If those of us who profess to value public schools and the principle of democratic access they uphold cannot find the courage or the motivation to fight in their defense, we may soon wake up to find that they have been replaced by wholly owned subsidiaries of McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wal-Mart.
That is Jonathan Kozol, writing in the August 2007 issue of Harper’s. Note that while there are some good (though in my view not decisive) arguments against vouchers, Kozol instead focuses on reminding us that corporations are greedy profit-maximizers. Nor does he mention that in America’s inner cities, "democratic access" to good french fries far exceeds democratic access to good schools. And might not Louis Vuitton join Wal-Mart in educating some of our children?
Kozol does (correctly, but without explanation or analysis) describe the results of U.S. voucher experiments to date as "very mixed." You might think that means our attitude toward vouchers should be "very mixed" but alas not.
Impeach Jonathan Kozol, impeach him now.
Addendum: Believe it or not, this post isn’t Alex.
Terrific post.
In a sense, Tyler is wrong is about there being greater “democratic access” to good french fries in the inner cities, because what Kozol really means by “democratic access” is statification.
See the quotations pp. 15-16 from ABC of Communism in the following paper of mine:
http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_10_1_1_klein.pdf
The authors Bukharin and Preobrazhensky make is plain that what it’s really all about is that social activities be “statified.”
Last year we got a grant that paid us cash money to do various things to increase our students’ math knowledge. I’m not proud of it but when the grant rolled out I found myself doing a lot of little extra things so get that cash. I was at the school 7 days a week before that and would like to think I was dedicated to my students. (I was the first high school teacher in over a decade to come back for a second year…) But I’ll admit that extra money motivated me to do more than I might of otherwise. Seven grand is seven grand, after all. So David, I have to say that while teachers do need to be motivated by affection some other incentives don’t hurt.
Balan, is there any REASON why “more than any other service” education cannot be provided by suppliers acting from their regard to their own self-interest? Or is it just proof by assertion?
Long ago I read Kozol’s book “Savage Inequalities” that shows how large funding differences because of property taxes are the cause of terrible schools for the poor. I was full of outrage and indignation.
Then I learned the facts that Kozol had *hugely* exaggerated the funding inequalities by focusing on the most extreme cases, that most states greatly equalize funding between districts, and that some of the highest spending districts have the worst schools. Now I know you can’t trust anything Kozol says.
I peopose that we cut teacher salaries to subsistence level and make them work the year round, thus making their incentives as weak as possible.
what nathan said.
yeah, megan mcardle made the point that with most public teachers current benefits (very average/subpar salry, but summers off and tenure), the job likely attracts a lot of slackers.
The “public schools” vs market debate is stale on both sides. Perhaps Walmartization would have certain advantages.
But given that existing private K-12 schools (like existing private colleges and universities) are both independent and non-profit, I can’t think of any good reason to assume that the blossoming of privates K-12s that would follow widespread adoption of vouchers would not similarly be dominated by independent non-profits rather than the educational equivalent of ‘big box’ stores.
In point of fact, we already DO have exactly the envisioned voucher system in higher-education where students are free to use need-based government grants at either public or private colleges & universities.
So it strikes me that the only reason to put forth ‘Walmartization’ as the inevitable result of vouchers is…well…fear-mongering.
Spencer, yeah I think they did learn more. Test scores went up, but there could be a dozen reasons for that. I guess the best outcome of the grant was the teachers that were doing what they should be (individualizing instruction, helping students after school, working with their peers, seeking professional development) got rewarded for the extra effort. And teachers there were doing the minimum there was extra incentive to use best practices.
Now Slocum will say that I already was rewarded with benefits and overpaid and didn’t deserved the extra money for doing my job, but that’s okay. That is one area where Balan is sort of right, if you are not motivated by affection for children or whatever you’ll get pretty sick of the assumption that you’re a leech on society pretty quickly.
David Balan, that was pretty weak. Perhaps your conclusion is correct, but you need to muster some support for it.
I find it interesting how many college students I talk to talk about how much better going to college is than high school was. But then they also seem to feel that any action to make funding and incentives work a little bit more like college would be totally disastrous.
The US has one of the best (if not the best) higher education systems in the world, but one of the worst precollege systems in the world. It’s odd that I never hear anyone ask the question “Why does one system work so well and the other work so poorly?”
What a terrific lot of shallow, fact-free posting. Recycling all the right-wing/libertarian talking points.
For opposing views by people who’ve actually studied these things, you can check out my index Public Schools, Education, and Vouchers.
It’s part of my Critiques of Libertarianism web site.
Are you the same Mike Huben who went to David Friedman’s blog a few hours after Milton Friedman had died and told David that his “family business” was working for murderous dictators?
Because if you are, why the hell should anyone go read your g****** website?
Ed,
“Now I know you can’t trust anything Kozol says†
Indeed, a flagrant disregard for the truth is at the core of everything Kozol writes or says. As you point out, many of this nation’s worst public schools are, in fact, lavishly funded. In some respects, the Washington DC public school system is the black hole case of complete academic failure and absurd outlays. According to “States Ranked According to Per Pupil Elementary-Secondary Public School System Finance Amounts: 2004-05† (http://ftp2.census.gov/govs/school/05f33pub.pdf) DC spent $17,809 per-student back in 2004-05.
Actually, the Camden, New Jersey system performs worse and spends even more at $18,902 per student (2004-05).
At some level, all of Kozol’s lies (the facts aren’t hard to find) appear to have a purpose. Kozol is frantically attempting to divert public attention from a fundamental fact. The sad reality is that the children of the underclass perform poorly in school, irrespective of how much money is spent on them.
