The Debatable Land

"Socialism in one clause"?

Peter Hoskin is right to be suspicious of the government's latest ploy: mandating that all public bodies have a statutory duty to narrow the gap between rich and poor. As you might expect Polly Toynbee is tickled a deepish shade of red by the notion. Nonetheless, consider this snippet from her column today:

Poor children might need to have much more spent on their education per head than the better-off do. Sure Start toddlers might need more funds than older children. It might mean local lotteries to see that all children get equal access to the best schools.

It's a myth, of course, that simply ploughing more money into schools necessarily improves them and I suspect that Toynbee envisions some centralised system whereby bureaucrats allocate funds based on some incomprehensible and inflexible formula. Still, it wouldn't have to be that way: giving head-teachers greater license to spend their school budget as they see fit (and thus freeing them from LEAs) would be a good start. If that means they want to spend more on salaries to attract better teachers then fine.

More significantly, Toynbee seems to be endorsing greater school choice. That's a good thing. The current system of "slection by house price" is inequitable for sure. But the best way to organise "local lotteries" for access to the best schools is to permit all parents to choose the school they want their kids to attend. Parents should decide what is the best school for their kids, not civil servants. A lottery would only be necessary if and when a school is over-subscribed. If I recall correctly, New Zealand's school choice system results in more than 75% of parents getting their kids into their preferred school. There's no great reason to suppose some similarly happy outcome could be achieved in Britain. School choice incentivises parents to be more involved with their kids' education and, as we know, parental involvement is one of the most important factors in determining educational success.

Chart of the Day

Nuff said, methinks. Vouchers and proper school choice programmes aren't the only answer, of course, but it's simple decency to extend to the working class  opportunities taken for granted by the middle-class, including, of course, many teachers themselves. More details on the chart here.

Choice is for me, not for thee

Gabriel Sherman's written a very entertaining piece on the furious competition between Washington's elite private schools to enroll the Obama daughters next term. Enjoyable as it is, you may find yourself wishing they could all lose. However, the piece reveals one of th egrubbier, more ghastly sides of the city.

Nonetheless, the issue of where the Obama girls go to school is interesting. Back in 1992 the Clintons toyed with the notion - perhaps even promising? - that Chelsea would attend a bog-standard public (ie, state) school. That didn't survive a recce of the DC public school system (though I suspect that the Secret Service had a say too) and I doubt many people really think the Obamas are going to put their kids into a public school. So Sidwell Friends (where Chelsea went) or Georgetwon Day seems most likely.

And that's fair enough. Here's the thing however: all year long Obama said that, with regard to healthcare, it was only fair that every American have access to the kind of privileged healthcare plan members of Congress have thoughtfully provided for themselves. Nothing wrong with that either. But sauce for healthcare is sauce for education: if everyone should be able to make the same choices as Congressmen and Senators in healthcare, why shouldn't ordinary voters have the same - or similar -  range of choices available to them as do the Wahsington elite when it comes to choosing what school they send their kids to?

I don't think Obama is being especially hypocritical in sending his own kids to the best school he can afford. I just wonder why he doesn't do more to help more families have some of the same choices he does?  What's the difference - apart from the teaching unions' contributions to Democratic politics - between healthcare and education? That is, what's the logic in supporting choice in healthcare but opposing it in education?

Education Briefing

The best political programme of the 1980s explains school choice - and the opposition to it. As always Yes, Minister and, subsequently, Yes, Prime Minister were on the money:


Hat-tip: Cato.

England, Their F***ing England

Amazing.

Pupils are being rewarded for writing obscenities in their GCSE English examinations even when it has nothing to do with the question.

One pupil who wrote “f*** off” was given marks for accurate spelling and conveying a meaning successfully.

His paper was marked by Peter Buckroyd, a chief examiner who has instructed fellow examiners to mark in the same way. He told trainee examiners recently to adhere strictly to the mark scheme, to the extent that pupils who wrote only expletives on their papers should be awarded points.

On the other hand... you might  say, given that I assume that plenty of the questions (in these shabby, fallen days!) are fatuous and gawd-help-us daft, that a swift "Fuck off" might be an admirably pithy and considered verdict that treated the question with an entirely appropriate measure of contempt...

