Anticipating three arguments against public school tuition
Previously on this subject:
Charging tuition at public schools
More on the Conservatism of the Left
Absent from school: Pigou
My desire is to preserve the best of both public and private schooling and create an environment in which most schooling is privately funded and all schooling is privately administered. The idea is that eventually all people will have choices about where to send their children, with public financing (perhaps, eventually, even private financing by nontraditional means) for the least well-off. The result will be better quality and lower costs of schooling.
The first argument will probably come in the form of the Perversity Thesis, that my proposal will achieve the opposite of what is desired. More specifically, it says that schools will become worse and more expensive, that more rules and regulations will be required, that eventually the state will have to ban private schools. It is hard to anticipate all of the means by which this will happen, but we could speculate.
As public schools start collecting tuition, private schools become a better-looking alternative than they are now, the more so as public school tuition approaches that of private schools. When that happens, parents will exit public schools en masse, moving their children into increasingly balkanized schools. The public schools stuck with very poor children will creak under the weight as they will have lost the strongest advocates for better quality even as the wealthier parents begin tax revolutions to stop the flow of funds to public schools. The students will all be turned out to the private schools, some of which will be shoddy, fly-by-night operations. Poor students will be increasingly victimized by these. A few large corporations will begin buying the facilities up and charging massive tuition. In the end, only the wealthiest will be able to afford education, while the poorest will simply drop out and become burdens to society.
The second argument will be from the Futility Thesis, that my proposal will not achieve what I desire. The reason for this is that there are social, legal, and other institutional foundations for the current system. Any attempt to change one thing will be superficial at best. Thus, my proposal will result in moving students to a new system which provides roughly the same outcomes as the current system.
The final argument will be from the Jeopardy Thesis, that this proposal will jeopardize what we already have. In a story similar to the one above, it says that not only will it not get me where I want to go, but it will cut the supports out from under the existing system so that when my proposal fails, we won't even have the existing system to fall back on.
These theses are, of course, from Albert Hirschman's Rhetoric of Reaction. An essay outlining them can be found here (hattip: Crooked Timber, I think, but I can't find the reference now). These were arguments that Hirschman distilled from the arguments of Reactionaries to the great shifts in political, social, and economic order in the last 300 years. They are now the arguments of (mostly) left-wing, "Progressive" Democrats to any and all attempts to reform an institution which they arguably now control, and which most Americans arguably believe is failing us.
I don't believe the speculation above: I offer it because I am trying to anticipate the counterarguments to this proposal. I think it breaks down at several points:
Charging tuition at public schools
More on the Conservatism of the Left
Absent from school: Pigou
My desire is to preserve the best of both public and private schooling and create an environment in which most schooling is privately funded and all schooling is privately administered. The idea is that eventually all people will have choices about where to send their children, with public financing (perhaps, eventually, even private financing by nontraditional means) for the least well-off. The result will be better quality and lower costs of schooling.
The first argument will probably come in the form of the Perversity Thesis, that my proposal will achieve the opposite of what is desired. More specifically, it says that schools will become worse and more expensive, that more rules and regulations will be required, that eventually the state will have to ban private schools. It is hard to anticipate all of the means by which this will happen, but we could speculate.
As public schools start collecting tuition, private schools become a better-looking alternative than they are now, the more so as public school tuition approaches that of private schools. When that happens, parents will exit public schools en masse, moving their children into increasingly balkanized schools. The public schools stuck with very poor children will creak under the weight as they will have lost the strongest advocates for better quality even as the wealthier parents begin tax revolutions to stop the flow of funds to public schools. The students will all be turned out to the private schools, some of which will be shoddy, fly-by-night operations. Poor students will be increasingly victimized by these. A few large corporations will begin buying the facilities up and charging massive tuition. In the end, only the wealthiest will be able to afford education, while the poorest will simply drop out and become burdens to society.
The second argument will be from the Futility Thesis, that my proposal will not achieve what I desire. The reason for this is that there are social, legal, and other institutional foundations for the current system. Any attempt to change one thing will be superficial at best. Thus, my proposal will result in moving students to a new system which provides roughly the same outcomes as the current system.
The final argument will be from the Jeopardy Thesis, that this proposal will jeopardize what we already have. In a story similar to the one above, it says that not only will it not get me where I want to go, but it will cut the supports out from under the existing system so that when my proposal fails, we won't even have the existing system to fall back on.
These theses are, of course, from Albert Hirschman's Rhetoric of Reaction. An essay outlining them can be found here (hattip: Crooked Timber, I think, but I can't find the reference now). These were arguments that Hirschman distilled from the arguments of Reactionaries to the great shifts in political, social, and economic order in the last 300 years. They are now the arguments of (mostly) left-wing, "Progressive" Democrats to any and all attempts to reform an institution which they arguably now control, and which most Americans arguably believe is failing us.
I don't believe the speculation above: I offer it because I am trying to anticipate the counterarguments to this proposal. I think it breaks down at several points:
- Public schools will respond to competitive pressures despite the resistance of teachers unions. They will also be well-funded because there will be resistance to decreasing the supporting tax revenues while the number of students left in them will decrease significantly. Thus, the per-student funds available to them will increase significantly.
- Some private schools may indeed be shoddy, fly-by-night operations. Their shoddiness will not be much different from the presently existing public schools. However, parents will share information about them the same way they do about grocery stores or any other institution.
- Maintaining high tuition prices for all students is only possible if there is a monopoly in education. It is interesting that people would be concerned about a private monopoly in education, but not about the existing public monopoly which seems far less responsive to its customers than to its employees. In any case, I deem the creation of a private monopoly extremely unlikely: startup costs are very low, so entry is easy, and there are limits to returns to scale. In countries such as India, private education is an extremely competitive industry. The more likely outcome is that there will be a range of educational institutions that provide choices in cost, quality, structure, content, etc., the same way there is for groceries. The poor will be able to find good quality, no frills, low cost education, and there will be both public and private support to help them pay for it.
Labels: education, philosophy
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