We Can No Longer Afford an Education Monopoly
In an IBD op-ed today, I point out that we’re spending twice as much per pupil as we did in 1970, despite no improvement in achievement at the end of high school and a decline in the graduation rate over that same period.
What difference does that make? If public schools had just managed not to get any less efficient over the past 40 years, we’d be saving $300 billion annually.
Our education monopoly is a luxury we can no longer afford. When the economy was booming, it didn’t matter that it cost us more and more every year for the same or even inferior results. These days, it’s becoming imperative that we find ways for our education system to enjoy the same relentless increases in efficiency that we take for granted in every other field.
This, for instance, would be a good start.
Economic urgency isn’t the only good reason to bring education back within the free enterprise system, but when the school monopoly starts bringing entire states to their financial knees, it’s certainly one we should take seriously.
Patching up the Education Monopoly
The Eli and Edythe Broad and Bill and Melinda Gates foundations have sponsored a report, “Smart Options: Investing the Recovery Funds for Student Success,” on how to spend $100 billion of “stimulus money” on improving America’s schools, according to Jay Mathews in The Washington Post. Ideas include national standards, better teacher evaluations, special help for struggling students, and more.
But let’s try a thought experiment. Bill Gates made his money in software. Eli Broad made his money building houses. Imagine a slightly different universe, say one in which Henry Wallace and Al Gore had become president, and we had monopoly providers of both software and housing. How good do you think the software and the housing would be? And if the U.S. Department of Technology and the U.S. Department of Housing announced that they would be spending another $100 billion, what would happen?
It seems clear that the way to improve housing and software in that world would be to open the fields up to competition, or even to privatize them. A government monopoly provider of software would be lucky to have given us Minitel by now. And monopoly provision of housing was tried in much of the world during the 20th century, with poor results. So if we were afflicted with these albatrosses, surely we’d recognize that deregulation, competition, and privatization would produce better results by far.
So then why don’t we realize it when we’re afflicted with a virtual government monopoly on the provision of education? Why are zillions of smart people studying and debating how to improve the performance of a sluggish, stagnant, tax-funded government monopoly? Maybe we shouldn’t be so sure that we’d see the failure of the software or housing monopoly either. Whatever enterprise the government chooses to monopolize — and there’s really nothing inherent or inevitable about which enterprises that will be — will most likely become a massive bureaucratic undertaking, and we will find it difficult to imagine how the enterprise could be privately run.
But Bill and Melinda, Eli and Edythe, Jay, Barack — the evidence on monopoly vs. competitive provision of services is out there. To a great extent it’s the history of the 20th century. Check it out.
Terrible Example, Mr. Secretary
Here’s something rich from U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan: According to The New York Times, yesterday Duncan smeared South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford as a reform obstructionist because Sanford wants to turn down education stimulus money.
“For South Carolina to stand on the sidelines and say that the status quo is O.K., that defies logic,” said Duncan.
That’s right, Duncan had the gall to frame as a protector of the status quo the same governor who for years has been crystal clear that schooling in his state is dismal and that school choice – which takes power away from politically ferocious, government-schooling special interests and gives it to parents – is the key to real change. It’s also the same desperately sought after reform, by the way, that President Obama and his education secretary are happy to let die a slow – but politically convenient – death in Washington, DC.
And what do Secretary Duncan and his boss have in mind for South Carolina? The same worthless, failed education “solutions” too many politicians have proffered for decades: spend ever more money and talk big about the better results you’ll “demand” but never get. That makes the politicians look like they care about “the children” while really rewarding the politically potent, school-choice-hating, accountability dodging unions, administrators and bureaucrats who live off the status quo and serve not the kids, but themselves.
So let’s get something straight, Mr. Secretary: If you want real change you actually have to do something different, something that attacks real problems, and with his crusade for educational freedom that’s exactly what Governor Sanford has been doing. In stark contrast, so far all the Obama administration has offered is a lot of bluster, and a lot more money for our hopeless education monopoly. And that, Mr. Secretary, is truly acting like the status quo is O.K.
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