Schools on Film
AEI’s Rick Hess worries that school choice advocates are moving into the public messaging arena with “brazenly manipulative” flicks that rely on shallow “sound bites.” He cites the screening of five documentaries at an upcoming national conference in San Franscisco to argue his point.
I can’t comment on them as a whole–I haven’t seen them all–but I would like to point out that there will actually be at least eight screenings at next month’s conference. Among them will be a brief sample of a proposed six-part documentary series called School, Inc. Taking Educational Excellence from Candle to Flame. This series, inspired by James Burke’s Connections and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, would take viewers on a world-wide quest to answer one very important question: why is excellence routinely replicated and spread on a massive scale in every field except education?
The series hasn’t been shot yet, and perhaps distributors today won’t think viewers are still interested in the kind of challenging, thought-provoking documentary series that so captivated me (and millions of others) in my teen years. But the project’s advisory board includes Jay Mathews, Paul Peterson, James Tooley, and Michael Horn, my co-producers and co-writers (Patrick Prentice and Tim Baney) have more than half-a-century of documentary filmmaking experience between them, and I’ve been studying school systems around the globe and across history for the better part of two decades. We’re confident that this series will be both substantive and entertaining, and think that American (and foreign) audiences are very interested in the subject matter. As we start to pitch to distributors in the coming months, we’ll find out if they agree.
Stay tuned….
A Severe Irony Deficiency
Tomorrow night at 8:00pm, Fox Business News will air a John Stossel special on the failures of state-run schooling and the merits of parental choice and competition in education. I make an appearance, as do Jeanne Allen and James Tooley.
News of the show is already making the rounds, and over at DemocraticUnderground.com, one poster is very upset about it, writing:
When will these TRAITORS stop trying to ruin this country?
HOW can AMERICANS be AGAINST public education?
Stossel is throwing out every right-wing argument possible in his namby pamby singsong way while he “interviews” a “panel” of people (who I suspect are plants) saying things like preschool is a waste of money and why invest in an already-failing system….
I hate Stossel and I hate all of those who think the way he does.
This poster goes by the screen name “Live Love Laugh.” I guess there wasn’t enough space to tack “Hate” onto the end.
What this poster–and many good people on the American left–have yet to grasp is that critics of state monopoly schooling are NOT against public education. On the contrary, it is our commitment to the ideals of public education that compels us to pursue them by the most effective means possible, and to abandon the system that has proven itself, over many many generations, incapable of fulfilling them. I wrote about this crucial point more than a decade ago in Education Week, in a piece titled: “Are Public Schools Hazardous to Public Education.”
Fortunately, a small but steadily growing number of American liberals have already grasped this pivotal difference between means and ends, as the growing Democratic support for Florida’s school choice tax credit program evinces. Giving all families, particularly low income families, an easier choice between state-run and independent schools is the best way to advance the ideals of public education.
Fear of Freedom Leaves Only Faith Healing for Our Schools
Historian Diane Ravitch drives me nuts. She has written numerous, terrific books chronicling the ills of government control of education, including the wrenching social conflict it has caused; the ejection of meaningful content from textbooks and tests it has required; and the dominance of educrats over parents and children it has enabled. She has been, essentially, the official historian of government-schooling’s failure. And yet, in a new blog interview with journalist John Merrow, she appears not to comprehend the most important lesson her copious works have to offer: that government education is doomed to fail.
Why the huge disconnect between her historiography and willingness to act on its clear implications? Because, it appears, as much as she knows that government schooling fails, she fears educational freedom even more. “Privatization,” in her mind, is simply too dangerous:
I remember your saying in an interview years ago that you favored public schools but not the public school system that we have. In New Orleans Paul Vallas has called for ‘a system of schools, not a school system.’ What’s your ideal approach? Are we moving in that direction?
If “a system of schools” means that the public schools should be handed over to anyone who wants to run a school, then I think we are headed in the wrong direction. Privatization will not help us achieve our goals. We know from the recent CREDO study at Stanford that charter schools run the gamut from excellent to abysmal, and many studies have found that charters, on average, produce no better results than the regular public schools. Deregulation nearly destroyed our economy in the past decade, and we better be careful that we don’t destroy our public schools too.
