Burger School

Tyler Cowen's upset with Jonathan Kozol's warning that "If those of us who profess to value public schools and the principle of democratic access they uphold cannot find the courage or the motivation to fight in their defense, we may soon wake up to find that they have been replaced by wholly owned subsidiaries of McDonald's, Burger King, and Wal-Mart." And, indeed, if anything the problem with privatizing the school system is likely to be the reverse of this. Businesses go where the business opportunities are.

Given the difficulty of the enterprises, there's no reason to think that educating disadvantaged children is a market that smart businessmen are clamoring to get in on. The basic structure of the achievement gap problem in the United States is that all the evidence suggests that educating the disadvantaged is harder than educating the privileged, but the latter task attracts more resources than does the former. A privatized system could, in principle, change that; but a publicly administered one could as well. Either way, you'd need a setup so that the best people (in terms of teachers, administrators, or even vicious profit-maximizing businessmen) were drawn to doing the harder job rather than the easier one.

Comments

The harder, less profitable, job rather than the easier, more profitable one.

Posted by mickslam | July 15, 2007 9:16 AM

educating the disadvantaged is harder than educating the privileged, but the latter task attracts more resources than does the former.

I once attended a talk Kozol gave, some years ago, in which he said that people sometimes ask him, sarcastically, whether he thinks education problems in the U.S. could be solved "just by throwing money at them." His answer: Yes! He went on to observe that many of these same people have no objection to solving military problems by throwing money at them.

Posted by RSA | July 15, 2007 9:32 AM

Well, another way to look at it is that it's easier to get away with failing to educate disadvantaged kids than privileged kids with their watchful, privileged parents. Like Cowen says, there's plenty of access to good french fries in disadvantaged areas, but he fails to note the lack of access to quality nutrition in disadvantaged areas. Sometimes you can make more money selling shit to the starving than caviar to the obese.

Posted by Consumatopia | July 15, 2007 9:58 AM

I think Matt is right on target here. The issue isn't the mechanism, its the will to solve the problem. Problems with education will not be solved with closing your eyes and outsourcing. The problem will only be solved by increased social investment. As a society we simply aren't putting sufficient effort into k-12 education.

In addition to the investment problem there are institutional problems. The public school k-12 model is largely moribund, both in disadvantaged areas and in the richer suburbs. Education is far more successful at the college level, where educational models are more flexible, but that is not the discussion here. I'm a scientist and I can tell you that high school graduates are illiterate in science. Furthermore, those who get high AP scores in biology, chemistry and physics are also illiterate. That is, first, because the scope of k-12 science is far out of date, and because the notion of what science is about is missing. I could rattle on with more specifics, but that is not the issue here.

I may be naive, but I am impressed with the steady progress with the New York City public schools. This is being done without reliance on vouchers, and being done on a large scale. A large part of the credit goes to non-ideological administrators who are willing to make change. But it is also important to note that New York City spends a lot per kid. These high levels of spending are not due to a societal decision to focus on education, but, rather, because of windfall tax collections from Wall Street over the past decade or so.

Posted by john | July 15, 2007 10:46 AM

And, this is precisely the problem with merit pay plans for teachers that fails to acknowledge the gaps that NCLB wants closed, will be the most difficult to close if you teach disadvantaged children. The incentive structure, as I'm currently reading it, nearly assures that the best and most accomplished teachers will actively seek to teach the best and most accomplished students. I'm all for differential pay for teachers; some are clearly more skilled than others. But, that doesn't obviate the need for an incentive system that draws teaching talent (and, and supplies, and $$ for building repairs, etc) to disadvantaged kids in disadvantaged schools.

Posted by mk | July 15, 2007 11:12 AM

"Given the difficulty of the enterprises, there's no reason to think that educating disadvantaged children is a market that smart businessmen are clamoring to get in on."

Indeed not- the danger is that they would want to get into the business of producing cheap labor and good consumers. Imagine a captive audience - you teach them just enough to work at a cash register or factory and spend the rest of the time on indoctrination. Perhaps Wal-Mart-Schools (tm) could offer specialized 'faith-based' education programs for the same segment of their customer base which also buys books from Wal-Mart... If quality is not really a goal, a business could make private 'education' both affordable (for the parents/students) and profitable (for the business).

There are other areas in which one would not expect privatization to actually make a profit- yes businesses clamor for 'privatization' - not necessarily for profit, but to escape public scrutiny - or perhaps create a tax sink - or for a dozen other reasons.

