The Free Market Won't Save Public Education
It's been an article of faith since Milton Friedman first started fantasizing about getting government out of education and replacing it with a voucher system.
Competition will spur excellence. Free market schools will save students from failing schools in poor districts. Free markets will stave off inequity.
Folks keep saying it. And yet there isn't a shred of evidence that it's true.
Name a single free-market sector of the economy that serves all citizens with excellence. Automobiles? Restaurants? Technological tools?
None of them, because what the free market excels at is picking winners and losers. The free market says these folks over here can have a Lexus and these folks over here can have a used Kia and these folks over here can take the bus (if there is one) and these folks over here can just walk.
What the free market excels at is sorting people into their particular tier, their particular socio-economic class. If you want to move up a level, then show some hustle and grab those bootstraps to prove that you deserve to move up the ladder. Otherwise, we'll just assume you're right where you belong.
There's no version of our free-ish market that is about lifting every single citizen up to a decent level, no function of the free market that says, "Let's get every single person in this country behind the wheel of a Ford." The free market doesn't like the poor.
Economist Douglas Harris laid out a solid explanation of why education is a lousy fit for the free market, and there's one more problem-- the free market and the public education system don't want the same thing. The free market wants to sort people out, put them at the top, bottom, middle-- and then provide them with what they deserve. The US public school system, however imperfectly, promises to provide every student with a quality education, without ever asking if one child deserves something different from another.
For some free market fans, inequity is not a bug but a feature; it's a way to sort people into their proper place. Equity for them means "equal chance to prove that they belong in a particular tier." The social safety net is disruptive and wrong because it "rewards" people with stuff they haven't proven they deserve.
Some free market fans believe that the free market will provide equity and even things out. Hell, Friedman appears to have believed that the free market would fix segregation and not, say, give rise to segregation academies. But the notion that free market mechanisms will bring greater equity than we now have in education is silly. Your ability to vote with your feet will always be directly related to your wealth.
But more to the point, we know that the free market will not correct the inequities of the education system because it is the free market that cemented them there in the first place. The primary mechanism for creating public school inequity is the policy of linking school funding to the housing--one more free market where winners and losers are sorted out. The free market was instrumental in giving us educational inequity; how can we possibly imagine that the free market would help get rid of it?
Well, that's not really a free market, free market fans will complain; it's a market that has been hampered and hamstrung by various government policies. But that's all markets. To start with, money is just made up stuff, and it takes government policies to maintain the illusion. Nor is there some pristine natural economic playing field that exists naturally; all economic playing fields are created, maintained, and regulated by governments. "That's not a true free market" just means "that playing field is not tilted the way I want it to be."
There are playing fields more severely tilted than others, markets more free-ish than others. I'm actually a fan of our free-ish market system. And some free-ish markets are excellent at handling some sorts of commodities, companies and customers. But education is not a commodity, and no free-ish market is going to help us create a more equitable system fir universal education of young humans in this country.
I don't have a problem with students being able to move from one public school to another. There is no "one size fits all" school. Some students need smaller schools, or bigger schools. or schools with special programs. or schools close to a parent's workplace, etc. But the schools students enroll in using my tax dollars, need to be PUBLIC. They need to be open to all students, they need to be accountable, they need to be responsive to the community through elected boards and open meetings. Private schools have none of these.
Public school teacher here. I want to be sure I understand: What do you advocate *for*?
I live in Indiana where students can transfer schools easily. I teach in a county with four different high schools. I teach middle school, and I've had many kids transfer *in* because they do poorly elsewhere, and after a few months in my classroom, they excel. Isn't that *good*?
By way of analogy, is switching from public school to public school like choosing a different McDonald's or choosing Taco Bell?
Public schools try to equalize as much as possible, but there's no changing human nature. Students reflect socioeconomic status and parenting more than any other factor.