• About

Sacred Cow Chips

Sacred Cow Chips

Tag Archives: Public School Monopoly

Single-Provider Education, Ideology, and Lunch

16 Sunday Feb 2020

Posted by Nuetzel in Education, School Choice

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Identity Politics, New York Times, Packed Lunches, Private education, Public School Monopoly, Scale Economies, School Choice, School Lunches, Slate, Social Justice

Advocates of public education sometimes can’t help themselves from demanding that parents abandon their own informed judgments and principles for the good of the collective. A friend sent me the links below along with his misgivings about the motives at play. These are his words:

“Here are two examples of something that drives me crazy and amounts to little more than treating my child (and me) as a [resource] to be spent for the improvement of others. The first calls for parents who pack lunches (because they are healthier and cheaper than school lunches) to stop packing and use the school hot lunch so the added scale of moths could improve foods for everybody.

The second is the same, but about attending public school instead of private – again, so that the parental force added to the public schools will help improve public schools. Never mind if public schools are actually good for you.” 

The links are from the New York Times and Slate, respectively:

Why Are You Still Packing Lunch for Your Kids?

If You Send Your Kid To Private School, You Are a Bad Person

In terms of the simple economics, I’d boil these motives down to two things: a desire to achieve scale economies, which is forgivable as far as it goes; and a desire to strengthen the public education monopoly. Of course the latter brings perks for all those who participate in the management and operation of public schools, which have absorbed an ever-increasing volume of resources with little or no improvement in academic results. But the motives involve politics as well as economics. The apparent mission of the public school monopoly encompasses more than the mere provision of education. As I have discussed in more detail in an earlier post, it fosters the inculcation of collectivist values in our children. Public schools, and a few private schools catering to wealthy progressives who would say public schools are good for your kids, are hotbeds of social justice doctrine and identity politics.

Here are my friend’s closing thoughts:

“I’ve always been resistant to private school because we already pay for public [schools] and public [schools] are good enough. But lately I’ve been thinking about private school, in large part to keep [my son] away from these sorts of folks who want to use him for their own purposes…”

Those purposes can be kept in check only through school competition and parental choice. Like any creditable provider of services, schools should cater to their customers, not the other way around.

 

 

Ideology and the Public School Monopoly

15 Tuesday Oct 2019

Posted by Nuetzel in Education

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Claremont Institute, Common Core, Cory Koedel, Darleen Click, Deep State, FEE, Foundation for Economic Education, Horace Mann, J.D. Tuccille, James G. Martin Center, Jay Schalin, John Hinderaker, Justin Spears, Michael Crichton, Mike Margeson, Multiculturalism, Public School Monopoly, Rob Dreher, Ryan P. Williams, School Choice, SJWs, Social Justice, TFP Student Action, Victory Girls, White Privilege, Woke Teachers, Zero-Sum Society

I toured our local public high school not long ago after some renovations. It’s my old school and my kids attended there as well, though it’s been largely stripped of its old character. Our sweet tour guide, when asked about school security and whether any staff are armed, said no, and then proudly informed us that the temperament of the school was “pretty progressive”, and that sort of thing would not go over well. Later, as I stepped into the new library, I happened to notice a table right up-front intended to showcase several books. The first title I laid eyes on was “Social Justice”, a topic emphasizing all manner of grievances, current and historical, the identification of culpable parties (and their unworthy descendants), and presumed correctives. The latter include reparations, redistribution, control of speech, criminalization, and often shaming. At best, these correctives deliver palliatives to the aggrieved that must be forcibly extracted by the state from others, with little consideration for the predictably disastrous second-order effects they engender.

The prominent display of the social justice book and our tour guide’s attitude regarding security were unsurprising manifestations of the educational emphasis our kids get today: the public schools have become indoctrination camps. Of course, a good class in American history will leave no doubt about the injustices that have occurred in our nation over 250 years. There were many individual victims and many groups were victimized. We could say the same about a good class in European history, or the history of events in any region of the world. However, the social justice doctrine being peddled to our children today assigns blame for victimhood to anyone deemed not to be a victim, as well as the growth and very success of western civilization, including capitalism, this despite the unprecedented comforts available today across the socioeconomic spectrum. It’s as if the SJWs wish to convince our children that all economic gains are of the zero-sum variety.

