Both vouchers and charters are private schools funded with public money, but exempt from all the laws that public schools are mandated to follow.
And they will only be exempt so long as public schools are there to catch the rejects.
1. I think that the case for spending “public money” (i.e., money extracted from taxpayers) on schools is quite weak. Until I see a well-controlled experiment, I will be skeptical of the benefit of schools. And whatever the benefit turns out to be for the child and the parents, the social benefit of schools (that is, the benefit over and beyond the private benefit that parents would be willing to pay for out of their own resources) is only a fraction of that.
2. In theory, there is a case for using schools to mold citizens by imparting social norms. In practice, I don’t agree with a lot of the ideology that goes into the molding nowadays. So for me, the “molding citizens” argument is not as compelling as it could be.
3. I do not think that we need to make taxpayer-funded schooling universal. Take “universal pre-K,” for example. If we had universal pre-K, most of the money would be spent on children whose parents would already send their children to pre-K. As far as I know, the research on pre-K tends to find benefits only for children from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. If we are going to spend taxpayer money on pre-K, I would say that we should spend it only on children from the most disadvantaged backgrounds.
4. I would follow the same reasoning with vouchers for primary school. I would only provide money where research shows benefits.
5. It might turn out that no child really benefits from primary school. I firmly believe that human nature has evolved to make us teachers and learners. But are we sure that classrooms are the most cost-effective approach? Again, as far as I know, we don’t have evidence based on randomized, controlled trials.
6. In particular, we should ask whether “the rejects” really benefit from school. If not, then why put them through it? If so, then it should be possible to provide them with sufficient voucher money to induce an entrepreneur to provide the schooling that benefits them.
People pay taxes. Giving them a voucher for schools just returns that money to them. If that’s stealing public money then such money was stolen in the first place when it was taxed. If you want cut both vouchers and taxes and then they can just pay cash.
Agree that the worst thing about public schooling is the ideology kids are taught. Most people can’t afford to pay taxes and then pay for private school (paying twice). Taxing them effectively deprived them of the ability to choose a school that teaches values they support.
“Rejects” may be objects of pity and charity, but at the end of the day it’s asinine to ruin our entire education system worrying about what amount to resource sinks. Their needs have to be balanced with other people’s needs in a rational way, not a politically driven and counter productive way. Moreover, Arnold’s point about school being largely useless to them despite all the spending and turning over backwards to accommodate them is important.
The trouble is that most families only pay a fraction in taxes for what it costs to educate their kids, as least at current prices. (The question of what would happen to prices in some alternative equilibrium of universal private schooling is a different and complicated matter.)
For example, in my neighborhood, there are a lot of retirees, and they all pay property taxes to the school district, which subsidizes the families with kids. Furthermore, families pay the same amount of tax no matter how many kids they have, so the “just give me my taxes back” would convert them from 0% marginal cost to 100% per additional kid.
The idea of vouchers is that if education produces social benefits worth the expenditure of the subsidy, then parents should be able to direct that subsidy to any school – government, charter, or private – which can be certified to produce that same public benefit.
Of course, few people are either too self-interested or ideologically committed to want to express that public benefit explicitly and in a ‘legible’ manner subject to quantitative evaluation, in part out of suspicion of what potentially ugly results would actually reveal.
People pay a fraction in taxes what it costs to educate their kids. Except that in some ways it’s on the installment plan…kids in school for 12 years, property taxes for life.
The bigger problem is that we seem to have reached a tipping point in which large portions of the economy have been allocated into the ‘taxes’ category: Education, healthcare, basic retirement income, basic welfare, consumer protection, basic science, etc.
Once in that category, a whole host of dysfunctional dynamics start to kick in:
(1) There is no feedback between investment and outcomes…at least outcomes relevant to the putative objective (education vs. child care vs. welfare for zero marginal utility workers)
(2) Implementation becomes one-size-fits-all
(3) Resource allocation is mediated by political factors, not economic/real-world ones
(4) Resources become fungible across objectives and stakeholder groups. Education dollars are captured for other purposes (pension, political re-investment, special needs), including purposes entirely unrelated to the original objective. Same for all other tax dollars in the pot.
Etc.
So we wind up with, as Glenn Reynolds puts it, ‘more government (taxes) than we need and less than we pay for.’ And the switching costs are massive.
So vouchers are a way to lower the switching costs and move away from one local optimal point toward a different one.
Vouchers with crappy public safety net schools are the educational equivalent to European healthcare systems where there are crappy public hospitals with better private alternatives for those that can pay.