[Hat-tip: James @ Coffee Hoose]

O tempora, o mores!

Guardianista logic:

• I like classics
• I think classics should be promoted
• Boris Johnson promotes the classics
• Boris Johnson is a toff
• Boris Johnson is therefore damaging the classics
• The classics would be better off with no champion than with Boris.

Seriously.

Tales from Labour Britain: Illegal Document Department

Via Samizdata, this seems to be a quite appalling story. The Guardian reports that:

A masters student researching terrorist tactics who was arrested and detained for six days after his university informed police about al-Qaida-related material he downloaded has spoken of the "psychological torture" he endured in custody.

Despite his Nottingham University supervisors insisting the materials were directly relevant to his research, Rizwaan Sabir, 22, was held for nearly a week under the Terrorism Act, accused of downloading the materials for illegal use. The student had obtained a copy of the al-Qaida training manual from a US government website for his research into terrorist tactics.

Mind you, I don't think there's any real reason to suppose that the Tories, had they been charged with mismanaging affairs these past ten years, would have been very much, if at all, more sympathetic to civil liberties than "New" Labour has been. 

According to Mr Sabir:

they read me a statement confirming it was an illegal document which shouldn't be used for research purposes. To this day no one has ever clarified that point.

Well, no, I don't suppose they have. But of course it's only cranks and crackpots who care about these things.

The Frippery of a Rounded Education

Chris Woodhead, the former head of the schools inspectorate in England and Wales, argues that many private schools are, to all intents and purposes, ripping off their clients. The Telegraph observes that he has an interest to declare, but:

Prof Woodhead is the chairman of Cognita, which owns a chain of profitmaking private schools and has purchased four charitable schools.

He said running schools as businesses reduced "waste" – such as luxurious sporting facilities and theatres – as fees were kept low to attract parents. "We are absolutely rigorous in not providing frills and frippery, but concentrating on what seems to us to matter most, namely the quality of teaching. I am deeply shocked by the degree of waste within the independent sector. I don't think that the fees do need to go up in the way that they do go up all the time and I think that many independent schools are locked into a competition to provide ever more five-star facilities which actually have no education benefit at all."

Well, this is nonsense. Or rather, Woodhead's complaint - or, perhaps, observation - merely shows that the education market is working. There's no reason why every private school should strive to offer exactly the same facilities or experiences as other schools. Indeed, the whole point of a private education market is to provide parents with choices most suitable for their children. If some parents want a "no frills" approach, then fine; if others want a "five star" approach across the board then, well, that's fine too.

But Woodhead's argument also reflects a desperately narrow view of education and one that, while it may be in vogue with bureacrats and government ministers, runs contrary to the ethos of most private schools I've ever had any dealings with. The public (ie, private) schools take a more rounded, even holistic (to use a rather terrible term) view of education. Yes, exam results and league tables matter but they're not the sole means of measuring a school's worth and, in my experience, they're not the sole criterion used by prospective parents.

The very facilities that Woodhead says are "waste"  - sports and arts  - are actually two of the areas that many parents and pupils alike find most attractive about private schools. Equally, sporting and artistic endeavours - to say nothing of institutions such as the Combined Cadet Force, community service, religious observation etc etc - play an important, even vital, role in the public school experience. In many ways they are just as important as the quality of teaching in the classroom.

But that's because education isn't a conveyer-belt to deliver pupils to the job market but rather a process of intellectual, cultural and social development in which every child is given the greatest opportunity to find their niche. If that means orchestras and drama or mountaineering expeditions to Peru and rugby tours to South Africa then so be it. 

Indeed, looking back upon my own school days and what stands out is not so much the qulity of the teaching (though some of that was excellent) but the trips to St Petersburg and Rome, the house and school plays, the extra-curricular readers' and writers' circles, long summer nights on the golf course or the cricket field, visits to the opera in Glasgow... and so on and so on. In other words, being exposed to a wide range of activity, not all of which had any obviously measurable impact upon the quality of the academic education one received but which, to one extent or another, were vital  - and happy! - elements of the boarding school experience.

