Voice in schools
I'm about halfway through Albert O. Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty and noticed something that I've seen to be true whenever his work is invoked against voucher programs -- or any privatization, for that matter. Since there is still another half left to go, I'm holding out hope that he will address it, but I didn't find anything promising in the index, so hope is running out for him ... and his little dog, too.
The main emphasis of the 1970 book, so far, is to (1) describe two mechanisms which consumers have recourse to when the quality of a firm or industry deteriorates, and (2) emphasize how little attention has been paid to these, by political scientists and especially by economists who had begun to colonize the other social sciences. The two mechanisms are exit (as in leaving one business and going to another) and voice (as in expressing your displeasure). Hirschman correctly notes that exit is not so automatic as economists have tended to assume, nor is voice so silly an alternative.
Hirschman levels the charge of bias against economists with a quote of Milton Friedman's original voucher proposal from 1955. When he returns to education later in the book, I got the impression that he was intentionally trying to create a tool for defending public schooling. In any case, having created the tool, I think he forgot to investigate whether it worked as well as he thought for that particular application.
The anti-voucher argument can be summed up in this statement.
Poor parents are less effective at voice. First, poor does not mean stupid or incapable, and this is frequently the implication of this claim! Poor parents are sometimes the most vocal because they understand first-hand the value of an education. Second, it is true that voice is more expensive to poor parents because of the time required to research, meet, debate, and follow up on ideas, time which they don't have which wealthier parents do (professionals can take time off, one spouse may not have a full time job, etc.). Parents who stay in the public schools will thus have more resort to voice the wealthier they are. Forcing them all to stay ensures that the school will be more responsive to wealthy parents than to poorer parents. If the wealthier parents had the option of exiting, the poorer parents remaining would have greater effective voice as their share of representation goes up. Which leads to ...
The only parents staying in the public system are poor parents. This assumes that voice is less expensive than exit. But Hirschman himself points out the opposite only a few pages before:
Voice will be effective at effecting change in public schools. But the people making the voice/exit argument against vouchers are usually the same group of people insisting that there is no problem with public schools - the quadrupling of real, per student expenditures is worthwhile, the flat standardized test scores mean nothing, criticisms of public schools are groundless, all they need is more money and a new alphabet soup of programs to plug other gaps. Consider, for example, Rothstein: "Despite careful admissions restrictions, magnet programs attract the most highly motivated students, draining neighborhood schools of students and parents who could spur higher achievement levels." They are offering a false double bind: claim there is no problem, in which case you don't need those with an effective voice, and claim that the system will collapse if it is changed because problems will not be addressed. Note that Rothstein craftily avoids saying "correction" and instead says, "higher achievement levels;" other voucher critics aren't this clever.
Parents voice will be equal to or greater than that of teachers, administrators, and patronage granters. This is a surprising oversight by Hirschman. He even cites Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action, so he cannot be unaware of the problem. Parents are interested in their children's education for at most 18 years (after which they get to access the public/private arena of college, where competition has apparently not had the deleterious effect), while teachers are looking at careers of 35 years or so. Parents' interest are varied (math, literacy, warehousing or baby-sitting, athletics, arts, and so on) and contradictory (I don't care about football, I want math and science, while someone else wants football, and someone else wants money spent on arts), and parents' knowledge is limited (they gather most of it second hand from mostly non-cooperative agents, which anyone who has ever been or raised a teenager will know), while teachers interest is focused (secure, high-paying jobs in a low-stress environment) and their knowledge direct. Administrators of the schools and patronage systems likewise have an advantage. Moreover, the parents' gains are likely to be shared and spread among others, while teachers' gains are going to come directly back to themselves. As a matter of fact, there is proof that teachers -- or more precisely, teachers' unions -- think the voice option works in their favor: they oppose vouchers and pay to lobby against them even though this would increase their exit options as employees!
Furthermore, Hirschman says "voice plays a more important role with respect to organizations of which an individual is a member than with respect to firms whose products he buys..." - I think even Hirschman would admit that the increasingly centralized, almost national school district has eliminated the possibility that parents are a member of the organization.