Handle outlined the current situation in a different post, which I’ll paraphrase as “there is no consensus on a ‘good society’ or ‘acceptable norms’. Under that situation, I find myself wondering if the two-level (public/private) model is the most broadly acceptable lowest common denominator. There’s a repository for the dysfunctional/nonfunctional bottom quartile and alternatives for the rest of society. And the existence of private options allows for some degree of competition and individual selection.
Excepting the issue of # of kids, lifetime education taxes should equal lifetime education expenditure. You are being subsidized by retirees, but will one day be a subsidizer.
The other comment below is good.
The rebuttal sounds reasonable to me. I would just further extend it to higher education. Where is the randomized, controlled trial demonstrating their effectiveness? And why provide funding to support individuals who can pay for their own education privately anyway? In a previous post, Dr. Kling had pointed out the financial ruin impending for many states due to unfunded retirement liabilities. One wonders how much of that burden is attributable to college and university personnel. And how are states supposed to cut back on spending on these when so many of their personnel are granted jobs for life. Universities as currently constituted are an anachronism kept alive solely by brute political force.
You assume that the ostensible educational benefits of the public school system are the real reason the system exists. It seems to me that the main benefit of both public and private schools is that they provide a relatively safe place to put the kids while parents work outside the home. Cheap day care.
Well, horribly expensive daycare with enormous, pointless administrative overhead. Also, entertaining daytime activity is one of the kinds of things that private markets excel at providing. As a parent of homeschooled kids, I can say there is plenty to do despite competition from massively subsided government institutions
Agree that it is horribly expensive in actual cost, but cheap to the consumer at the point of consumption. That homeschooling is as popular as it is shows how little the $12,000 or so per pupil per year the public schools spend actually buys.
I would be willing to bet that most children benefit from the basic reading/writing/’rithmetic they learn in primary school; it’s secondary school that seems more likely to be a waste, in my opinion, especially because the opportunity cost is higher. IE, you’re older, more physically and emotionally mature, and you could be in the labor market somewhere, getting paid and developing skills instead of sitting in class learning geometry or whatever and forgetting all of it within six months.
This is a good point. In _Public education: An autopsy_ by Myron Lieberman, the author asserts that mandatory high school attendance is to the USA what the “Socialist Banking System” was in the USSR.
The USSR didn’t have a functioning market for stocks and bonds and real estate, so all the Soviet citizens had was the “socialist bank” where you deposited your rubles and got a tiny bit of interest. The lack of alternative investments in closely held businesses or traded stocks kept you from realizing how profoundly you were being deprived of better options.
Lieberman says we have some aspect of the same thing in the USA with the teenage labor market. If you could leave school at 14 or 15 and work full time year round at a “real job” with steady skills acquisition and advancement, it would be clear what the opportunity cost of lost wages really is, while you sit in Geometry class.
The metaphor works for me–enough to be memorable.
That title is a free download on the web, BTW.
See ERIC, e.g., eric.ed.gov published 1993.
Apologies for mentioning this book title and metaphor repeatedly.
Great discussions–I have been a tad hypomanic lately and am trying to post less, not least because staying on topic is a perennial challenge.
I’d be eager to hear Ed Realist respond!
Question for Ed Realist: Why can’t someone stipulate your criticism and still support vouchers/charters/choice-of-some-kind? Some reforms to the current public system prove politically impossible (“throw out the disruptive kids”). And some school districts are broken beyond fixing. Voucher/Charters offer an end-around where some of these reforms can be enacted piece meal, or where parents can exit without moving. Yes, the publics are there to pick up the slack. So what? Some % of kids get the benefit of the reforms/ exit from the system. That’s fine unless the cherry picking makes someone worse off.
One problem is that few people are disinterested in the outcome of this debate, myself included, and so you have to discount what everybody argues by understanding that they are “talking their book”.
A parent with kids in public school may have serious doubts about whether charters are “better” in any valid sense, but he or she is also sorely tempted to stay quiet about those objections if it means there is a socially acceptable cover story that allows for enough public and political support for an escape hatch from an incorrigibly crazy system for which there are no viable political remediations. I think I remember this “voluntary silence on one topic resulting from necessary silence on another” from a book about Communist societies, which is a depressing comment on what is happening to our own society.
Likewise, an outstanding public school teacher cant do anything to cure the system insanity, but has no escape hatch, and so wants to preserve a critical mass of good and smart students as an economically captive audience. If those folks use vouchers and the cream of the public school is skimmed away, the public school job just got much worse. That’s really unfair, especially if those other schools have ways of effectively circumventing the “take every kid” requirement that public schools cant avoid.
