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 is 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.