Mike,
The problem with asking if you’ve stopped beating your wife yet is that the person presumably does not beat their wife at all. But that’s not the case here.
Anyone who is a regular reader of Friedman’s Ideas blog knows that you did in fact behave like despicable slime. I’m just telling the folks here who might not know that what kind of treatment they should expect from you if they decide to debate you on these issues. Perhaps you will wait until their family members die, and then heap calumny on the dead.
I think anyone reading can see what kind of person you are by your initial comments:
What a terrific lot of shallow, fact-free posting. Recycling all the right-wing/libertarian talking points.
For opposing views by people who’ve actually studied these things. . .
In other words, the libertarians who have posted here are:
1) shallow
2) ignorant of the facts
3) haven’t studied the subject
So tell us Mike Huben. How much “depth” does it take for you to go to David Friedman’s blog, when his dad’s body is still warm, and call David and his dad apologists for murderous dictators?
Any why shouldn’t I warn any and everyone who might care to debate with you how you have behaved in the past, and that they might well put themselves and their families on the receiving end of that kind of heinous abuse?
Debating Mike Huben is like debating a cow.
it’s not cheap to run a good school
3k/year Sudbury schools are pretty good.
癌症 肺癌 胃癌 è‚癌 肾癌 食é“癌 å宫颈癌 乳腺癌 åµå·¢ç™Œ ç›´è‚ ç™Œ ç»“è‚ ç™Œ 皮肤癌 甲状腺癌 胰腺癌 å‰åˆ—腺癌 膀胱癌 骨癌 鼻咽癌 脑瘤
And fundamentally his comparison is broken: we have capitalist access to french fries. And of course we could ask then where the market has provided such “democratic access” to transportation for the inner city: looks like another failure to me.
Nope — yet another government failure. If you’ve been to third world countries, you know that transportation works pretty well with informal, independent cab service. Such service can work in the U.S., too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_van
Except it is generally banned or strictly limited by cities looking to prevent competition with the city bus system and licensed cab drivers.
You might make a better case for market failure in the poor access of inner city residents to supermarkets, except that governments are often involved in that problem, too in that big city governments tend to be quite unfriendly to such businesses (see the failed Chicago big box ordinance). Businesses are willing to put up with the costly nonsense in lucrative big city locations, but not marginal ones.
On the first point, there is a famous paper called “On the Folly of Rewarding A, while Hoping for B,”
All the more reason to replace a system where A is just showing up, and B is good teaching.
As America continues to hum along and public schools, especially urban ones, are generally crappy, I’m beginning to think that maybe formal education isn’t that valuable, except as a signal. Obviously, I would expect that outcomes for HS dropouts would be worse than for the college educated, but maybe it’s because they’re both correlated with something else, like intellegence or good parents.
I’m sure I’ll still try to send my kids to “good” schools. The obvious benefit of good schools is that they’re generally safer. A reduced risk of being stabbed is enough to entice me to fork over the extra property taxes or tuition. Also, I live in Michigan, so maybe I can take advantage of their school of choice program.
Most of this debate is really beside the point. Kozol does make one very good point which no-one has adressed – parents desire to choose schools for their children is mostly concerned with the ability to decide with whom their children go to school. Private schools for the most part don’t have superior resources, often don’t even have superior teachers to what you can find in a public school. What they do have is usually a self-selected community of parents. My friends who work in private equity or hedge funds aren’t pulling their kids out of the Newton and Weston public school systems (two of the best in the country) because of the lousy teachers or quality of education – it is because they want the networking opportunities of being in a community of parents of similar means and status. It’s hard to see how a voucher system will really improve anything over the long-run. If too many of the “wrong sort” of children start showing up in a school, the high achieving parents will quickly abandon that school – it won’t matter how hard the administrators and teachers work to keep up the quality. The best way to make your school attractive to buyers will be to exclude as much of the “riff-raff” as possible. If there were a true “free market” for education some significant percentage at the bottom would get no education whatsoever because it wouldn’t be profitable to provide it to them. Maybe the fairest solution would be to privatize the entire school system nationwide, but require every school take a certain number of hard luck cases.
Vanya: you seem to have a problem with parents exercising their freedom of association on behalf of their children. What other fundamental rights do you think that we should relenquish on their behalf?
Government-run schools have consistently been formed for the primary purpose of ensuring that the students be raised with government-approved views. It was true in this country for Baptists & Methodists with Catholic children in the past, its true today. We used this in Japan folling WWII to pave over their culture. Bismark used it to forge a nation out of the empire he assembled.
If you don’t think that the classrooms are currently full of nonsense, you’ve not been there in a long time. My wife and I would gladly give up half of our stuff if required to keep our children to ourselves, and we’re hardly alone.
It is also true that the GI Bill destroyed the independent college system that we had prior to WWII. There are now only scattered religious schools which have generally given up their tax-exepmt status (See: US vs Bob Jones University) in order to keep their intellectual freedom. Vouchers would destroy most of the private schools as they currently exist.
We don’t use your “free” schools, and while I’m not taking up arms to keep from paying for them anyway, you have no right to demand that I give you my money to maintain them.
As for the ever-with-us poor, prior to the government takeover of education, civic-minded individuals provided education for many of the nation’s poor. Yes, it was totally ad hoc, but with the improvements in communication and the explosion of wealth that we have had, it would be far, far easier to ensure a higher level of coverage than we currently have.
I’ll make you a deal: shut down your **** sausage factories, and I’ll turn over my ENTIRE property tax bill to a private effort to educate the poor.
Ohh, and Huber: ‘mooooooo’
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