Krugman speaks sense on education. He just doesn't know it.

I have no interest whatsoever in health policy, but I am interested in education. Paul Krugman's column yesterday mocked one strand of conservative (libertarian actually) education thinking.

So let's end this un-American system and make education what it should be -- a matter of individual responsibility and private enterprise. Oh, and we shouldn't have any government mandates that force children to get educated, either. As a Republican presidential candidate might say, the future of America's education system lies in free-market solutions, not socialist models.

Isn't this a transparently ridiculous argument he suggested, before going on to say, well, that's what we currently have in health care.

But of course Krugman's ridiculous education policy is exactly what I would like to see. It's progress, I suppose, that these arguments are aired on the New York Times' editorial page, even if only to be mocked.

Brian Beutler, among others, reminded Krugman not to be quite so sanguine.

But if he assumes that junking public schools and replacing them with a private system is an idea stuck out on the fringes of the Republican mainstream, then I think he's forgotten what sort of creature the Republican party is.

Frankly Mr Beutler has little reason to be so pessimistic. Vouchers ain't arriving anytime soon (nationally at least), let alone dismantling every aspect of public education. Still, what I always find interesting about the opposition to school choice and other libertarian education dreams is the assumption on the left that you must hate poor kids if you favour this sort of "radical" scheme.

I've never understood this. Vouchers aren't a crazy right-wing notion designed to marginalise the poor; quite the contrary, they're supposed to be a means of giving the poor more choice and greater access to the best and most appropriate education for them. They're an egalitarian measure.

Perhaps that explains why countries such as the Netherlands and Sweden - not normally regarded as homes of right-wing craziness - have done more to make school choice the central plank of their education systems than any other countries in Europe.

It's a long, long struggle to give poor people the same sort of opportunity - in as much as this is possible - enjoyed by the wealthy. The idea of vouchers is not exactly new. Milton Friedman proposed them as far back as... 1955.

Comments

[ndm]

"Vouchers aren't a crazy right-wing notion designed to marginalise the poor; quite the contrary, they're supposed to be a means of giving the poor more choice and greater access to the best and most appropriate education for them."

A lot of deception in that paragraph.

The voucher movement in the United States is a right-wing movement designed to destroy public education. A $4,000 voucher will do nothing to help urban poor attend private schools costing $25,000 a year as they do in the city I live in. It would, of course, help them attend the neighborhood parochial school which makes the idea attaractive to the religious conservative. (Alex Massie hails from a country where every joke about the Pope starts with the line "What school did you go to?")

A voucher would provide a nice bonus to the upper middle classes who send their children to these fancy private schools. However, the parents send their children to these expensive schools so that they do not come across urban poor. After the introduction of vouchers the parents would have to find even more expensive and exclusionary schools to send their children too. In fact, I know of two popular private schools in this city that significantly increased their fees recently with the intent of gaining a better class of students.

Milton Friedman may have been a bright spark with regard to economic policy. Comrade Friedman, however, was a dim bulb when it came to educational policy. An inevitable consequence of widespread introduction of a voucher program is government oversight of all schools. (Ask some old physicians how they feel about the changes in oversight subsequent to the introduction of Medicare in the 1960s.) Things have come to a sorry pass when I have a higher belief in keeping private schools free of government interference than did Comrade Friedman.

[James Barlow]

But consider that a motivated parent can take that $4,000 voucher away from the school administration if she is unhappy with the education received by her child. This market signal to schools is what will help them to improve.

The fact that private schools cost more is irrelevant - their success likes in responding to parental pressure for good results, year after year.

Vouchers might even reveal that some private schools are over-priced for the results they deliver.

[DCPI]

ndm: Having grown up as a child of a private school teacher and administrator, I feel confident that private schools are not raising prices to "bring in a better class of student." Most elementary and secondary private schools survive year to year without a major endowment. The board debates on tuition raises are typically contentious and in the end the decision is usually one of making ends meet.

They screen for the right type of student with a little thingy they call an "application."