It's true that when I was at school, the place had changed less since the 1950s than it has in the 16 years since I left. The new boarding houses do feel like mid-range hotels. But that investment has come because parents demanded it. Those who had experienced boarding school themselves didn't much mind that we lived in spartan, freezing houses; those parents who had not quite reasonably demanded that their children be able to live in rather more modern conditions.

There's nothing wrong with a "no frills" approach to private schooling and doubtless there are schools that outperform their more expensive rivals, but in general terms you get what you pay for. The question of what suits a given child is up to parents themselves of course.

Still, it's dismally instructive that Woodhead, the man formerly charged with monitoring standards in English state schools, should consider sport and the arts as expensive "fripperies". This is the sort of thinking that leads to government ministers bemoaning the study of history or other "useless" subjects. (Not just government ministers: I recall having a fierce argument with a newspaper editor some years ago over the future of Greek in Scottish state schools. My suggestion that we might run an editorial condemning the proposal to no longer offer Greek Standard Grade exams was not received terribly warmly.) 

But if you don't offer Greek anywhere in the system, or you don't offer pupils the chance to express themselves - and learn! - on the sports field or in the theatre or music school then you're doing them a disservice and, in the longer term, failing society itself.

The horror is that so many pupils never get the chance to develope their talents in these areas and yet we're quite prepared to let that miserable status quo endure. The question isn't whether too many private schools are spending too much on facilities, but why the state sector - in general terms, since obviously there are many fine state schools - cannot take as broad a definition of what education actually constitutes?

Back to school: "Choice is for me, not for thee" edition...

To return to schools. Did you know that it's a bad thing for a school to be popular? Nor did I. But according to Scott Lemieux a voucher programme is pointless because it can't save every child overnight and, anyway, there aren't enough places at private schools in the first place. This rather conveniently ignores the fact that real school choice is not just a question of competition between private and state-sponsored schools but within the state sector itself.

Anyway, Mr Lemieux writes that:

A market in education wouldn't function like other markets. Whereas more customers (within reason) for a department store mean more profits, more students for a school makes it harder to educate everyone, and places substantial demands on physical spaces that can't be easily expanded. Even assuming that they provide enough money for students to have a genuinely wide theoretical range of private schools to go to, which in practice is unlikely, vouchers are only an effective solution for more than tiny numbers of students if there are lots of spaces in good schools for children to go to. Or, in other words, they only work if you assume away the problem you're trying to solve in the first place. The small numbers involved and the fact that schools are very far from being like markets in consumer goods also make large transformative effects created by vouchers exceptionally implausible.

Alas this is nonsense. Well-intentioned nonsense I'm sure but nonsense nonetheless. We actually have a pretty good idea as to how education markets work because - amazingly! - we can look at how market forces and competition operate in the private sector. There we find that failing schools contract and eventually close while successful schools expand and improve the quality of the education they offer their customers. Schools have an incentive to invest in their facilities knowing that if they don't prospective parents will choose to send their children to competing schools that do. Competition within the private sector drives up standards. I can't see any logical reason for supposing the same would not be true in the state sector as well provided, that is, that funding follows pupils as it does in the private sector (in the form of fees). That being so, successful schools gain the ability to take on extra staff, provide a greater range of extra-curricular activities, build new facilities etc etc.

Is there likely to be some difference between what a $35,000 a year boarding school and a $10,000 a year state school can offer children? Sure. But that doesn't invalidate the principle at issue here. The only way that Lemieux's point can be valid is if the money does not follow the pupil - but all the most serious advocates of school choice insist that this is an essential element.

The capacity question really is a canard, since it assumes that it's impossible for new schools to be set up or for successful ones to expand. But there's no compelling reason to suppose that's the case. Again, we may look to Sweden where in just 15 years the proportion of children educated privately has risen from less than 1% to more than 10% with no indication that this growth will suddenly stop. That experience would seem to suggest that education markets are just as flexible as other kinds of market.