Someone in that situation may sympathize with parents’ legitimate concerns bordering on desperation, but again, they are sorely tempted to keep quiet about those problems (also because of intense ideological social pressure) and instead just emphasize a critical counter-narrative.
The poverty of this kind and manner of discourse is really just fallout from the PC inquisition which continues to utterly demolish any remnant of forthright honesty and rigor in our society’s public intellectual life.
they are “talking their book”
True enough! But at least in the comments of Arnold Kling’s weblog I hope we can do better than just argue our corners…
I hope that Ed Realist (whose work I have enjoyed) has a moment to respond. As I interpret his argument contra charters/vouchers, it relies on either a) the kids ‘left behind’ in a choice system doing worse than status quo, b) the choice scheme proving more expensive than the status quo and us not being willing to pay the price, c) it’s the thin end of a wedge to destroy a largely functioning public system. These criticisms seem to me addressable, but I don’t want to rebut a misconstrued version of his argument.
I would simply eliminate the mandatory attendance laws and the social promotion altogether.
Are schools that accept vouchers exempt from all laws that public schools are mandated to follow?
I thought one criticism of vouchers was that they too prescriptive on charters to follow the public school model, that it doesn’t give much margin for innovation.
But, if this commenter is correct, the answer should be rolling back these laws for both public and charter schools, rather than restricting choice to just public schools.
“I don’t agree with a lot of the ideology that goes into the molding nowadays.”
I’d be curious as to what ideology Kling sees that he disagrees with. I take my kids to public elementary school; I’m watching for contentious ideology and haven’t seen anything.
“But are we sure that classrooms are the most cost-effective approach?”
What is the alternative to classrooms? Outdoors? Swimming pools and gyms? Lots of child care programs feature those.
> I take my kids to public elementary school; I’m watching for contentious ideology and haven’t seen anything.
Keep looking. It ramps up as they get older.
It also depends on what you categorize as ‘contentious’.
“Until I see a well-controlled experiment, I will be skeptical of the benefit of schools. ”
Would you allow one of your children in this control group?
You might be comfortable, as an educator of some means, with the idea that your child, likely someone of above average intelligence and bearing, would end up supervised in a responsible way, and that they would have the resources and support to pursue various interests that would serve their development. But what if being in this control group meant you were prohibited from providing such resources? You go to work, and they just figure it out, for the duration of their childhood.
Would you be OK with that?
That is a worthy question.
That depends what you mean by a control group. If you are suggesting that the control group would not be educated at all, I think that’s a strawman.
A reasonable system without compulsory attendance as we know it today would simply impose learning achievement requirements every year or every few years, to be backed up by tests, with the penalty for failure being that you have to enroll the kid in an approved school. I like this approach because it provides kids who respond poorly to the traditional system — such as myself at that age — with the option of finding their own ways to achieve the goals and have done.
The main problem with this argument is that it is almost certainly false for charters, vouchers probably not. There may be a state that allows charters to choose who to enroll, but I am not aware of it. Charters take everyone.
Note–Arnold’s software is blocking my posts even though there aren’t any links. Probably long. So I’ll stop from posting the last one. [Note: It’s not my software. It is the way wordpress works, perhaps with some instructions I gave it years ago. I often go days without checking comments, so a comment may be stuck in limbo for days before I release it.–Arnold]
As to this, it’s not true. Charters skim. They also cherrypick. They are indeed allowed to reject candidates. There are charters for immigrants only, charters for blacks only, charters for Spanish-speakers only, charters for academically advanced.
Moreover, you have a right to attend public school, but you don’t have a right to attend a charter.
simply not true, and they have many regulations they need to follow.
https://www.ecs.org/charter-school-policies/
I’m surprised to see this post characterized as a “rebuttal”, when in fact it’s no such thing. I made no argument in favor of public schools (although I do favor them). I simply stated that vouchers and charters are not public schools, but rather private schools paid for by public funds. I see nothing rebutting that assertion. Rather, Arnold doesn’t want public schools.
A lot of the assertions I see in his post and in the comments are untrue or a serious misunderstanding of history, but Arnold’s software blocks comments that have links to their own work. So I’ll just give the names to the articles in this comment and then add a second post with links, or you can just check my site. Also, one of the reason I write less is because posts like this require a lot of organization and thinking. I have a lot to do today (last free day before school work days start) so forgive the disorganization.
