Ed Collision: The Proposition

The Inaugural Post of this site simply lays out what I feel to be the most simple and potentially effective solution to the education crisis (and there is indeed a crisis; and it has been building for some time) brought to a head throughout several states in the U.S., but which is truly a national crisis for reasons I will get to soon. It is not a new idea, but a new take on an old one--essentially a modified voucher proposal that is designed to be more effective, efficient, rapidly reformative, and politically acceptable than conventional voucher proposals.

Conventional Voucher Proposals, such as those criticized in Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great [*cough*] American School System have had very mixed results and have not proven to be nearly as effective as proponents had hoped. However, that is because they have tended to by burdened by crucial compromises that defeat the entire reasoning behind them. A conventional voucher (and there are many variations of the theme) simply allows parents to choose from schools in various school districts in order to have the choice to leave failing districts. A suggestion that seems only human, but was, of course, fiercely opposed by the education establishment. (More on them in a minute.)

The problem with this is that failing school districts only represent a small part of the problem. They are few in number and can generally be reformed so as to achieve mediocrity by fairly straightforward means. (The fact that such reforms are straightforward does not mean that they are easy to accomplish, however.) The problem is the successful schools; or to be precise, the problem is the dreary mediocrity that passes for success in the school system. The conventional voucher fails because in large part because it makes the mediocre school the standard of performance. But it fails for other reasons as well. The conventional voucher ignores the dilemmas faced by a family that must choose between keeping their child in a sub-optimal school (again, few schools are truly terrible) and bussing them away from their communities to a school in a distant district about which they have little information. Furthermore, traditional vouchers keep intact the bodies that provide information about the various "competing" school districts, resulting in information that is uninformative, jargon-laced, and unclear. And finally, it fails because it sidesteps the issue of general school quality. Most schools in most districts are very similar, and converge to a common standard of mediocrity that is the inevitable result of the constraints and organizational structures under which almost all schools operate. The "school-choice" movement too often amounts to giving parents a choice between McDonald's and Burger King, between Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum, or between the Republican and Democratic party equivalents of public schools. It is significant that Diane Ravitch, in her thoughtful, but ultimately disingenuous book, misleadingly portrays these top-down measures as "market-based" school reforms, when they are obviously no such thing, in that they do not conform to the very purpose and spirit of the market-based reform: to decentralize control of American schools and promote truly independent entrepreneurial ventures.

In addition, vouchers are also politically volatile because of the connection between a school district's perceived quality and property values. Parents move to expensive suburban neighborhoods in large part because these neighborhoods boast of high-quality school districts, and while it is considered impolite to say so publicly, these parents also understand that the main determinant (some say the only determinant) of the quality of a school district is the quality of the student population.

This is how you resolve the contradiction between the contention that most schools are very similar in quality and the contention that high property values are a function of good schools. It is not the schools that are of high quality in the coveted districts, since the schools generally add the same value as those in supposedly bad districts. What is different is the baseline of the students upon which the schools are called to add value, which does vary greatly. In effect, the parents of high-quality students are paying through the nose to surround their kids with other high-quality students. And they are not amenable to risking severe drops in their property values that might result from opening their district to lower achievers (and thus hurting the school's graduation rates, college placements, and other superficial and misleading metrics that their school uses to promote itself).

To fix this, I propose four simple adjustments to the conventional voucher proposals:

1.) Rather than issuing a voucher as a license to attend the public schools across various districts, the voucher should be what the name implies: a credit for a fixed amount of money (that amount being the average per-pupil expenditure in a given state) that can be that can be spent for any educational purpose.

2.) Allow the vouchers to be redeemed only for private schools, private tutoring, or in the public school to which the student would have been assigned regardless. Moving a student to another public school district would still entail all of the difficulties that it does under the current regime.

3.) This is crucial. If an educational institution or collection of private tutors should charge less than the amount of the voucher, the balance is redeemable in cash, contingent upon the ability of the parent to demonstrate a good-faith effort made to provide the student with an education. If the student happens to be a brilliant autodidact, and can teach himself without the aid of teachers and tutors, the parent has the right to redeem the entire voucher for cash.

4.) Again, this is crucial. The market for private schools that is bound to emerge from this setup shall not be encumbered with any of the regulatory apparatus of the modern public school system (short or basic safety standards, perhaps). This means that they will be outside the purview of union contracts, certification requirements, class size mandates, special education mandates, restrictions on disciplinary measures, and any other mandates you can think of. Meanwhile, the public schools would continue to operate in accordance with the current regulatory framework.

