as wealthy as the Obamas and other elites, she could still offer her kids a better quality education by voting with her feet and relocating to a different school district. Middle class families do this all the time. One of the top questions asked real estate salespeople is “What public school is this area assigned to?” If the school is bad, the parents buy a house somewhere else.
The public educational system in America is perverse. The children who need the most help are relegated to the worst schools. Lower income families cannot afford to send their kids to private schools since the tuition would come straight out of their pockets. Poor parents can’t even move to nicer neighborhoods because they can’t afford the higher property or rental prices. Consider a single mother in North Philadelphia who struggles to provide for her kids. She doesn’t want her kids influenced by the gang/drug culture at the local public high school, but what choice does she have? She can try to get them into a charter school, but the waiting list is miles long. Why shouldn’t she be able to send her children to a safer school where they may even receive a better education in a safer environment?
What I’m saying is that the wealthier you are the more educational opportunities your children have. Rich kids go to good schools. Poor kids go to bad schools. This is a generalization and so there are going to be exceptions, but on the whole the system favors those with the most money and influence at the expense of those who do not. I hope that Barack Obama realizes that the biggest change that we can believe in is the reform of the public educational system. He should be applauded for picking Arne Duncan for education secretary. Duncan is a compromise candidate who pushed for Chicago reforms yet was palatable to teacher unions. He moved on teacher accountability and student standardized testing.
But I believe that the best tool for educational reform remains unused: school choice. Parents deserve greater choice over where they send their children to school. Access to a quality education should be universal, not limited to the middle and upper classes that can pay the additional premium of private tuition or the hidden relocation tax. Funding for schools should be distributed through parents rather mandated by bureaucrats. Each family with eligible children should be given a voucher worth the amount spent per pupil by the public school system in the prior year. The parent could turn that voucher in to the school of their choice, whether public or private.
What would be the end result? Better students, better schools, and a more equitable system. The principal problem with the public school system is that it is essentially a monopoly. Every taxpayer in the United States is forced to give the public educational system money. True, you could choose to pay extra and send your kid elsewhere, but only if you have the extra money to spend; hardly a level playing field. Furthermore, public school teachers are virtually guaranteed their positions…they can’t be fired! It costs the state of New York several hundred thousand dollars and takes years to fire even the worst of teachers.
With yesterday’s post in mind, let me use an allegory based on the car industry. Let’s say there was one giant car company, let’s call it DET, that makes over 90% of the cars in America. The government uses tax money to subsidize the company for cars made regardless of quality. In fact up until recently a factory that made shoddy cars got rewarded the same as one that made excellent cars. The subsidies mean that a DET car is free to whoever wants one. It is true that you can purchase a competitor’s car, but you have to pay full cost without subsidy. Unsurprisingly people continue to buy DET cars even though they would prefer the better cars made by competitors. Furthermore, even though the quality of DET’s cars vary from place to place, there is just one type of DET car produced in each region and if you live in that region the only car you can get for free is that specific DET car. DET is under very little pressure to improve the quality of their cars or to make them more efficiently since there is little competition. Poor people essentially have to drive DETs and many others do just because it’s cheaper, not because they actually prefer DET. Indeed DET deserves our sympathy since they can’t fire or effectively discipline their own workers.
Obviously DET is the public educational system. Forget Carnegie, Rockefeller, or Ma Bell, public schools are effectively the biggest monopoly in American history. Whatever the industry, be it cars or education, entrenched monopolies stymie innovation, hurt consumers, and encourage inefficiency. Why try to make a better car if people have to buy one no matter what? Competition, the essence of the marketplace, is the answer. In a competitive marketplace companies are encouraged to streamline production, improve quality, respond to customer complaints, and reward innovation. That is why we have antitrust regulations on the book to break up monopolies and encourage healthy competition.
School vouchers would encourage competition for students. Schools would want the tax money tied to vouchers and would vie to get the most students by offering the highest quality education possible. Schools that failed to offer a good education would go under while schools that succeeded would grow and replicate. Poor teaching and inferior educational models would be punished by the marketplace while good teaching and superior school systems would be rewarded. Just as competition lowered the cost of cars while the quality improved, the educational marketplace would raise the quality of education at a lower cost per pupil.
So, where does Obama stand on all of this? To his credit at times Obama has sounded open to school choice. Unfortunately whenever teacher unions barked Obama toed the Democratic Party line and ignored school choice. I get the feel that Obama could be personally persuaded that school vouchers are a viable alternative, but the interests backing the (abysmal) status quo are the same interests that back him. Bucking those powerful interest groups would require a leader willing to sacrifice his own self-interest for the good of America, a bit of a messiah figure really.
So far when it comes to educational policy, President elect Obama has acted more like a typical politician. Let’s hope he introduces some educational change we can believe in.
Addendum (8/7): Obama chose hypocrisy instead.
