Free market education


Why suppress the private alternatives?
Think about this.

Dorian Cain told me he wants to learn to read. He's 18 years old and in 12th grade, but when I asked him to read from a first-grade level book, he struggled with it.

"Did they try to teach you to read?" I asked him.

"From time to time."

His mom, Gena Cain, has been trying to get him help for years. If Dorian were in private school, or if South Carolina allowed parents to choose schools the way we choose other products and services in life, Dorian and Gena would be "customers" and able to go elsewhere -- if any school were dumb enough to serve a customer as poorly as Dorian has been served. But since Gena is merely a taxpayer, forced to pay for the public schools whether they do her any good or not, she can't even demand a better education for her son. "You have to beg," she said. "Whatever you ask for, you're begging. Because they have the power." They do. What are you going to do -- go elsewhere? Gena can't afford that.

Gena's begging eventually got results -- just not results that helped her son. What the school bureaucrats did was hold meetings to talk about Dorian. (Bureaucrats are good at holding meetings.) At the meeting we watched, lots of important people attended: a director of programs for exceptional children, a resource teacher, a district special education coordinator, a counselor and even a gym teacher. The meeting went on for 45 minutes.

"I'm seeing great progress in him," said the principal. "So I don't have any concerns."

Well, Gena still had a concern: Her son could barely read.

Was Dorian just incapable of learning? No. ABC News did see great progress in him -- when we sent him to a private, for-profit tutoring center. In just 72 hours of tutoring, Sylvan Learning Center brought Dorian's reading up more than two grade levels.

In 72 hours, a private company did what South Carolina's government schools could not do in over 12 years.

First let me say I have no kids.

I've heard the arguments for and against public education. In most states public education is set up as the choice that excludes choice. Even if you would rather use something else, you still have to pay for public education.

It would be like Kellogg's demanding (and getting) a subsidy from your property taxes, even if you only used Purina Corn Chex. Kellogg's would have no incentive to pay attention to what you want or even to get your business because they get paid regardless.

Most of the problems with public education come from either the structure or the lack of accountability to anyone except political masters. Top down approaches always suffer from this, and the only real lasting solution is to focus on the customer without a slew of government intermediaries.

People are perfectly capable of choosing for themselves provided they know no one is going to bail them out if they make a bad choice.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Wed - February 1, 2006 at 05:19 AM  Tag


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