“Case for extracting public money is weak” as well as “public school is just daycare, etc”.–I’m not going to argue for or against these assertions. There’s some practical truth to the second, but probably not the first. However, here’s something people rarely consider: US public schools were willingly funded to an extent unprecedented in history for 150 years at the state and local community. And the rest of the world clearly sees our model as a good idea. It’s pretty obvious (albeit unproven) that both Asians and Hispanics bring their kids here in no small part to get in on the education. The rest of the developed world followed America’s example in increasing access to education and broadening its mandate, only catching up by the end of the last century. (see part one of my Caplan review).
And until 50 years ago, the federal government stayed out of it because the southern states wouldn’t fund equal education for blacks and the Catholic politicians wouldn’t fund public schools unless their religious schools got money. Fifty years ago, the ESEA changed all that. Most of the problems that exist in public schools began when local communities were forced to pay for court ordered equity, or forced to take money to pay for Congress-imposed requirements. (see part 1 of my Caplan review for cites).
But the *mindset* of public education has still not changed. People still value it. American beliefs about general education as an improvement over focused vocational education have remain unchanged. They also value teachers. Elites of both parties don’t value teachers, and the last two presidents, from different parties, have been focused on achieving all of the traditional “education reform”: charters, accountability, vouchers, standards. They got everything they wanted–and the public HATED it. Traditional education reformers are reeling. (See The End of Education Reform? but also just read Michael Petrilli, Rick Hess, or a recent piece by Checker Finn–this is a widely accepted reality). Similarly, there was a big push to end tenure across many states, and the vast majority of them are being rolled back (see Shibboleths of Tenure Haters). Politicians feel education is broken. But if you look at the public surveys (Ed next does one every year), you’ll see that there’s been no sea change in public opinion. The public’s pretty happy. Even Republican voters only seem to like education reform when it comes to paying taxes for other people’s schools. You all might feel like you’re a significant chunk of people who hold these views, but collectively, you’re fringe of fringe of fringe.
My point is that there’s no “case” for public education I need to make. It wins huge and constantly. And when those who ignore its popularity and its history pretty much doom often excellent ideas for changing it. Changing public education requires understanding that making silly statements about how it’s just daycare (which it certainly is in no small part in some cases) is basically saying “your kids aren’t worth educating” and that’s a really stupid thing to do.
Chunking here.
“I do not think that we need to make taxpayer-funded schooling universal. ” and “there’s no case for it”:
Practically speaking, American education had a lot do to with American productivity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries–this isn’t an area I follow, but see this review of Caplan’s book for discussion of Schulz and Goldin. American productivity is a pretty good case for public school funding, along with the fact that most countries saw our success and followed our lead. The notion that education is primarily an individual benefit is very new, and probably untrue–although it’s certainly how politicians, economists, and the public consider it today. See various David Labaree books (Someone has to fail and How to succeed in school without really learning in particular).
“Universal pre-k”–You suddenly got very specific. The argument for universal pre-k is based on the Social Security argument–the proponents want to make sure it stays around and can’t get funding cut. And there’s not much evidence it helps even the most disadvantaged. I would fund need-based pre-k simply to get kids into a better environment, but universal pre-k is moronic.
But past pre-K, the idea that most people could afford private school is just ludicrous. Private schools sell exclusivity, peers, and network–not education. They are designed to be profitable or at the very least not lose money. Catholic schools have become a shadow of their prior selves once they couldn’t rely on clerics to teach–and are now very similar to secular private schools as a result. And private schools would have no mandate to educate anyone. There’d be no interest in educating any but a fraction of poor children, and private schools would undoubtedly discriminate–I can imagine all sorts of all-Asian schools flatly refusing students of any other ethnicity. Moreover, many parents would simply ignore education entirely, and that would indisputably be bad for the country.
The case for public education as a social good is indisputable. I can’t even believe anyone would argue with it. You really think poor children would learn to read or write without instruction? You really want to ignore the existence of really bright poor kids who would never be found without public education? (And make no mistake, they’re found all the time.)
And how would these vouchers for primary school work? You give a kid a test and say “I’m sorry, this kid isn’t worth educating. His reading ability will never get past 6th grade, and frankly, his value to employers won’t be any more with that ability than without. So keep him at home until he’s 12 and send him to work.” Yeah, good luck with that.