Education, after all, is a commodity that has the great advantage of being a product in which almost all the incentives are for improvement rather than a cost-cutting race to the bottom. Equally importantly - and as I've mentioned before - there is plenty of evidence that the expansion of choice in Sweden has helped raise standards in the state-provided education sector too.

Lemieux's TAPPED colleague Dana Goldstein also weighs in, making the remarkable claim that even if lots of new schools open and even if these schools prove popular with parents:

This will still be a drastically unequal system. Why? Because many, if not most, of the new schools will continue to cater exclusively to poor, non-white students. Those schools will suffer from poor reputations (racism and classism are real), less parent volunteer time, less investment from the community, and probably less funding. Megan, one reason to support the federal government providing any service is that greater centralization can reduce inequalities.

We need to decrease the isolation and concentration of already stigmatized groups within our education system. Since there is no evidence that private charters do a better job at educating kids than public schools do, what makes us think crowding poor kids into private schools en masse will fix the problem? Rather, we need to make more public schools into good public schools, so that more parents opt-in. This doesn't have to take decades. Schools can turn around in a year or two under good leadership and with quality teachers and high academic standards.

Wel,l yup, I agree that schools can be turned around if there's good leadership, quality teachers and high academic standards. No argument there! But why isn't that happening? Why are too many city kids in the US and the UK not benefiting from these obviously good things? If it were simply a matter of looking up Good Head-Teachers Are Us in the Yellow Pages we wouldn't need to even have this discussion. Perhaps, as Goldstein suggests, we only suffer from a failure of willpower. But somehow methinks it's more likely to be a systemic problem.

(Individual schools may be tuned around by an inspirational headmaster but that is hardly a prescription for system-wide reform given that, alas, there's no factory producing inspirational headmasters. To make one other obvious point: one reason private schools are better equipped to respond to parental demand/interests/concerns is that head-teachers have greater freedom to run their school as they see fit. They have a freedom that is the envy of every state-sector teacher I know. That is a non-trivial factor.)

As for this "greater centralisation can reduce inequalities" stuff: well that's breath-taking (in passing, if this is true and this is your aim, is there any area of human activity you would rule out of bounds for this sort of government-controlled centralisation? and if not, why not?). I say it's breath-taking because the movement for school choice is built upon despair at the shocking inequalities - of both opportunity and outcome- that centralised, state-controlled "one size fits all" has created. If the current system weren't so unequal - and such a zipcode lottery - then, again, we wouldn't be needing to argue about this.

Remember, it really can't be stressed enough that the people most penalised by the current system are the ambitious, concerned, poor (once upon a time they'd have been called "The Deserving Poor" but I suspect that's not allowed these days). Let's put aside knee-jerk paternalism for a moment and see what the people most affected by this have to say for themselves:

Both African Americans and Hispanics are markedly more likely to support vouchers than are whites. Indeed, 68 percent of African Americans and 61 percent of Hispanics favor vouchers, compared to 38 percent of whites. Only 15 percent of African Americans and 23 percent of Hispanics oppose vouchers, compared to 40 percent of whites.

Given that African-Americans and Hispanics are vastly more likely to suffer the consequences of failing inner-city school systems than are whites one might think these numbers quite significant. One might even go so far as to suggest they're significant enough to be worth heeding. The alternative must be to suppose that these people are too stupid to know what's best for them and they should just pipe down and listen to what their betters have to tell them. The opposition to school choice would seem to come from parents who are, generally speaking, quite content with their children's education. Lucky them. But that's no reason to permit them to deny opportunities to their less fortunate fellow-citizens.

An Economist blogger is spot on when he/she argues:

Moreover, lest we brutishly blame the victims, there is no reason to expect that poor consumers would prefer schools that arrest their children's intellectual development. Were something more closely approximating a market to appear, we should expect, at the very least, that poorer parent will feel less trapped and their children will do no worse in the short run, while, in the long run, the entrepreneurial incentive and competitive process will continuously improve the quality of education at the lowest segment of the price scale -- as it has done for almost every other good and service known to man. If it is to be taken seriously by the economically literate, the claim that education is a special exception requires a special explanation.