Incidentally, I am not a strong fan of vouchers. I fear that voucherization would be a Trojan Horse for regulation of the few remaining private schools. A much better solution, I think, would be to charge means-tested tuition for public schools, the same way you pay park fees. For one thing, the free breeders out there would have to carry more of their share of the load. For another, private schools would spring up as an alternative, no subsidies required. For a third, public schools would have increased budgets (or the state and local governments could offer tax breaks or redirect tax moneys).
[UPDATE] Haha, sure enough, he provides an argument on the very next page, and takes it up again later in the book. I swear I looked in the index.
Anyhow, Hirschman provides an elegant graphical proof of what happens when two consumers, one sensitive to quality and the other to price, encounter a deterioration of quality in a market which has both a higher priced, higher quality alternative as well as a lower priced, lower quality alternative. Sure enough, the quality sensitive consumer bails early. Unfortunately, he doesn't explore the situation that arises when the alternatives are both lower priced and higher quality, which is a common case with private schools. The outcome of that very distinctly depends on the assumptions, since both types of consumers stand to benefit.
Another problem I have with the analysis is that he begins with a discussion of a consumer who has greater consumer surplus and then treats this person as if they were the fastidious consumer (the implication that wealthy = quality minded, not wealthy = don't care about school quality). I think that is a mistake (a mistake I propagated above), the same mistake in fact of justifying patient waits because the doctor's time is more valuable than the person in the waiting room. Somewhere in Marshall's Principles (drat, can't find it right now), I remember that he warns that a demand schedule is not precisely the same as utility. Given the anti-voucher PR machine that operates in urban environments, graphs like the one below tell me that poor education consumers have a strong utility for education (stolen from Creative Destruction after finding it searching on something unrelated).
The main emphasis of the 1970 book, so far, is to (1) describe two mechanisms which consumers have recourse to when the quality of a firm or industry deteriorates, and (2) emphasize how little attention has been paid to these, by political scientists and especially by economists who had begun to colonize the other social sciences. The two mechanisms are exit (as in leaving one business and going to another) and voice (as in expressing your displeasure). Hirschman correctly notes that exit is not so automatic as economists have tended to assume, nor is voice so silly an alternative.
Hirschman levels the charge of bias against economists with a quote of Milton Friedman's original voucher proposal from 1955. When he returns to education later in the book, I got the impression that he was intentionally trying to create a tool for defending public schooling. In any case, having created the tool, I think he forgot to investigate whether it worked as well as he thought for that particular application.
The anti-voucher argument can be summed up in this statement.
... those customers who care most about the quality of the product and who, therefore, are those who would be most active, reliable, and creative agents of voice, are for that very reason also those who are apparently likely to exit first in case of deterioration.But in applying this, both Hirschman and those who draw on him to argue against school privatization take this as revealed truth. Their argument relies on several assumptions that are mistaken in my estimate:
Poor parents are less effective at voice. First, poor does not mean stupid or incapable, and this is frequently the implication of this claim! Poor parents are sometimes the most vocal because they understand first-hand the value of an education. Second, it is true that voice is more expensive to poor parents because of the time required to research, meet, debate, and follow up on ideas, time which they don't have which wealthier parents do (professionals can take time off, one spouse may not have a full time job, etc.). Parents who stay in the public schools will thus have more resort to voice the wealthier they are. Forcing them all to stay ensures that the school will be more responsive to wealthy parents than to poorer parents. If the wealthier parents had the option of exiting, the poorer parents remaining would have greater effective voice as their share of representation goes up. Which leads to ...
The only parents staying in the public system are poor parents. This assumes that voice is less expensive than exit. But Hirschman himself points out the opposite only a few pages before:
In fact, in addition to this opportunity cost [that of foregoing exit], account must be taken of the direct cost of voice which is incurred as buyers of a product or members of an organization spend time and money in the attempt to achieve changes in the policies and practices of the firm from which they buy or the organization to which they belong. Not nearly so high a cost is likely to be attached to the exercise of the exit option in the case of products bought in the market - although some allowance should be made for the possible loss of loyalty discounts and for the cost of obtaining information about substitutes to which one intends to switch.In fact, it is in the status quo, where "free" public schools appear to be less expensive than non-free private ones and exit has a cost on that account, that poor families have no recourse except voice and that wealthier ones have both more recourse to voice and exit. In a system in which "free" public schools are no different than voucher-subsidized private schools, exit would be a lower cost means of responding to lower quality than is voice, if Hirschman's claims immediately above are correct. Either he is right in saying that the wealthy will leave them behind, in which case their comparative voice increases, or he is right in saying that exit is the lower cost option, in which case vouchers give an additional option to the less wealthy.
