Should we let market forces dictate which schools can continue?
This episode of This American Life talks about a community where Hasidic Jews, who are a majority of the local population, take control over the public school’s board of directors when their kids attend private school.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with the majority making their voice heard. But what do you do when a group of people really don’t want to use a certain benefit given by the government?
In 2012, the average schools’ budget was funded 44.8% by the local government, 45.1% by the state, and 10.1% by the federal government. The following chart helps to show that education has always largely been paid for by the states & local governments.
So, education is significantly funded by local property taxes, so the people living in that direct area are paying for education in that area. So, if you are paying property taxes, but choose to pay for private school and not use the public education system — what should we do?
One side would say that since it’s a public service, everyone should pay into it regardless. Because one never goes to the local park, should one be allowed to opt out of paying for it?
The other side does agree with the idea of education as a public service, but says that everyone should be able to choose where they want to go to school, whether it be public or private. Hence, the school voucher system: one chooses where they want to go and that school gets money from the government.
At the end of the day, it comes down to this: should we try our best to make all our schools equitable or allow “the market” to decide which schools survive?
For me, I can’t get behind school choice because it builds in a lot of risk into the system. That by design, some schools would fail. It’s not to say that our schools aren’t currently failing certain students or that a certain degree of failure isn’t good.
However, our education system isn’t like when they tried to revamp MySpace: it didn’t matter that they failed. Their existential crisis meant that Facebook monopolized our attention instead, not that there was a large loss for our society. For our education system, we need to embrace the taking of more calculated risks while raising the baseline educational attainment of all our schools.
It’s not to say that we wouldn’t find solutions quicker through a more market-oriented approach, but at what cost? I would say that the first problem we need to solve about our education system is not to create more “excellent” schools, but to make our low performing schools solid ones. To make sure all our kids have a good opportunity to succeed.