Neither Ms Goldstein nor Mr Lemieux come anywhere close to offering that explanation. Nor, of course, do they offer anything other than wishful thinking as an alternative solution for the problem of failing urban schools. And yet, remarkably, it's the advocates of school choice who are the glib ideologues here? I think not my friends, I think not.

UPDATE: Glen Whitman asks why we even suppose that education can be best provided by the state in the first place. True that.

Trick or Treat or Voucher?

Megan McArdle has been on a rare old tear recently, pushing the argument for school choice, here and here and here and here and here. It will not surprise some readers that I rather agree with her.

Clearly, however, this just proves my foolishnesss. Did you know that it's impossible to make a good faith argument in favour of school choice or any programme that gives poor families greater input into where their children are educated? Me neither. Time for me to be telt, obviously.

Exhibit A) Matt Yglesias:

...the United States already "allows" poor parents to withdraw their children from inner city school systems in much the same way that it allows rich and middle class parents to withdraw their children from inner city school systems. They're "allowed" to send their kids to a private school that's willing to educate them, and they're "allowed" to move elsewhere. Obviously, in practice poor families have less practical capacity to do this. But by the same token, poor families have less practical capacity to live on streets with well-appointed sidewalks, to choose cruelty-free meat, to get health care, to benefit from competently organized disaster relief, to live in neighborhoods with low murder rates, and all kinds of other things. These are all real problems but since they're problems of practical capacity rather than permission (about the fair value of the right, rather than the existence of the right) institutional design is about all that matters.

Exhibit B) Ezra Klein:

There are a lot of very good, very smart people thinking through education policy, childhood poverty, etc. Then there are somewhat more shallow people who want to propose a tough-minded solution to the sorry state of inner city education, and they fasten on vouchers (which no evidence has ever suggested will actually solve the problem) or teacher's unions (ditto). Those policies may have some worth. But they are not Answers, no study has ever suggested otherwise, and forcing us into an endless conversation over them is actually bad, so far as I can tell, for the education debate. They do, however, give a certain class of participants a useful club with which to beat on liberals and accuse them of active opposition to the disadvantaged.

So there you have it. If you think that giving people more control over their lives is a good thing you're just being glib. And you probably hate poor folk too.

The question is not whether or not a voucher system can improve everyone's education overnight but whether or not it can do more than the status quo to advance the interests of children. Matt - rather blithely! - says "Obviously, in practice poor families have less practical capacity" to move to catchment areas for the best state schools (because they can't afford to) which is, of course, precisely the point. The whole idea behind school choice is that, in time, competition for pupils between schools will drive up standards (as well as increase parental involvement in their kids' education).

The question is not one of perfection but of improvement and, frankly, given the proportion of kids in state schools (in the UK and the US) who are not benefiting from the kind of education we would wish them to receive, it is hard to see quite why the idea of letting ordinary people have more control over their lives can be a bad thing.

That empowerment would, from a philosophical point of view, be a good thing anyway. It makes no more sense for the state to tell you where your kids may be educated at high school than it does for the state to tell you what university you may attend. So, yes, school choice has - in my view - a value even if it produced the same educational outcomes as the current system. I'd also say that in the long-term such a scenario seems unlikely: introducing competition to the state sector seems more likely to drive up standards, just as it already does in the private sector. Follow the money: I have a hard time believing that incentivising schools to perform better is really likely to prove catastrophic. Indeed, I'm not sure I can recall a major piece of research concluding that voucher programmes in other countries have made matters worse. 

Equally it is remarkable that so many people should still cling to the "one size fits all" approach when experience suggests that there are precious few human activities for which this is appropriate, let alone one as complex and subject to so many variables as education.

At the risk of labouring the point, the notion that school choice programmes will destroy education and are the province only of those who wish to enslave the poor would be news to those countries that have introduced vouchers. Among them are our old friends in Sweden and the Netherlands as well as, on the other side of the world, New Zealand.

