Tyler Cowen on School Choice

He writes,

if you’re reading a critique of vouchers and the critic isn’t willing to tell you up front that parents typically like this form of school choice, I suspect the critic isn’t really trying to inform you.

Perhaps the voucher movement ought to be called the “Make schools accountable to parents” movement. I was opposed to the No Child Left Behind law from the very beginning, on the grounds that it defined “accountability” for schools as accountability to Washington.

Parents will not be perfectly informed consumers of public schools. But bureaucrats in Washington will be much less well informed.

I am not claiming that vouchers will lead to better long-term outcomes. As you know, I believe in the Null Hypothesis. But I like the idea of having teachers and school administrators accountable to people who can observe their performance close up.

15 thoughts on “Tyler Cowen on School Choice

  1. Actually, parents cannot “observe their [teachers and administrators] performance close up.” Parents are never encouraged, and generally prohibited from, attending any of their children’s classes. What parents get is a very filtered experience, either their children telling them or a teacher telling them. Both of those groups have interests, and both rarely transmit with anything like 100% accuracy.

    Parents don’t know how much their kids are learning. They may get some idea what kids are supposed to be learning by talking with them or helping with homework (and at what grade does that end?) but they don’t know how much actually lodges permanently in their offspring’s brain. As a high school teacher, I was continually impressed (perhaps the wrong word) by how much was memorized for a test and forgotten in a few months, weeks, or even days. Grades will tell a parent how well little Johny has been able to “memorize and forget” compared to his fellow students, but it doesn’t tell them a lot else.

    Of course, part of this is the inevitable consequence of two things that perhaps make school unique: 1) it is compulsory on its consumers, 2) even with vouchers, the consumers (young people) are not the same as the buyers (parents).

    • Well, sure, that’s the experience *now* — when the norms for education are set by public schools. Who’s to say how they change in a competitive semi-market?

      For example, the private Montessori school I sent my kids to was pretty open to parental participation in the classroom — far more than your comment suggests, at least.

  2. “Accountability” is meaningless without the capacity to do something about what the accounting reveals.

    “Public” schools are really **Government Schools** and as such the access (under our systems) to capacity to do anything about what any accounting reveals (or to obtain accounting) is through the political system of the specific government, in which other active forces and interests divert and dilute the capacity of the public concerned to have any but the most limited and delayed effects.

    We have Government Schools -NOT- Public Schools. We have political determinations, not capacities for public access to accountability, let alone to act upon what is revealed.

    While it is not exclusive, government has become the accepted “funding mechanism” for facilities. It can be returned to that limited function.

    Vouchers and other “choice” mechanisms provide some capacity for public response to lack of accounting, improper accounting, and the revelations of accounting. Its a beginning.

  3. The real value of vouchers is probably to put your kids in a school with fewer disruptive/indifferent peers. I suspect that the presence or absence of such peers has a real effect on other students’ achievement, even if the quality of the teachers and curriculum does not.

  4. It’s all about the content of the curriculum baby! I can’t guarantee my kid will learn much or that the teacher will be competent, but something like Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum, for example, at least would give my kids a shot at knowing some good stuff. My child not being proselytized into politicized race/gender/environmental/etc. BS is also really high on my list of wants as a parent.

    School choice is a means of getting one’s child into a school with a good curriculum. But the curriculum is the battleground folks, let’s keep our eye on the ball.

  5. I assumed that the chief benefits of vouchers for school is as the kids are signaled that they can be kicked out of the school as well. So it they don’t behave or study well they throw you out a lot easier. (I find the California public schools are much better with students today than they were in my 1980s public schools.)

    Still, in vouchertopia, somebody has to explained why private free market would invest in schools in the inner cities ghettos and the hills of West Virginia. Given the level of free market grocery stores in these areas are diminished compared to other neighborhoods, why would schools be any different? My guess the average schools were drastically worse than the government schools.

    2) How would vouchertopia be any different than our secondary college system? I am guessing the cost would vastly es-calculate for the right schools. I think this is would be a long term issue because the cost of raising kids would continue to rise so people would even have fewer children.

    • Milton Friedman’s old argument from 50 years ago, based on part from personal observations of Chicago, was this: .In South Chicago Black neighborhoods you saw some people with nice cars and fancy clothes, but there was no competitive market for good schools. Cars and clothes were private goods and you could see with your own eyes that some people were willing and and able to pay for very good ones and to lavish attention on them.

      But the market for education was much less competitive, which had something to do with the public schools being pretty uniformly poor (the Catholic schools were better).

      He says it better than I.

