Economist Douglas Harris: Schools Cannot Fit A Free Market
From Forbes. com— economist Douglas Harris makes the case against vouchers from the economist side.
Public school advocates have long argued that attempts to inject free market ideology and mechanics into education are misguided and destructive because the free market is a bad fit for universal public education. But in a new paper, Douglas Harris argues that the reverse is true: schooling is a bad fit for free market logic.
Critics of his analysis (eventually published in book form as Charter School City) found his approach “clinically distant” and failing to acknowledge some of the damage done by outsiders. At the same time, they noted that Harris did express some reservations, and Harris himself wrote that “some of the rhetoric of reform supporters has gone overboard.”
Those reservations find full expression in a new working by Harris for the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. In “How Free Market Logic Fails in Schooling— and What It Means for the Role of Government,” Harris explains how schools are ill-suited for a free market approach, and so, when looking at current school choice policy he finds, “the current direction of policy is off-track and apparently inconsistent with the main criteria on which we evaluate education policy and even with the values that voucher advocates themselves profess.”
Harris considers six conditions needed for an ideal efficient free market, and how in school “all of the assumptions fail to an unusual extent.”
Failure #1 Choices of individuals do not affect other people.
Whether Pat eats at McDonalds or Sardis for lunch does not affect anyone else’s lunch. But schooling affects everyone. When individuals learn basic functional content (reading, math, etc.) as well as democratic values, that benefits everyone (a “positive externality,” as Harris puts it in economist-speak). Harris also argues that when students all attend a school in their neighborhood, it strengthens community bonds.
Harris points out that “students affect each other’s academic knowledge as well as their expectations and beliefs” as education is produced in a community of peers. The individual’s choice affects that community. He points out that this is also affected by the many well-documented ways in which school choice becomes school’s choice, as schools seek to shape that community of students to the school’s advantage.
Failure #2 Consumers (and producers) have good information.
When we shop for a new car, we can collect information and develop a pretty good idea of what we might be getting. But what we expect from a car is pretty straightforward, while “we expect schools to do many things and goals like creativity, values, and socio-emotional skills are hard to define and even harder to measure.” Many educational goals are not observable until years later; even if we could follow children into adulthood to measure (somehow) if they became productive, responsible members of society, the information would come far too late for the school or teachers or parents of new students to act upon it.