Wouldn’t school vouchers amplify the problem you mention that happens when middle class families flee to the suburbs? With vouchers the poor families might be able to choose a school, but since they still lack the ability to uproot the rest of their lives, they’re stuck with the available options, which may be few or none. (If poor schools actually go under, then in bad neighborhoods there really may be none.) And it seems like the disparity of funding would be even greater, as those with the means take their vouchers from less desirable neighborhoods.
But for every school that goes under, a new one will spring up…kids, even the problem kids, become sources of profit. Competition among schools for student vouchers will encourage new schools to open in areas with less competition. Indeed I’ll go a step farther and argue that ultimately there will be more schools in poor neighborhoods than there currently are. Lower class vouchers are worth every bit as much as middle or upper class vouchers.
I am arguing for the introduction of the market into education. Supply and demand regulate themselves in the market. Your second question is only an issue in a planned educational economy where bureaucrats have to set supply and demand. In the market, comparative advantage rules. When people are going out of their way to purchase a good or service from a certain supplier, competitors see an opportunity. They find the source of the demand and build an establishment closer to the source of the demand (or the original company preempts the competition by opening another store…either way the demand is satisfied). Like water, supply flows downhill.
The disparity would only be temporary. To be honest what I am proposing doesn’t have to clear a very high bar…disparity of funding and a lack of access are massive problems in the current system. Sure, there might be disparities in my proposed voucher system, but it can hardly be worse than the situation we currently face.
This is essentially an incentive problem. In the current system incentives are such that the interests of teachers and administrators are often at odds with the interests of students. In an ideal system the interests of both parties would align, and a market usually works well to that end: producers only get paid if they satisfy consumers. Unfortunately it appears that some customers, i.e. low income parents, don’t actually demand so much in the way of good academic performance. From an NBER paper:
“There is growing empirical evidence that low-income parents place lower weights on academics when choosing schools, implying that school choice plans may have the smallest impact on the choices of the families they are targeting.”
This doesn’t mean more choice wouldn’t be an improvement, but it might not be the boon you think it would be.
And, in the interest of shameless self-promotion, here’s a post I wrote about year ago about centralization and education.
I’m ambivalent about school choice. On the one hand, free markets are usually better at efficient use of money, and there’s no question the existing system has a lot of problems. On the other, education isn’t exactly like a free market. We compel children to attend school in part because we recognize that they and their guardians don’t always understand or hold the children’s long-term interests, and we don’t want just to support financially desirable studies.
I’m not sure that would actually be true (although I would support experimenting with it on a small scale). A inner-city $20 bill is just as good as a suburban $20, but there isn’t an equality of stores. Wal-Mart locates in suburbia (and for the most part not downtown) for the same reasons a for-profit school is likely to do the same: rent is lower, real estate is more available, employees can be paid less, there are lower crime costs, etc.: in other words, the profit margin is greater.
Then there’s the problem of church and state. Should my tax dollars be funding an inner-city Islamic madrasah? Maybe; I’m not sure.
Local experiments have already begun in Washington, DC, Cincinnati, and several other inner city school districts. Voucher experiments have been targeted at disadvantaged groups (interpretation: poor, urban minorities) and they have been wildly popular with involved parents. Surveys of participating parents show significantly higher scores for parental satisfaction, parental involvement, and some preliminary data shows improvements in testing scores.
I’m a bit concerned at the paternalism you casually evinced–guardians are ignorant or untrustworthy so a paternal bureaucrat will do better–that’s the sort of rhetoric I expect from elitists about welfare, affirmative action, and like evidences of state paternalism. Of course some guardians don’t care and their children would not be better off than in the current system, but the ones who do would be better served by vouchers because it would give them choices they don’t currently have.
Ah, but your Walmart example actually bolsters my argument. Walmart would love to locate in the inner city, but government intervention is what typically keeps them out. Time and time again (I can think of New York and Los Angeles offhand) Walmart has wanted to move in to urban cities but have been stymied by red tape, unions, and advocacy groups. As you noted, since red tape and labor monopolies are a roadblock to both Walmart and school choice my solution is to cut the tape and break the monopoly; these are ultimately surmountable even though formidable barriers.
Lower income consumers are overrepresented at Walmarts because poor consumers are more cost conscious. Indeed, just like with the schools, it is ironic that the greatest opposition to Walmart expansion tends to come from wealthier NIMBY types. So too, opposition to school vouchers often comes from the entitled while surveys of the lower sort show big support for Walmarts and school choice.
I don’t like to think of school vouchers as government money; I believe vouchers belong to parents, not to the government. I see vouchers as the government refunding people their money so they can purchase education. In this sense vouchers are like annual tax refunds. Wouldn’t it be silly to advocate preventing people from donating their tax refund money to their church or using it to send their kid to a private school? When the government gives it back it is yours to spend as you like. A voucher is similar, though with one string attached: it can only be spent on education.