The politicization of the curriculum in our schools is an extremely dangerous phenomenon. Many schools are banning literature, distorting history, subverting science in favor of politicized orthodoxy, and teaching “social justice math“, which I’m sure is heavy on zero-sum word problems. And how about this “Run from the cop” worksheet given to first graders in a Pittsburgh school! Federal and state education authorities are taking an active hand in much of this. For example, a new ethnic studies curriculum for California high schools proposed by the state Department of Education takes a notably anti-Israel perspective. At the federal level, there is the Common Core initiative (and see here) which, in addition to educational inefficacy, is a source of many of the same concerns cited above. President Obama’s school discipline policy, heavy in its emphasis on “disparate impact”, was perhaps even more disastrous (and see here).

Social studies textbooks today are increasingly written by leftist authors who distort U.S. history, present anti-science viewpoints on environmental topics, and promote the divisive tenets of multiculturalism. The U.S. history covered in this prominent textbook is subject to a variety of left-wing biases, but it is not unique in that regard. And it’s not only a matter of bias in favor of collectivist philosophy and leftist interpretations of historical events. For example, it’s way over the top to teach public school children that Christians are bigots.

But God bless the teachers, many of whom are indeed wonderful people, and many of whom are very good at what they do (my daughter being a prime example!). There is little doubt, however, that leftism dominates the faculty in most public schools. John Hinderaker writes of the political activism practiced by the faculty at a high school in Edina, Minnesota, where lessons about “white privilege” are part of the curriculum even in the feeder schools. It’s a travesty that many of our nation’s public school teachers are products of university schools of education with extremely low academic standards relative to other academic divisions within those universities. And these schools of education have been thoroughly politicized. Needless to say, a good many of their graduates are easily cowed by the typical “feel-good”, free-lunch, social justice arguments made by the Left.

In a sense, these civil servants are a local counterpart to the army of federal bureaucrats sometimes known as the “deep state”. They are funded by taxpayers and are often represented by powerful unions. Under-performing teachers are difficult to dismiss, and they are able to exercise great discretion in the messages they deliver to students. As Darleen Click writes, “The ‘woke’ want your children“.

The leftist thrust of public education today descends from a long evolution shaped by “progressive” education reforms, and most reforms receiving attention within today’s education establishment fail to address the single biggest problem: the public school monopoly. That inattention is reinforced by attempts to maintain ideological purity among participants in the debate over school reform. Social studies teachers Mike Margeson and Justin Spears, writing for the Foundation for Economic Education on the motives for establishing public education, say the following about historical reforms:

“The objective was to nationalize the youth in a particular mold. … From Luther to Fichte, the idea to use the coercive power of the state to force kids into schools and indoctrinate them was clear. Horace Mann became instrumental in importing this system and helping it spread throughout the United States.”

Breaking the public education monopoly is imperative to improving both the quality and cost of education. That means choice, in all it’s liberating glory. J.D. Tuccille has a great take on this issue: choice is the only way we can assure that our children are taught from a perspective that parents most prefer. Many parents know that they must take an active part in educating their children. That includes their role in selecting the school they believe will be best for their kids, as well as ongoing scrutiny of the school’s performance. A simple by-product of choice is that schools and their faculties might be more circumspect about shading their instruction with their own political agendas.

 

 

Busting the K-12 Monopoly

12 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by Nuetzel in Education, School Choice

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Betsy DeVos, Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux, Donald Trump, Education Funding, GI Bill, Opportunity cost, Public School Monopoly, Racial Segregation, School Choice, School Vouchers, Teachers Unions

school-choice

Public school teachers are highly sensitive to any suggestion that their schools should “compete” for students, but it’s difficult to rationalize restrictions on competition faced by any institution that trades with consumers. Education is certainly not a natural monopoly. But in the U.S., K-12 public schools are granted an effective service monopoly over large segments of their local markets. Their monopoly status is a legacy and usually taken for granted, but that does not make the arrangement a natural state of affairs, or a healthy one.