Now- I have no problem with private schools nor homeschooling, but I think that it is important that public schools be available for anyone, and that those public schools provide a certain minimum education to the students they serve.

cheers-

Posted by Eric | July 15, 2007 11:59 AM

Privatizing education rests on the notion that the current private system is upwardly scalable to an enormous degree. This is nonsense. Private school's academic advantage is precisely the result of its ability to exclude. If they had to teach everyone-- the intellectually disabled, the emotionally disturbed, the severe behavior problems, the addicts, the generally fucked up-- all of whom, to one degree or another, are excluded from private school-- you'd see any quantifiable advantage for private schools vanish.

I said much more about it at the American Scene

Posted by Freddie | July 15, 2007 12:02 PM

Freddie makes a good point. When I went to private school after going to public school, I found that the classes tended to be less dumped-down, be more in-depth and move at a faster pace. That's why it's great to not have the kid who just got out on parole and doesn't want to be there in the back dragging everything down as the lowest common denominator. People also forget that there are also a lot of rather crappy private schools out there that are there basically to teach the rich kids who were too stupid to get into the better privates. That's why in Boston people say that graduating from Thayer just shows your parents could pay for you to go to Thayer. In the past, going to a school like Thayer was a decent way to segway your way into an Ivy, but that is no longer true with more students applying to colleges and people making a bigger difference between different private schools. Building a good private school is based as much on selecting the motivated students as it is getting good teachers.

Posted by Reality Man | July 15, 2007 1:14 PM

"Given the difficulty of the enterprises, there's no reason to think that educating disadvantaged children is a market that smart businessmen are clamoring to get in on."

That's because educating disadvantaged children is not what these educational entrepreneurs are hoping to do. Rather, they want to skim off the students displaying the greatest potential, the kids from stable homes, the ones with the most highly motivated parents. These kids are the easiest to educate, the ones most likely to test well and "prove" on standardized tests the efficacy of the private sector in "reforming" education.

Meanwhile, the kids with learning disabilities, the emotionally troubled, and the ones from dysfunctional homes will continue to be the responsibility of the public schools. With their budgets shrunk in order to pay corporations to educate the better off students, public schools will end up with even lower test scores, providing further "evidence" that market-based solutions work.

Just as Michael Moore demonstrates in "Sicko," private, for-profit corporations are not there to make sure that everyone is taken care of. They are there to make money by signing up the ones with the greatest profit potential and shunning the rest. The marketplace works well in many areas, but it is seldom the best place to seek solutions for public policy problems.

Posted by Rob_in_Hawaii | July 15, 2007 2:02 PM

People talk of fixing the schools without mentioning fixing families and neighborhoods. Watch last year's episodes of The Wire--bad streets/families trump good teachers.

Posted by mal | July 15, 2007 2:05 PM

Even if private education could be scaled up dramatically, and still offer a product that was noticeably better, and could compensate for social factors outside the school, it would be difficult to capture the increased social returns (mainly future higher wages) enough to pay for the education up front.

I guess the next step will be to propose 'human capital bonds' to pay for it. Probably make them part of estates too. Not slavery, just a clever market reform...

If you read the founders, I can hardly think of a more reactionary and revolutionary development than removing public education. They considered a universally educated public with a common knowledge base, especially concerning civics) a necesary requirement for successful popular rule. Can the reactionaries guarantee the market will provide the same? If not, flush their ideas down the john. Yet, these peole call themselves conservatives. One of the chief virtuositists, Bill Bennett said he was willing to obstruct measures to improve public education, because he didn't like it, and saw no problem in hiding this agenda from the public. I would like to see his dream private school ethics curriculum.

Posted by anon | July 15, 2007 2:53 PM

Our public sector IT is increasingly privatized. When public sector IT moves from a do-it model to a contract-it model the ability to revert to do-it vanishes. This movement is a trap door and the business community knows it.

And check out the large IT projects at the federal and state level that have been contracted out. It is not hard to find catastrophes. Privatization is no guarantee of success. And as long as their lawyers are better than the public sector lawyers they will not pay the full consequences of their failure.

I have no doubt that the cheapest and best approach to education and other public enterprises is via a competent civil service. Like anon's reference to Bill Bennett above, those committed to the privatization model actively weaken our public sector's ability to function competently.

Posted by Nat | July 15, 2007 3:33 PM

But the same insight applies to public school teachers -- the best teachers love to have students learn, so they actively seek out schools with the best students.