Unfortunately, while Prof. Ravitch knows a gigantic amount about education history, she exhibits precious little understanding of freedom or its economic subset, free markets. For one thing, charter schooling – a system by which public schools are given a right to exist and largely held accountable by government – isn’t even close to “privatization,” if by that we mean taking control from government and giving it to free, “private” individuals. Worse, Ravitch evinces a reflexive and, frankly, simplistic fear of free markets in hyperbolically asserting that “deregulation nearly destroyed our economy in the past decade.” I’d strongly suggest that she explore some non-education history – for instance, that of government-sponsored institutions such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; federal laws such as the Community Reinvestment Act; and federal regulation – before making any such over-the-top declaration again.
Ultimately, it seems likely that Prof. Ravitch fails to grasp – or, perhaps, to intuitively feel – how freedom works, and hence she fears it. Like many people, maybe she’s just not comfortable with seemingly ethereal spontaneous order, and needs to have some higher power pulling the strings to feel safe. Perhaps she fails to see how freedom, by fostering competition and innovation, produces all of the wonderful things we take for granted. Maybe she doesn’t really understand that it is due to freedom that we have an abundance of computers, coffee cups, cars, houses, package delivery services, miracle drugs, and pencils, not to mention religious pluralism, marketplaces of idea, and even happiness.
Want to Know Why the U.K. Tory Party Is Revamping its Development Policy?
If so, just pick up a copy of James Tooley’s The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves.
The Tories have looked at the evidence amassed by James and his colleagues (see p. 36 of their new report) and concluded that the best way to advance education in developing countries is to encourage and support existing entrepreneurial schools that are already serving the poor. And if the polls are any guide, that will likely be official government policy in the U.K. before too long.
Congratulations to James, Pauline Dixon, and their wonderful team for bringing sanity to the development policy debate.
A Tree Grows in Washington
The front-page of the Washington Post’s latest Outlook section features a review of James Tooley’s wonderful book The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves. From the review:
The officials Tooley encountered in his travels often denied the existence (much less the superiority) of private schools for low-income children. “There are no private schools for the poor,” a bureaucrat in China’s Gansu province told Tooley, “because the People’s Republic has provided all the poor with public schools. So what you propose to research does not only not exist, it is also a logical impossibility.”
Undeterred, Tooley spent years surveying private schools across the developing world. He found that, on average, they had smaller class sizes, higher test scores and more motivated teachers, all while spending less than public schools…. Tooley blasts development experts for recognizing the problems with public education and still insisting that more investment in public schools is the way to go. “Why wasn’t anyone else thinking that private schools might be part of a quicker, easier, more effective solution?” he asks.
… Tooley, meanwhile, with a Rough Guide in one pocket and an endless supply of exclamation points in the other, drowns readers in local color, detailing every “bright-eyed” school child and every “thin drifting smog” above a shantytown.
Still, Tooley’s passion comes off as genuine.
People Are Discovering A Beautiful Read
I’m a bit ashamed to admit it: I just finished reading The Beautiful Tree, Professor James Tooley’s new book recounting his remarkable travels through some of the world’s poorest slums discovering for-profit private school after for-profit private school. I’m ashamed because The Beautiful Tree is a Cato book and I should have read it long before it became publicly available. Fortunately, it seems many people outside of Cato caught on to the importance of Tooley’s work the moment they heard about it.
Yesterday, the Atlantic‘s Clive Crook blogged about Tooley’s book, calling Tooley “an unsung hero of development policy” for bringing to light — and refusing to let others blot that light out — how mutual self-interest between entrepreneurs and poor families brings education to the world’s poorest children. And there’s the companion story: How billions of government dollars have erected some relatively nice public school buildings but have created an utterly dilapidated public school system, one that enriches government employees while leaving children — sometimes literally — to fend for themselves.
In addition to the blogosphere, the national airwaves have begun carrying the uplifting story of Tooley’s findings. On Wednesday, ABC News NOW ran a lengthy interview with Prof. Tooley in which he laid out many of the book’s major themes. And the book was only released, for all intents and purposes, that same day; much more coverage is no doubt forthcoming.
It needs to be.