5.) Restrictions on the rebate would have to be limited in order to avoid a situation in which women bear multiple children only to redeem more vouchers. Although such behavior is unlikely, since the parent would have to wait five years for the child to become profitable, the risk of perverse child-bearing incentives is real. Thus, the rebate would be limited to two children in a family. The third child would still be provided the voucher, but would not be eligible for rebate money. Other restrictions could apply, given the political imperatives. If the state wishes to combat illegitimacy, the rebate could only be applicable to two-parent families, giving women a huge incentive to bear children in wedlock, or to get married once they have a child, and to stay married until their children reach adulthood, when the social consequences of divorce are lessened considerably. Such a proposal would not be discriminatory, since all children are given the voucher, and their right to a "free" education, regardless. All it means is that extra privileges are tied to responsibilities. Recall that illegitimate children would still have the right to attend their local public school just as they do now in addition to retaining their rights to the voucher. It is merely the unmarried mother who would not be eligible for the rebate. Note also that while it is probably necessary to limit rebate privileges to two children, the other conditions, while in my view desirable, are not necessary. This is to say that if feminists find the idea of denying rebates to unmarried mothers abhorrent, the plan could function without such a measure, although my personal view is that it's high time action was taken to discourage illegitimacy.

The principle advantage of this idea is that it has a built-in failsafe mechanism. The very worst thing that could happen is the perpetuation of the current system, since the public schools would continue to operate exactly as they do now. And this feature has a twin component in that it would pit the modern public schooling apparatus in direct competition with an open- market alternative. This is to say, that if the maze of regulations, union contracts, and mandates that are tied to public education is truly good for the students, as is claimed by the propaganda organs of the industry, it should give the public schools an advantage over the open-market alternatives, thus placing them in no real danger. If, however, the current collection of regulations and contractual laws is not good for the children, but rather represents a thousand species of graft designed to feather the nests of sundry parasitic industries that mooch off of education money, such as professional development committees, task-forces, workshop hucksters, lawyers, education schools, and publishers, then the open-market schools should be able to provide a far superior education at the fraction of the price, eventually forcing the public education apparatus to reform its fiscal ways or face certain extinction.

Politically, this plan should work to the benefit of huge numbers of constituencies. First of all, the suburban would have nothing to fear, since her public schools would still be protected from the infiltration of low-performing "urban" students by prohibitive real estate costs. However, should certain schools open that promise a better education at a lower cost, the parents would have a choice in deciding whether it would be best for themselves and their children to keep their children in the public schools, insulated from "urban" kids, or whether it would be best to send their kids to the private school, where their child may come in contact with kids from the other side of the tracks, but which might be run in such a way that such a heterogeneous student population would not hinder their child's education, while they would get what would effectively be a significant property tax rebate. The expectation is that in the event of the ideal outcome--the near-total replacement of the public schools by leaner and more effective alternatives--the suburban communities would no longer have the advantage of an exclusive public school district, and might see property values decline as a result. But that would be offset by the increased efficiency of the open-schools and the monetary rebate that would result, not to mention the superior education for their kids.

Furthermore, such a plan would be an enormous incentive for entrepreneurs to put together the most effective education system at the lowest cost possible, since they would attract business from parents eager to ease their tax burden. Teachers would not be significantly hurt by the proposal, since the newer schools would need teachers to man them, although the salary scales might get bumped down a peg. Of course, the children of teachers would be eligible for the voucher rebate as well, which could easily be enough to offset any loss of income.

There are, however, constituencies that would be hurt by the implementation of such a program. The schools of education would suffer a blow, since the open-schools would be exempt from any and all certification requirements. The lawyers who specialize in educational litigation would be significantly hurt because the maze of regulations in which they specialize in maneuvering would not apply to the new schools. The professional development and teacher-workshop rackets would only be employed by the new school if these schools were to find their services necessary, which is to say that they would never be employed. The Teachers Unions would be hurt, since all laws compelling union membership would not apply to these schools, which would undoubtedly choose to hire an underemployed liberal arts major than a much more expensive unionized teacher who, despite his or her surfeit of credentials and degrees, such as teacher certification, the masters in education, the MA+30, the professional development credits, and countless other pointless and expensive trimmings of credentialism, would not do the job any more effectively.

In other words, the army of parasites and bloodsucking leeches that are drowning out the education budgets of every state of the union have a lot to lose, and we can expect them to combat this with full vigor. In future posts, I will address a couple of issues related to this: first how to defeat the political efforts of the parasites, and second, substantiating why these entities in fact are parasitic, and exactly why our public schools are corrupted beyond redemption and need to be replaced by a constructive alternative. In addition, I will regularly post links to the crucial literature on the matter, and verifying my claims with evidence.