The idea that education is a “public good”, or nonexclusive in the benefits it confers, is true only in a weak sense. Yes, there are external benefits from the education of children, but those are secondary to the personal benefits reaped by the children themselves as they go through life. And even strong public spillover benefits do not imply that government should provision the education itself, free of competition. Economic theory justifying intervention in markets implies only that the public sector should attempt to augment supply; direct production by the public sector is unnecessary and often unwise. Competition among schools will bring forth more of the private and public benefits than a monopoly.

But the public schools are free, and that doesn’t sound like a monopoly, right? Well, no, they aren’t free! Not to taxpayers, of course, but also, not to families with children who are denied the right to fully internalize the true opportunity cost of the resources claimed by public schools. The option to move to a school district with better academic performance is unavailable to many families. What would those families decide given a greater degree of empowerment to consider alternatives?

About 18 months ago, the topic of the K-12 monopoly was the subject of a favorite post on Sacred Cow Chips called: “Public Monopolists Say “Don’t Be Choosy“. It called attention to a thought exercise featured by economist Don Boudreaux on Cafe Hayek. Consumers are very choosy about their food, and they should be. Why shouldn’t they be just as choosy about another essential: the school for their children? Because the government won’t let them! Boudreaux lists factors that would make consumer grocery distribution just like the structure of K-12 education. That includes property taxes to pay for “public” grocery stores and the allotments of food they distribute, assignment of each family to a single public grocery store, but freedom to shop at “private” grocery stores at additional expense. He then asks how the food distribution system would perform. Here’s Boudreaux:

“Being largely protected from consumer choice, almost all public supermarkets would be worse than private ones. In poor counties the quality of public supermarkets would be downright abysmal. ….

Responding to these failures, thoughtful souls would call for ‘supermarket choice’ fueled by vouchers or tax credits. Those calls would be vigorously opposed by public-supermarket administrators and workers.

Opponents of supermarket choice would accuse its proponents of demonizing supermarket workers (who, after all, have no control over their customers’ poor eating habits at home). Advocates of choice would also be accused of trying to deny ordinary families the food needed for survival. Such choice, it would be alleged, would drain precious resources from public supermarkets whose poor performance testifies to their overwhelming need for more public funds.

As for the handful of radicals who call for total separation of supermarket and state—well, they would be criticized by almost everyone as antisocial devils indifferent to the starvation that would haunt the land if the provision of groceries were governed exclusively by private market forces.

In the face of calls for supermarket choice, supermarket-workers unions would use their significant resources for lobbying—in favor of public-supermarkets’ monopoly power and against any suggestion that market forces are appropriate for delivering something as essential as groceries.“

That’s exactly the behavior we see from the teacher’s unions, from which sanctimony flows liberally as to “public service”. Remember that the classic monopolist actively engages in denying choice and restraining trade through private actions, public relations and various other political means. But why would any sane observer have concluded that these “protected markets” would lead to successful outcomes?

It’s no secret that public schools in the U.S. face severe challenges. They are highly uneven in their results. A recent report in U.S. News said the following:

“Since World War II, inflation-adjusted spending per student in American public schools has increased by 663 percent. Where did all of that money go? One place it went was to hire more personnel. Between 1950 and 2009, American public schools experienced a 96 percent increase in student population. During that time, public schools increased their staff by 386 percent – four times the increase in students. The number of teachers increased by 252 percent, over 2.5 times the increase in students. The number of administrators and other staff increased by over seven times the increase in students.“

Federal efforts to improve K-12 education have been remarkably fruitless. Despite the massive increases in staffing over the past 50 years at all levels, graduation rates are still miserable in minority districts; schools are more segregated today than 50 years ago; huge gaps exist between the achievement of students in high and low-income districts; and math scores on standardized tests rank near the bottom of OECD countries, (science and reading scores are closer to the average).

The usual rejoinder from the public school establishment is that still greater funding is needed. Always more…. But families are exercising their right to opt-out. The number of home-schooled children is likely to exceed two million by 2020. There are now programs in 32 states facilitating choice through vouchers, tax credits, tax deductions, and education savings accounts. The body of research surrounding the effects of school choice is overwhelmingly positive: choice has improved academic outcomes in both private schools and the public schools that are forced to compete, it has a positive fiscal impact, and it reduces racial segregation. The constant drumbeat of additional funding requests looks unnecessary and wasteful in view of the options.