The Beautiful Tree, quite simply, contains lessons applicable not only to slums or developing nations, but to all people everywhere, and they need to be learned. In the United States, whether the subject is government-driven academic standards or the desirability of for-profit education, this book offers essential insights. But many readers will find the overall lesson tough to take: The cure for what ails us is not more government schooling — providing education the way we think it’s always been done — but embracing freedom for both schools and parents.
Whether or not this lesson is tough to stomach, it must be acknowledged by all who honestly seek what is best for our children. For as Tooley’s work makes abundantly clear, denying reality — no matter how unexpected or politically inconvenient it may be — only ends up hurting the people we most want to help.
New at Cato
Here are a few highlights from Cato Today, a daily email from the Cato Institute. You can subscribe here.
- Malou Innocent argues that the United States should not increase its troop presence in Pakistan in a new Cato Policy Analysis.
- Doug Bandow discusses Tax Freedom Day in the American Spectator.
- Watch Tucker Carlson discuss whether a president should blame problems on past administrations on Fox News.
- Chris Edwards is finishing his live debate with French economist Thomas Piketty over whether the rich should pay higher tax rates. Readers decide who wins, so don’t miss the chance to cast your vote.
- Join the Cato Institute Wednesday, April 15 to hear James Tooley, author of The Beautiful Tree:A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves, discuss successful ways to educate the world’s poor.
Not Waiting for Government
As Tad DeHaven mentioned the other day, CNN reported recently that business owners and residents on Hawaii’s Kauai island got together and made repairs to a state park — in eight days — that the state had said would cost $4 million and might not get done for months. Businesses were losing money since people couldn’t visit the park, so they decided to take matters into their own hands.
“We can wait around for the state or federal government to make this move, or we can go out and do our part,” [kayaking company owner Ivan] Slack said. “Just like everyone’s sitting around waiting for a stimulus check, we were waiting for this but decided we couldn’t wait anymore.”…
“We shouldn’t have to do this, but when it gets to a state level, it just gets so bureaucratic, something that took us eight days would have taken them years,” said Troy Martin of Martin Steel, who donated machinery and steel for the repairs. “So we got together — the community — and we got it done.”
It reminds me of the story 20 years ago of how Donald Trump got tired of watching the city of New York take six years to renovate a skating rink, so he just called up Mayor Ed Koch, offered to do it himself, and got the job done in less than four months. He got so enamored of the skating rink that he ended up getting the concession to run it.
And it also reminds me of the stories in James Tooley’s brand-new book, The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves, which talks about how poor people in China, India, and Africa have set up schools for their children because government schools were absent or of poor quality.
If government would get out of the way, businesses, churches, charities, and individuals would solve a lot more social problems.
Week in Review: Successful Voucher Programs, Immigration Debates and a New Path for Africa
Federal Study Supports School Vouchers
Last week, a U.S. Department of Education study revealed that students participating in a Washington D.C. voucher pilot program outperformed peers attending public schools.
According to The Washington Post, the study found that “students who used the vouchers received reading scores that placed them nearly four months ahead of peers who remained in public school.” In a statement, education secretary Arne Duncan said that the Obama administration “does not want to pull participating students out of the program but does not support its continuation.”
Why then did the Obama administration “let Congress slash the jugular of DC’s school voucher program despite almost certainly having an evaluation in hand showing that students in the program did better than those who tried to get vouchers and failed?”
The answer, says Cato scholar Neal McCluskey, lies in special interests and an unwillingness to embrace change after decades of maintaining the status quo:
It is not just the awesome political power of special interests, however, that keeps the monopoly in place. As Terry Moe has found, many Americans have a deep, emotional attachment to public schooling, one likely rooted in a conviction that public schooling is essential to American unity and success. It is an inaccurate conviction — public schooling is all-too-often divisive where homogeneity does not already exist, and Americans successfully educated themselves long before “public schooling” became widespread or mandatory — but the conviction nonetheless is there. Indeed, most people acknowledge that public schooling is broken, but feel they still must love it.
Susan L. Aud and Leon Michos found the program saved the city nearly $8 million in education costs in a 2006 Cato study that examined the fiscal impact of the voucher program.