Sweden's story is interesting: the vouchers proved controversial when introduced 15 years ago by a (by Swedish standards) right-wing government. Tellingly, however, there is no popular support now for abandoning the programme. A paper from Stockholm's  Research Institute of Industrial Economics (which can be downloaded here) which studied the impact of Sweden's voucher system on 28,000 kids finds, contra Ezra's claim that "no evidence" has ever been found that vouchers can be part of a solution:

Greater competition improves the standards of public schools...Sweden has left a system with virtually no parental influence over school choice, and an almost complete dominance of public schools. A voucher system, where parents are allowed to choose any school approved by the National Agency for Education, has been put in its place...

A widespread concern among opponents of school choice is that competition will hurt the public schools. The present study shows this fear to be without foundation.

No wonder that, to the best of my knowledge, vouchers and choice programmes have proven popular wherever they have been implemented: in Europe, the antipodes and in countries such as Chile and Colombia in Latin America. Now, clearly there are many ways to skin a cat and school choice schemes vary from country to country. But the basic point remains that school choice is popular wherever it is introduced. From that one may deduce that parents are, on the whole, satisfied with the greater opportunities available to them. It requires quite some imagination to suppose that parents in each of these very different countries have been duped by a nefarious right-wing plot to destroy education.

As Caroline Hoxby, professor of economics at Harvard, argues in this paper:

The essence of school choice is a claim that if government intervenes mainly through setting prices and parameters, education investment will be more optimal than if it intervenes through quantity regulation or, more usually, straight government provision. School choice is a claim about the form of intervention, not a claim that education is best left to a laissez-faire market because, if they were interested in a laissez-faire situation, advocates of school choice would presumably not be interested in the use of tax dollars at all.

Hoxby cites three factors vital to a successful choice programme:  supply flexibility, money following students and independent school management.  Take any one of those elements away - as has been the case in, say, Milwaukee where the money does not follow pupils effectively and independent management (which does not mean being free from assessment) has been curtailed - and you reduce the impact and efficacy of any voucher or school choice system.

Matt talks about "practical capacity" as though this were an insuperable problem. In other words, even if you let everyone choose their school all the good ones are going to be over-subscribed so the best you can hope for is that a few kids will be better off but that most will see no real difference in their situation. But that's why the money is important: if the money follows the pupil (and crucially, is taken from poorly performing schools) then over-subscribed schools have an additional incentive (beyond altruism or a sense of mission) to expand. Crucially they also have the ability to do so.

That's why voucher programmes of the sort favoured by most pro-voucher experts are explicitly designed to address the point Matt makes here:

If we're concerned not about the "right" of exit (which already exists) but the practical ability to get a better education, then you need policies that increase the supply of schools that do a good job of educating poor children.

Well, yeah, that's exactly the point. (And is also why it takes time for voucher programmes to work: the good schools won't expand automatically, nor will the bad, unpopular ones fade away immediately. Hence it's silly to say, "hey look vouchers aren't working" after just one or two years. It's a long-term effort at improvement, not an immediate panacea.)

Now it may be that all these other countries with their silly choice programmes and all the parents who would like to be able to choose schools for their kids are wrong. Perhaps they really have no clue about what works best for their kids. And, yes, perhaps some voucher enthusiasts are from time to time too keen to suggest that vouchers are a magical and immediate solution to all educational problems. But... I find it hard to believe that they're quite such a pernicious policy proposal as Matt and Ezra would have us think. Nor, needless to say, do I find their sweeping accusations of bad faith terribly convincing.   

UPDATE: Time Lee has more good things to say on this.

Midgets need not apply?

Via Arthur Goldhammer - curator of the excellent French Politics blog which has become an invaluable resource for keeping up to speed with Sarko et al - comes this splendid illustration of the benefits of a Harvard education. As Mr Goldhammer says, "Note the translation of Hautes Etudes":

Mr Goldhammer also draws one's attention to a 60 Minutes profile of Sarkozy this evening in which Sarko decides he's can't be bothered answering CBS's questions and abruptly storms out of the interview. Should be fun!

UPDATE:  Mr Goldhammer observes that Lesley Stahl does not seem to know very much about France. Fancy that!