As for federal dollars, one suggestion is to pare back sharply the number of bureaucrats at the education department, putting the savings toward a program that would emulate the hugely successful GI Bill, under which beneficiaries chose how to spend the money.

Donald Trump’s nominee for education secretary is school choice advocate Betsy DeVos. Obviously, the new administration will not view the public school monopoly as untouchable. But let’s get one thing straight: no one is trying to “ruin” public schools. The objective is to fix something that’s been broken for a long time and, in so doing, to improve educational outcomes across all segments of society. The medicine delivered thus far, including top-down planning and profligate spending, has been expensive and ineffective, and even counterproductive in some respects. A few bad schools will fail under a competitive regime, but they already do. Bad schools have no sacred right to survive. Most struggling schools will improve, leveraging innovative techniques as well as their natural advantages, which often include proximity to a base of prospective students. It’s time to tackle the education problem by vesting consumers with sovereignty in the choice of schools.

 

Follow Sacred Cow Chips on WordPress.com

Recent Posts

  • The Impotence of AI for the Socialist Calculation Debate
  • No Radar, No Rudder: Fiscal & Monetary Destabilization
  • Health Care & Education: Slow Productivity Growth + Subsidies = Jacked Prices
  • Debt Ceiling Stopgaps and a Weak Legal Challenge
  • Some Critical Issues In the Gun Rights Debate

Archives

  • June 2023
  • May 2023
  • April 2023
  • March 2023
  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014

Blogs I Follow

  • Ominous The Spirit
  • Passive Income Kickstart
  • OnlyFinance.net
  • TLC Cholesterol
  • Nintil
  • kendunning.net
  • DCWhispers.com
  • Hoong-Wai in the UK
  • Marginal REVOLUTION
  • Stlouis
  • Watts Up With That?
  • Aussie Nationalist Blog
  • American Elephants
  • The View from Alexandria
  • The Gymnasium
  • A Force for Good
  • Notes On Liberty
  • troymo
  • SUNDAY BLOG Stephanie Sievers
  • Miss Lou Acquiring Lore
  • Your Well Wisher Program
  • Objectivism In Depth
  • RobotEnomics
  • Orderstatistic
  • Paradigm Library

Blog at WordPress.com.

Ominous The Spirit

Ominous The Spirit is an artist that makes music, paints, and creates photography. He donates 100% of profits to charity.

Passive Income Kickstart

OnlyFinance.net

TLC Cholesterol

Nintil

To estimate, compare, distinguish, discuss, and trace to its principal sources everything

kendunning.net

The Future is Ours to Create

DCWhispers.com

Hoong-Wai in the UK

A Commonwealth immigrant's perspective on the UK's public arena.

Marginal REVOLUTION

Small Steps Toward A Much Better World

Stlouis

Watts Up With That?

The world's most viewed site on global warming and climate change

Aussie Nationalist Blog

Commentary from a Paleoconservative and Nationalist perspective

American Elephants

Defending Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness

The View from Alexandria

In advanced civilizations the period loosely called Alexandrian is usually associated with flexible morals, perfunctory religion, populist standards and cosmopolitan tastes, feminism, exotic cults, and the rapid turnover of high and low fads---in short, a falling away (which is all that decadence means) from the strictness of traditional rules, embodied in character and inforced from within. -- Jacques Barzun

The Gymnasium

A place for reason, politics, economics, and faith steeped in the classical liberal tradition

A Force for Good

How economics, morality, and markets combine

Notes On Liberty

Spontaneous thoughts on a humble creed

troymo

SUNDAY BLOG Stephanie Sievers

Escaping the everyday life with photographs from my travels

Miss Lou Acquiring Lore

Gallery of Life...

Your Well Wisher Program

Attempt to solve commonly known problems…

Objectivism In Depth

Exploring Ayn Rand's revolutionary philosophy.

RobotEnomics

(A)n (I)ntelligent Future

Orderstatistic

Economics, chess and anything else on my mind.

Paradigm Library

OODA Looping

  • Follow Following
    • Sacred Cow Chips
    • Join 123 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Sacred Cow Chips
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...