To learn more about the positive effect of school choice on poor communities around the world, join the Cato Institute on April 15 to discuss James Tooley’s new book, The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves.
Obama Announces New Direction on Immigration
The New York Times reports, “President Obama plans to begin addressing the country’s immigration system this year, including looking for a path for illegal immigrants to become legal, a senior administration official said on Wednesday.”
In the immigration chapter of the Cato Handbook for Policymakers, Cato trade analyst Daniel T. Griswold offered suggestions on immigration policy, which include:
- Expanding current legal immigration quotas, especially for employment-based visas.
- Creating a temporary worker program for lower-skilled workers to meet long-term labor demand and reduce incentives for illegal immigration.
- Refocusing border-control resources to keep criminals and terrorists out of the country.
In a 2002 Cato Policy Analysis, Griswold made the case for allowing Mexican laborers into the United States to work.
For more on the argument for open borders, watch Jason L. Riley of The Wall Street Journal editorial board speak about his book, Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders.
In Case You Couldn’t Join Us
Cato hosted a number of fascinating guests recently to speak about new books, reports and projects.
- Salon writer Glenn Greenwald discussed a new Cato study that exa
mines the successful drug decriminalization program in Portugal.
- Patri Friedman of the Seasteading Institute explained his project to build self-sufficient deep-sea platforms that would empower individuals to break free of national governments and start their own societies on the ocean.
- Dambisa Moyo, author of the book Dead Aid, spoke about her research that shows how government-to-government aid fails. She proposed an “aid-free solution” to development, based on the experience of successful African countries.
Find full-length videos to all Cato events on Cato’s events archive page.
Also, don’t miss Friday’s Cato Daily Podcast with legal policy analyst David Rittgers on Obama’s surge strategy in Afghanistan.
Poor Choices Lead to Better Education
What would you do if you earned about a dollar a day and wanted a better life for your kids?
And what if your local public schools just weren’t working — with teachers often cutting classes or showing up only to sip tea and read the paper, ignoring their students. If you’re like the majority of poor Ghanians, Kenyans, Nigerians, Indians, and Chinese that professor James Tooley has studied over the past decade, you’d pay for private schooling at tuition around $2/month.
From impoverished fishing villages to blighted ghettos like those featured in Slumdog Millionaire, from the largest shanty-town in Africa to the remote farming communities of inland China, the poorest people on Earth are not waiting for educational handouts. They are taking matters into their own hands and sending their children to private schools in their own neighborhoods and villages.
Next Wednesday at noon, James Tooley will be at Cato’s DC headquarters to launch his book The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey into how the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves.
His stories are compelling — his discovery of private schools serving slum children in Hyderabad, his thoughts while being interrogated by one of Mugabe’s goons in a basement cell in Zimbabwe, his reaction to the party functionary in Gansu, China who told him that the private schools he had just visited did not exist. In addition to James’ stories, you’ll also hear those of Reshma Lohia, who runs Lohia’s Little Angels — a school serving 500 poor children in Hyderabad, India.
When I report my findings that parent-driven education markets outperform state-run school monopolies, one of the most common objections I hear is that many parents — especially poor, marginally-educated ones — couldn’t make wise choices for their kids. If you’ve ever pondered that concern, you owe it to yourself to stop by the Cato Institute next Wednesday at noon. Because James has not only chronicled the existence of private schools serving vast numbers of the poor, he has documented in peer-reviewed studies how their performance compares to that of nearby public schools spending many times as much per pupil.
You can register for the event here and help spread the word on Facebook. We look forward to seeing you.
New at Cato Unbound
This month’s Cato Unbound continues our tradition of stirring up controversy. The lead essay is by Patri Friedman, who challenges the advocates of liberty as follows:
I deeply yearn to live in an actual free society, not just to imagine a theoretical future utopia or achieve small incremental gains in freedom. For many years, I enthusiastically advocated for liberty under the vague assumption that advocacy would help our cause. However, I recently began trying to create free societies as my full-time job, and this has given me a dramatic perspective shift from my days of armchair philosophizing. My new perspective is that the advocacy approach which many libertarian individuals, groups, and think tanks follow (including me sometimes, sadly) is an utter waste of time.