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 15, 2007 3:40 PM

One way to try to make the incentives for teaching low-performing students greater is to measure how much learning took place over the school year and not focus on whether or not students are at the "grade level" that corresponds to their age. For example, lets say a teacher has a 6th group of students who average 4th grade reading level and at the end of the year they finish at 5th grade reading level . . . that's a year's worth of teaching. Let's say another teacher has a similar group of students, but they finish at an average level of 5th grade and 5 months . . . that's a year and a half worth of teaching in 1 year! Give that teacher a bonus! The current system penalizes teachers who work with students who are not already at grade level, but it could easily be changed to reward them.

Thinking outside the box, would it be fair to pay teachers who work with below-grade level students a bonus equal to their monthly salary for every month of learning the students do? So if a teacher's class went from 4th grade reading level to 6th grade reading level, pay them *double* their salary. That would be fair and would be good value for money. Students with the biggest deficiencies would be the ones with the richest potential gains (assuming no special educational factors).

Obviously special educational services would need to be priced differently. Which would not be a bad thing. A program serving special ed students needs a different mix of teachers and support personnel. More TAs and Master's level specialists. Special Education has never been fully funded anyway, 40% is supposed to come from Federal sources and its never been anywhere close to that level.

Posted by William | July 15, 2007 4:33 PM

comment for William:

Longitudinal assessment of students, which is what you are suggesting, if far superior to cross-sectional assessment. There are thousands of ways that longitudinal assessment is better, you mention one. But it is a bit harder. This notion holds equally for population or epidemiological research as with school assessment. In my comment above, I praised the New York City schools. They are attempting to implement longitudinal assessment. I believe there was also a recent NY Times article on this. Another, perhaps more important advantage of longitudinal assessment is the ability to give meaningful evaluation and guidance to individual students.

One thing that surprises me with the no-child-left behind initiative is how primitive it is. Its reliance on cross-sectional assessment is one example. Another related example is the exclusion of computerized testing, where a various creative approaches, approaches where learnign is combined with assessment, can be implemented.

Posted by johh | July 15, 2007 5:37 PM

The point of a private enterprise is to make money for the owners. Can money be made teaching (or, more accurately, seeming to teach) the disadvantaged and/or unmotivated? Sure, it all depends on how much the enterprise is getting paid by the state.

Posted by CharleyCarp | July 15, 2007 5:57 PM

Well, of course, if you give a public system a lot of resources and underfund a private system, the public system will probably do better, and if you give a private system a lot of resources and underfund a public system, the private system will probably do better. That doesn't essentially answer the question of whether or not, given constant resources, the public or private system yield higher quality (or, turning it around, given constant quality, whether the public or private system would be cheaper).

From what I've seen, the difference between the two isn't really significant, but I'm inclined to support some form of privatization or school choice within the public school system nonetheless, because I believe that forcing all children in a precinct with disparite interests, personalities, etc, to go to a single school for seven hours per day often leads to a toxic social milieu that, regardless of whether it has any negative affect on the kids' academics or future success, is unpleasant for the kids while they're there. I don't think giving increasing choice would solve this problem 100%, but I think it could alleviate it to some extent.

Posted by Julian Elson | July 15, 2007 7:33 PM

"Either way, you'd need a setup so that the best people (in terms of teachers, administrators, or even vicious profit-maximizing businessmen) were drawn to doing the harder job rather than the easier one."

I'm afraid the influence of the IQ determinist position might impede any ambitious effort for many to take the "harder job".

Posted by thehova | July 16, 2007 12:34 AM

Why do you want to divert educational resuorces from smart students to dumb students where the resources will produce less return to society. Many jobs do not require an extensive eduction and it is wasteful to provide it to the people who will be filling those jobs.

Posted by James B. Shearer | July 16, 2007 12:47 PM

Unfortunately Freddie is right. I think for a lot of parents "good school" = "school that doesn't have the wrong sort of kids." Remember that charter school in NYC that was so succesful precisely because it kept the poor black and hispanic kids out? That's what we'll see a lot more of if we privatize our schools. It's no accident that public schooling enjoys it's greatest success in ethnically and socially homogenous countries like Japan, Korea and the Scandinavian lands. It's also no accident that in a country like Germany, dissatisfaction with the school system is on the rise as more Turks, Russians and Arab kids enter it.

Posted by vanya | July 16, 2007 5:36 PM

There seems to be an assumption in this thread that those who advocate for the privatization of government services actually make well intentioned arguments and actually really believe that privatization will produce better results. I find that perspective to be naive at best.

The purpose of privatization is to funnel government money straight into the pockets well connected corporations and individuals. Any "services" that are provided are accidental to incidental to the process. Taking on the arguments of privatizers on the merits is a losing game.

Posted by Rob Mac | July 16, 2007 7:52 PM