  6. The trouble is the progressives have a ready answer. The parent satisfaction is bunk and should be ignored.

    If parents report being more satisfied despite no improvement in scores, then they are either laboring under some false consciousness which we should not encourage, or their satisfaction derives from racist or otherwise deplorable motives which don’t merit deference, and indeed, deserve quite the contrary. And thus the satisfaction of such people should serve as a mark against, not for, charter schools.

    You don’t have to pass the ideological Turing test to know that someone is going to say something predictably extreme like, “we don’t care about the satisfaction of racist whites in South African apartheid or Jim Crow segregation or revealed preferences in contemporary American neighborhoods when considering policy, and it’s just the same for this case.”

    There was a recent story about the one polling firm who figured out this election had a large Bradley Effect because ‘shy voters’ were lying to pollsters about their intentions to vote for Trump. Their case was based on a ‘trick’ question that asked them what they thought other people they knew well were going to do. The discrepancy results were asymmetric for the two parties, and so the firm concluded that Trump support was being underestimated and came up with a decent estimate as to by how much.

    Now, what progressives can then say is “see, asking racist parents about ‘satisfaction’ is just as much a trick question that reveals their true motivations. If you ask them directly of course they’ll lie and say no, but if you couch it this way …”

    Who knows whether there is any truth to that claim or not, but this is one of the ways that PC makes us worse off. Even if voice were effective, making it impossible for people to use that voice to express certain legitimate interests and honest sentiments will make them double down on abandoning the system and insisting they be given the right to exit. And then they have no choice but to gush about how happy they are with their exit options, whether warranted or not, and even though a sane public system could provide at least as good results and as much satisfaction.

    • According to Cowen, the parents reported as expressing satisfaction with voucher schools are poor blacks and Hispanics, who would be difficult for the Left to analogize to racist whites under apartheid or Jim Crow. But I suppose they could try.

      BTW, I recall reading a few years ago that vouchers, although long a cause celebre for movement-conservative policy wonks (e.g. Betsy De Vos) and libertarians, are unpopular with non-ideological suburban whites, who are generally happy with their own suburban public schools and do not want to see their taxes increased to fund schemes to improve inner city education.

      • Massachusetts voters just massively rejected loosening the state cap on charter schools. I got numerous mailers and saw a lot of ads from the NO people, all focusing on the idea that loosening the cap would “take away” some frightening amount of money (I think $400 million) from “our public schools.”

        Lots of town and city school committees (called school boards in many other states) took votes opposing the measure.

        • Yes, that’s consistent with my understanding. Conservative activists and policy wonks may love vouchers and charter schools, but most taxpaying voters (including GOP-leaners) are indifferent or opposed. Yet another example of the GOP being out of touch with the sort of people it expects to vote for its candidates.

          I think it would make more sense to improve public schools by making it easier to discipline disruptive students, but I gather we’re moving in the opposite direction.

          • The status quo school industry is effective at generating fear, uncertainty, and doubt about alternatives and efficiency.

    • Being stuck in a school is crazy. There are kids/parents who end up just having matching problems and being able to simply go to the next over public school is a clear benefit to them. Having the option, even if unexecuted, is a benefit. That is likely why public schools are making this more available.

      We are still crazy, but slightly less so. Around here, they started having the schools have focus areas, compelling us obviously to apply for the STEM-focused elementary school. A funny anecdote was I accidentally called this option “school choice” while submitting the application and they did not like that at all.

  7. Hirsch made some valuable points. I was re-reading _The schools we need and why we don’t have them_ which is almost 20 years old now.

    Hirsch blames a lot of our problems on “Romanticism” in education and the lack of a content-based curriculum. He says a lot of it goes back to Teacher’s College, Columbia University, and what someone called “The blob”, an interlocking directorate of professionals, teaching colleges, and I forget who else (unions and licensing bureaus?).

    Probably we’ll never get a centrally-provided content driven curriculum, so I think the best we can come up with is dueling curricula such as Hirsch’s _Core Knowledge_ and whatever else is out there. Home schoolers also have good curricula, such as the reading lists put together by Susan Wise Bauer et al.

    I also like the argument made by Diane McGuinnes (Why our children can’t read) which is that teaching reading in English is hard because of the orthography. This makes sense to me intuitively–it’s why learning French as a foreign language is hard (all those spellings, all those vowel phonemes). Some people get phonemic awareness pretty easily (I did). Apparently some don’t–and thus they can’t read with proficiency, and fall further behind as their age cohort progresses.

  8. Has anyone done the accounting on funding? I pay property taxes. Thus a portion of my taxes goes to pay for my kids and a portion goes to pay the public good. What is the portion for my kids (NPV)?

Comments are closed.