Thursday, January 07, 2016

Educational Reform : Free Market Competition

Educational reform is seen as a threat to public education and as a result the general public cannot get it's collective head around the concept of competitive school systems replacing public schools. This is a very hard thing for the public to understand as public education has been around for every. Such a huge change is extremely hard to accept.

For an example of change, one cannot grasp that our current president and his political party are actually fully involved in destroying our society as it was founded on personal freedom and ownership of property as guaranteed by our Constitution. This has never happened before in our history of more then 236 years of our country's existence.

So to accept a complete change in how our children are educated is just added stress and struggle to make the right decision, but given parents know and understand what they have now to educate their children has failed, it isn't difficult for parents to know and understand something has to be done to establish an educational system that works for everyone. The public system is not working as designed.

More Evidence of School System Failure, But not of “Failure of Market Reform”
By John Merrifield

Recent mail included an announcement of Left Behind: Urban High Schools and the Failure of Market Reform (John Hopkins Press, 2015). Okay, so we have another finding that what is being tried — the latest central planning attempt — isn’t delivering noteworthy improvement in our school system outcomes, which is predictable, generally, from central planning’s awful track record. And more specifically, continued failure is predictable because we haven’t yet mustered an assault on the specific roots of the low performance problem. And the book yields further proof that a lot of education scholars have no idea what a market is.

From my experience, it seems like it is every one of them; certainly the vast majority of them. So, absolutely beware of education scholars pretending to evaluate markets in action. I have not yet read the book, but I can say with confidence that the book’s findings can provide no genuine insights into the nature of “Market Reform” in any form. The book announcement says the book’s contents arise from study of “four urban charter schools across the U.S. and four public high schools in New York City.” Those are not market settings.

In markets, price change informs and motivates the actions of product providers and consumers. Provision of schooling through chartered public schools is price controlled. Price control has proven disastrous for industries, including primary and secondary education, for over forty centuries.

Two other key ingredients of typical markets is easy entry; no formal entry barriers. But chartered public schools need formal authorization from each state’s charter authorizer, often just school districts. And another key ingredient of market settings is the potential to make a profit; something allowed in only a very few of the 43 states that allow chartered public schools.

Given the competition-crushing effects of price control, especially as seen in chartered public schools so far (huge waitlists = shortages → quality-dilution scandals predicted by economic theory and experience), allowing charter operators to pursue profit is not a good idea. Studying chartered public schools with price control everywhere, and especially in the few states that allow the toxic combination of price control and profit potential, does not, by any stretch, yield evidence of “market reform” in action.

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