Argument has refined our principles, and academic research has enlarged our understanding, but they have gotten us no closer to an actual libertarian state. Our debating springs not from calculated strategy, but from an intuitive “folk activism”: an instinct to seek political change through personal interaction, born in our hunter-gatherer days when all politics was personal. In the modern world, however, bad policies are the result of human action, not human design. To change them we must understand how they emerge from human interaction, and then alter the web of incentives that drives behavior. Attempts to directly influence people or ideas without changing incentives, such as the U.S. Libertarian Party, the Ron Paul campaign, and academic research, are thus useless for achieving real-world liberty.
Cato isn’t called out by name, but it easily could have been. Like I said, Cato Unbound tries to be controversial.
What’s needed, Friedman claims, is not more study or advocacy, but a change in the deeper institutional structures that give rise to government policies. Competition among states (and non-state agents!), new technologies, and new intentional communities may just induce old-fashioned governments to behave a whole lot better. By contrast, just recommending somewhat better policies won’t do very much, not if all we do is write about them. (Friedman seems particularly skeptical about blogs. Ahem.)
Is this just a young person’s impatience? Or has Friedman found a serious weakness in libertarian activism? One reply I might make is that Cato scholars have researched quite a few topics that Friedman would probably find worthwhile. It’s important to document these things, and much of this work directly furthers the kind of structural reform that Friedman favors.
Consider the many Cato scholars who have heralded the rise of tax competition — in which states feel increasing pressure to deliver a low-cost product when their taxpayers can move elsewhere. Or consider Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter, a book whose conclusions inform Friedman’s own project. This book began with a series of discussions among public policy scholars (on a blog no less!). Cato actively promoted Caplan’s work, and we would hope that Friedman would find this an effort well-spent. An upcoming event with author James Tooley shows how the world’s poor are founding their own schools to educate themselves, admirably free from any state interference — a new, private social practice bests an incompetent government! These things matter, I’d say, and they matter even if we accept Friedman’s premises. (We’re also giving a platform to Friedman, both here and at an event on April 7.)
In any case, this a big and very important discussion for the libertarian movement, of which the Cato Institute is only a part. Cato Unbound will have a remarkable series of panelists commenting throughout this week and next, including Jason Sorens, founder of the Free State Project; Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and noted philanthropist; and Brian Doherty, who has researched and written about more forms of libertarian activism than most of us can even recall. Whatever side of the debate you end up taking, be sure to stop by to catch this month’s edition of Cato Unbound.
A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste (after High School)
The South Carolina NAACP is among the most strident opponents of a new education tax credit proposal in that state that would make it easier for families — especially poor families — to choose private schools for their kids.
But the NAACP’s national platform states that:
The NAACP is a leading advocate of equal access to quality education. In an effort to promote and ensure education opportunities for minority youth, the NAACP offers the following national scholarships: Earl G. Graves Scholarship, Agnes Jones Scholarship, …. These awards help eliminate financial difficulties that may hinder students’ education goals.
Doesn’t that put the SC NAACP’s position into clear conflict with its parent organization? Actually, no. I deleted the qualifier “higher” before the word “education” in the block quote above. The NAACP strongly supports scholarships for poor kids to attend private schools, so long as the kids are over 18 or so.
A few years ago I debated this bizarre inconsistency with a very candid and pleasant NAACP representative, and his response boiled down to this: ”I lived through the Jim Crow South and I don’t trust a bunch of white Republicans to have our best interests in mind.” Fair enough. We shouldn’t trust politicians of any stripe to have the public’s interests in mind on any issue. We should instead look at what actually works best both here and around the world, and do that.
From the largest shanty town in Africa, to the slums of Hyderabad, India, to the remote rural villages of in-land China, the poor are already choosing private schools in vast numbers. And those schools are significantly outperforming their public sector counterparts at a fraction of the cost. Their stories are told in The Beautiful Tree, a compelling new narrative non-fiction book by scholar and world-traveler James Tooley. Cato is launching the book at noon on April 15th at our DC headquarters. I hope someone from the NAACP will attend.
Oh, and in case it matters to anyone, the lead advocate of SC’s tax credit school choice program is state senator Robert Ford, an African American Democrat. For some reason the NAACP still opposes it.
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