Sarko apparently stormed out of his interview with Lesley Stahl because she asked him a question about Cécilia, but he should have refused to meet with her because she is so utterly ignorant of France, as this "reporter's notebook" makes clear (click on the "Lesley Stahl's notebook" link). She states that France "used to be anti-American but is now pro-American and pro-Israel" and that the French are "prohibited by law" from working more than 35 hours per week. This misunderstanding may make it difficult for her to comprehend Sarkozy's reform of the tax on overtime work.

The problem with targets

Merit pay, eh? Normally I'm all for hopping on the teachers-unions-are-spawn-of-the-devil bandwagon. But they're right to think that performance-related pay, or at least any form of it likely to be introduced by bureaucrats, is likely to be a disaster for exactly the same reason as most government-mandated teaching requirements offer exactly the wrong incentives. Neill Harvey-Smith explains:

If one in twelve children sitting their GCSEs in 2010 raise what would have been a D to a C grade, in just one subject, and everything else stays the same, then the government will have met its supposedly tough new target for secondary education.

Would your kid have got 5 A to Cs anyway? They don't need extra help. They are doing well enough already.

Will your kid get way below 5 A to Cs? Then teachers would be stupid to try and raise their marks a long way; there are more promising students to focus on, just below the threshold.

Making this the measure of success means - forgive me - focusing on the few not the many. It means concentrating the energies of the secondary education system on the 45th - 53rd percentiles of the student population whose test results currently fall just below official acceptability. It creates a ridiculous distortion of educational priorities. It is another top-down target of the sort whose demise keeps being headlined but never actually cease.

Better by far, methinks, to just free schools from the dead hand of political oversight. Pay should be something in the gift of head-teachers free to hire and fire teachers as they see fit (as, of course, is already the case, in the private sector) as well as offer bonuses and determine pay scales as they see fit. A nationwide one-size-fits-all approach is not likely to be optimal.

Vouchers or complete privatisation would be good too. But that's a battle for another day.

Swedes 1 Turnips 0 (Again).

It's a question I've asked before, but it's worth revisiting: if school choice is a nefarious right-wing plot to keep poor people poor and uneducated why is it that Sweden - Sweden! - has a nationwide school voucher programme that is supported by all political parties? Now clearly this doesn't in and of itself demonstrate that open access school choice programmes are necessarily a magic bullet, but it might - or rather ought to - quieten some of the hysterical shrieking one hears from defenders of the status quo in both the USA and the UK. If school choice can be embraced by left-wing Swedes it's just about possible it won't cause the sky to fall tomorrow...

A new paper from the Adam Smith Institute (unsurprisingly!) suggests the UK could usefully copy Sweden's voucher system and points out that in Sweden:

After the government allowed parents to send their children to any school that they thought was best -- whether state, private or religious -- and the government made sure that funding followed the pupil, as long as the school did not charge any top­-up fees, Sweden experienced an unprecedented expansion in the independent school system. New, affordable educational possibilities opened up to children from disadvantaged families. Swedish state schools were faced with having to compete in a more vibrant environment, and their quality improved as a result. Thanks to its spectacular success, the open access scheme introduced there is now valued by most parents, and embraced by all major political parties.

As I say, oppose school choice all you like but please let's drop the pretence that it's a policy advocated by people who don't care about other people. The evidence doesn't support that. Or, if you must continue down that path explain to me why the Swedes (and the Dutch for that matter) are also so very beastly and tell me why, having experimented with this callous approach to leaving the poor behind school choice in Sweden there's no appetite for returning to the old system.

  

Are you smarter than a Harvard student? Probably...

God knows how reliable this sort of sillyness really is (not very, probably) but:

Students at many of the country's most prestigious colleges and universities are graduating with less knowledge of American history, government, and economics than they had as incoming freshmen, with Harvard University seniors scoring a "D+" average on a 60-question multiple-choice exam about civic literacy.

According to a report released yesterday by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the average college senior at the 50 colleges and universities polled did not earn a passing grade.

You can take the test yourself here. I confess I did so with much trepidation. It turns out that I don't know much about judicial review or how the bond market works. More embarrassingly I could do with revisiting just war theory. Still, 57/60 or 95% seems a satisfactory score for a foreigner. Leave your scores in the comments, if you dare...

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.