Hence, in comparison to the exit option, voice is costly and conditioned on the influence and bargaining power customers and members can bring to bear within the firm from which they buy or the organization to which they belong.
Voice will be effective at effecting change in public schools. But the people making the voice/exit argument against vouchers are usually the same group of people insisting that there is no problem with public schools - the quadrupling of real, per student expenditures is worthwhile, the flat standardized test scores mean nothing, criticisms of public schools are groundless, all they need is more money and a new alphabet soup of programs to plug other gaps. Consider, for example, Rothstein: "Despite careful admissions restrictions, magnet programs attract the most highly motivated students, draining neighborhood schools of students and parents who could spur higher achievement levels." They are offering a false double bind: claim there is no problem, in which case you don't need those with an effective voice, and claim that the system will collapse if it is changed because problems will not be addressed. Note that Rothstein craftily avoids saying "correction" and instead says, "higher achievement levels;" other voucher critics aren't this clever.
Parents voice will be equal to or greater than that of teachers, administrators, and patronage granters. This is a surprising oversight by Hirschman. He even cites Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action, so he cannot be unaware of the problem. Parents are interested in their children's education for at most 18 years (after which they get to access the public/private arena of college, where competition has apparently not had the deleterious effect), while teachers are looking at careers of 35 years or so. Parents' interest are varied (math, literacy, warehousing or baby-sitting, athletics, arts, and so on) and contradictory (I don't care about football, I want math and science, while someone else wants football, and someone else wants money spent on arts), and parents' knowledge is limited (they gather most of it second hand from mostly non-cooperative agents, which anyone who has ever been or raised a teenager will know), while teachers interest is focused (secure, high-paying jobs in a low-stress environment) and their knowledge direct. Administrators of the schools and patronage systems likewise have an advantage. Moreover, the parents' gains are likely to be shared and spread among others, while teachers' gains are going to come directly back to themselves. As a matter of fact, there is proof that teachers -- or more precisely, teachers' unions -- think the voice option works in their favor: they oppose vouchers and pay to lobby against them even though this would increase their exit options as employees!
Furthermore, Hirschman says "voice plays a more important role with respect to organizations of which an individual is a member than with respect to firms whose products he buys..." - I think even Hirschman would admit that the increasingly centralized, almost national school district has eliminated the possibility that parents are a member of the organization.
Incidentally, I am not a strong fan of vouchers. I fear that voucherization would be a Trojan Horse for regulation of the few remaining private schools. A much better solution, I think, would be to charge means-tested tuition for public schools, the same way you pay park fees. For one thing, the free breeders out there would have to carry more of their share of the load. For another, private schools would spring up as an alternative, no subsidies required. For a third, public schools would have increased budgets (or the state and local governments could offer tax breaks or redirect tax moneys).
[UPDATE] Haha, sure enough, he provides an argument on the very next page, and takes it up again later in the book. I swear I looked in the index.
Anyhow, Hirschman provides an elegant graphical proof of what happens when two consumers, one sensitive to quality and the other to price, encounter a deterioration of quality in a market which has both a higher priced, higher quality alternative as well as a lower priced, lower quality alternative. Sure enough, the quality sensitive consumer bails early. Unfortunately, he doesn't explore the situation that arises when the alternatives are both lower priced and higher quality, which is a common case with private schools. The outcome of that very distinctly depends on the assumptions, since both types of consumers stand to benefit.
Another problem I have with the analysis is that he begins with a discussion of a consumer who has greater consumer surplus and then treats this person as if they were the fastidious consumer (the implication that wealthy = quality minded, not wealthy = don't care about school quality). I think that is a mistake (a mistake I propagated above), the same mistake in fact of justifying patient waits because the doctor's time is more valuable than the person in the waiting room. Somewhere in Marshall's Principles (drat, can't find it right now), I remember that he warns that a demand schedule is not precisely the same as utility. Given the anti-voucher PR machine that operates in urban environments, graphs like the one below tell me that poor education consumers have a strong utility for education (stolen from Creative Destruction after finding it searching on something unrelated).
Labels: education, philosophy
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