Arguing against primary public school is foolish. I think one thing people confuse (although I didn’t think Arnold did until now) is the difference between “change in learning outcomes” and “no learning whatsoever”. My understanding of the Null Hypothesis is that treatment doesn’t change outcomes. I agree. But saying “look, improved teacher quality won’t change outcomes” is NOT the same as saying “kids learn the same thing whether or not they’re put in school”. (see “The Many Failings of Value Added Modeling”).
To illustrate, consider what Arnold’s demand to “prove that classroom learning is effective”. Right now, parents can choose to educate their own children or send them to private school. Rich parents can choose any method of education that they like, yet they seem to opt time and again for classroom based instruction. If the market was going to provide another option that would scale, much less meet the demands of the Null Hypothesis, where is it? For that matter, you yourself have observed the Null Hypothesis means that different “treatments” (online vs. classroom, staying at home vs classroom, Matrix induced blasts of data vs classroom instruction) don’t have different effects. So why are you suddenly demanding a random controlled test of other options that, in 200 years, haven’t revealed themselves as superior to those who can pay for it?
The only treatment left is “no formal schooling”. If you really want to try a randomized control study by leaving poor kids to sit at home to see if a similar group of kids sitting in school are more likely to learn to read and write, good luck getting it past IRB. Which kind of suggests the very idea is foolish, doesn’t it?
Also–and this is something that Kling, Caplan, and Cowen all ignore to an extent I find perplexing, unless they see it as a way to avoid criticism–the racial applications of this policy are appalling, risky, and pretty foolish. Any mandate to prove the value of additional education is going to mean vouchers will benefit whites and Asians and a very few blacks and Hispanics. So the rest of the blacks and Hispanics that your policies don’t think worth educating are just going to sit around all day? One thing I pointed out in an article somewhere is that yeah, schools are ACTUALLY LESS EXPENSIVE than jail. Not in the romantic sense, but in the very real sense. (Unstructured Musings on Choice) If all schools did was delay criminal start time by 10 years, what’s not to like? And of course they do more than that.
But the real issue, to me, is the total failure of these proposals to mention race or grapple with the racial imbalances of the “end or justify public school” mandate. And that’s why these policies are never taken seriously, and never engaged with. Few people want to say look, IQ by racial groups being what they are, how do you handle the unequal nature of the public education funding you are proposing? And so Caplan, Kling, et al aren’t required to state either that they don’t think such imbalances would occur (unlikely) or that it’s cheaper to invest in jails, or whatever their answer is.
https://www.ecs.org/charter-school-policies/
Seems like a good site for more info.
Ed Realist says my points (maybe even better) a) most folk haven’t found a better general way than classroom instruction by teachers. Homeschool works, possibly even better, but doesn’t scale for general. I have NOT heard of successful “neighborhood home schools”. Tho a loose enough voucher scheme might allow that.
b) In Forrest Gump, it was stated that IQ needs to be above 79 or so, with Forrest scoring 75. Many low IQ folk are as nice as Forrest, but the thing about being stupid is the frequency of making stupid mistakes. See the early spelling of Charlie from Flowers for Algernon. A good number of low IQ folk are mean, big, bullies, who would rather fight against the teacher and the teacher’s authority than do the very hard work of learning limited stuff.
Either such disruptive low IQ folk are segregated, or the whole class suffers.
A higher percentage of these folk are black, so racism needs to be explicitly handled.
Letting there be more state variety, and especially more smaller schools and more vocational schools, seems most likely to converge towards minimizing the dumb student problem. Probably also lots more apprenticeships.
Nothing “solves” that problem.
I’m constantly disappointed that simply paying kids money to study, do homework, and then do well on tests, doesn’t seem to have been seriously tried. I’d like to see more incentives for the dumb / slow students to do better. Weekly & daily rewards are likely to work better than longer term rewards. If the “system” is already spending $8k / year, they can move $1k per year towards the local students who do the most homework. Both results (good test scores) but also effort (doing homework — tho actually doing it, so checking is important and expensive) probably need some reward.
I’d think paying the kids directly would get them to do more studying — including finding out how to get by / know the answers with a minimal of study. Such gaming is inevitable in any system.
Regarding the “case for using schools to mold citizens by imparting social norms” – we can slice this into two distinct goals:
1. Giving students good norms. The objection “I don’t agree with a lot of the ideology that goes into the molding nowadays” is a good rebuttal to this.
2. Giving students common norms. Here the objection is not as strong. It might be important that as many as possible Americans share some core values and experiences, where this core may be somewhat arbitrary. Here there may be a trade-off between having good values and having idiosyncratic ones.