Why shouldn’t a Muslim parent have the right to send their kid to a Muslim school? Why shouldn’t a Christian parent be allowed to send their kids to a Christian school? Why shouldn’t a __________ parent be allowed to send their kids to a _____________ school? Ad infinitum. The grand Dewey standardization experiment has been a failure. Using a one size fits all approach to inculcate general “American” (what does that mean?) values is counterproductive since it leads to any number of problems. With a voucher based system the fights over intelligent design/evolution and sex ed (among others) would become moot.
The problem with labels like “paternalism” and “elitist” is that they’re vague, pejorative, and not much else. Whatever they call it, most people agree that the government should interfere with people’s liberty in certain situations. Is it “paternalism” to tell someone he can’t drive drunk or chain his child to a bed for weeks?
I’m not saying that in general someone should determine poor people’s educational choices for them; I’m saying that there should be a baseline of educational quality. In a purely free market of educational vouchers, there would be some districts in which there is too little demand for a school. I’m saying that we don’t just abandon the children who are stuck there, even though that’s not what a perfectly free market would dictate.
This doesn’t really apply to poor or probably even lower middle class people, because they’re not paying enough taxes to cover voucher costs. So either you have true vouchers-as-refunds and exclude the poor, or you have vouchers-as-subsidies.
They should. I just don’t know that my tax dollars should help them do that, especially when without the voucher (and assuming even a maximum tax refund) they couldn’t do it themselves. Maybe they should; I don’t know. I’m ambivalent.
This is a big problem with modernity and perhaps an intractable one. We don’t really have a common culture as Americans, and even secularism doesn’t offer a consistent culture. However, I think history shows that when sub-cultures withdraw into their ghettos, it tends to destabilize society. People should be free to do that on their own dime; I don’t know that tax dollars should fund it.
Maybe Wal-Mart is a bad example because of controversies regarding its non-unionization, but I think you overestimate the role such red tape plays in general. The fact that stores of all kinds in poor areas tend to be fewer and of lower quality can’t just be attributed to bureaucracy. It’s just logical that everything else being equal, a business with finite resources is going to make the choice that maximizes profit, and crime and property values will affect that profit.
I agree with you that a purely market based approach to education is impractical. Still, I’m addressing a system much too close to the opposite extreme of the spectrum. In my ideal system the government would fund a limited safety net of public schools. Only families making less than a certain amount would have free access to these schools. Over a certain income families would be required to provide education for their own kids. The cost of the safety net would be spread among all taxpayers.
Sure, paternalism is in the eye of the beholder and can be appropriate, but it can also be abused. I would differentiate between varieties of paternalism. Both the examples you provided show government preventing people from endangering others/violating others’ individual rights. That is appropriate paternalism (in this sense government is inherently paternalistic). The inappropriate paternalism that I referred to was government telling people what was best for themselves (and by extension their wards). I put a mandated public system in a class with banning transfats from restaurants and restricting smoking even in privately owned establishments.
I agree that universal American cultural norms are a myth and that secularism is variegated. I don’t agree with your premise about sub-cultural ghettos. Waves of immigration are a constant in American history. Invariably the first generation of immigrants, whether from Germany, Ireland, Italy, Eastern Europe, Latin America, or Asia, was criticized for resisting going native (thus Ben Franklin’s complaints about the hordes of “Palantine boors”). The second generation though becomes bicultural. The third generation is pretty thoroughly assimilated (though some cultural memories make it through intact). From what I understand, though I’m no expert, this pattern predates universal public education. I am not convinced that public education speeds that process up; I suspect that cultural consumption is the key factor in that transition. I remember a story about an illegal immigrant mother living near San Fransisco. The reporter asked her if she wanted to become American to which she responded in Spanish (rough paraphrase): “Not until my hair turns blond and eyes go blue.” Despite her protestations, the reporter noted that as she said this her teenage son was watching the Simpsons, wearing a 49ers jacket, and talking in fluent English on the phone.
Instances where sub-cultures do destabilize society (like France) have very different national identities. Of course nationalism is a construct, but powerful nevertheless. Rather than blaming the presence of sub-cultural ghettos per se, I wonder if the Francophile ideal combined with informal cultural racism to cause the tension. American identity seems to be a more fluid concept.
I contest the idea of stores in poor areas are “lower quality.” Quality for a resident of Beverly Hills is likely different from someone living in North Philadelphia. Sure, customer service might be worse or the goods made from cheaper materials, but that could simply be what those people demand. I should also point out that crime and property values are often in an inverse relationship. Some stores might locate in poor and/or crimeridden areas because property is cheaper. The cheaper cost of building and the resulting lower overhead from property taxes might encourage certain stores to invest in poor areas at the expense of wealthier areas. Think Dollar Stores. Investing in a poor community can also maximize profit. I see no reason why education couldn’t work the same way.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLDb2V86Ei0