We all knew it would happen – President Obama has presented his plan for education reform. In typical government newspeak the Obama plan carries the misnomer “Race to the Top,” which undoubtedly will prove to be an acceleration to the educational bottom, just as his predecessor’s attempt at education reform left every child behind.
Race to the Top is funded by $4.35 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, “one of the largest investments in education reform in American history” according to Mr. Obama. The money will be distributed to the states based on a single principle: “Whether a state is ready to do what works.” It comes as no surprise that it is the Obama administration which determines “what works” in the educating of children.
According to the erudite officials of the Department of Education, “what works” includes adopting and implementing “a common set of K-12 standards that are internationally benchmarked”; creating and using “a statewide longitudinal data system that includes all of the elements of the America COMPETES Act”; developing alternative pathways to teacher certification; applying multiple rating categories to evaluate teachers based on student growth; distributing good teachers equitably among poor schools; linking students’ achievement data to the students’ teachers and principals; increasing the State’s authority to intervene in the lowest performing schools; and, lifting restrictions on the number of charter schools and providing equitable funding and access to facilities for charter schools. In order to receive funds from Race to the Top, a State is required to meet these criteria.
Generally speaking, Race to the Top, like most educational “reforms” in the last forty years, moves further in the direction of consolidating American education in the hands of the federal government, at the expense of the states and local communities. There is also a lot wrong with the program’s particulars including the Big Brother requirement of a data system to keep tabs on all students and teachers, and the adoption of uniform K-12 standards which will only exacerbate the cookie cutter complexion of public school factories.
Increased federal control and expanded state intervention in the public school system, although concerning factors in themselves, are merely byproducts of a more fundamental error on which Race to the Top is based: it attempts to reform public education. Neither Obama nor any president hereafter, state governor, Congressman, or local school board will ever be able to reform the public education system for the simple reason that it is public education.
A “reform,” whether of public education or anything else, requires “improvement or amendment of what is wrong, corrupt, [or] unsatisfactory,” but the very nature of public education is wrong, corrupt, and unsatisfactory—thereby making reform impossible—for two primary reasons. First, it is inherently an immoral system. Second, it is pushed outside the realm of market forces, and therefore, always will be economically inefficient.
Public Education Lacks A Moral Foundation
The concept of morality presumes that men come into this world with certain natural rights, including the right to life, the right to the fruits of one’s labor, and the right of liberty. The right of liberty endows all men with the freedom to act in whatever manner conceivable, so long as such actions do not infringe on the natural rights of others.
Under the right of liberty, therefore, if someone has gained rightful possession over some thing, there is but one way for another to obtain that thing – through voluntary exchange. The only other way to obtain it is through force, but that runs counter to the possessor’s natural rights.
Thus, if Shane has a pair of new shoes and Jason wants them, Jason can obtain those shoes in several ways. Jason can offer some form of value in exchange for the shoes, and assuming Shane is in agreement, the transaction is in accordance with the natural rights of both parties. Jason could also act by himself through aggression to force Shane to give him the shoes. Everyone would agree in that situation that Jason’s acts would be immoral. Even more sinister, Jason could combine with his friends Jeff, Kelly, Candice, and Heather and jointly vote in a democratic process to force Shane to give Jason the shoes.
Public education is based on the latter example, that is, it is founded on democratic force, aggression, and the violation of natural rights. In a public education scenario, Shane and Candice cannot get Jeff and Kelly to voluntarily fund their children’s education, so Shane and Candice combine with Jason and Heather to force Jeff and Kelly to either provide for the education of Shane’s and Candice’s children or go to jail. Elementary my dear Watson…or so it would seem.
To most Americans the public education system is sacrosanct, and to attack it, let along advocate its abolition, is in and of itself immoral. That is because somehow Americans have created and accepted a notion that everyone is entitled to an education at his neighbor’s expense. This underlying assumption was evident in President Obama’s Race to the Top speech when he said that “The future belongs to the nation that best educates its people.” A nation has no right or obligation to educate anyone. Instead, the state’s only role is to protect the right of the free individual to secure his education of choice by his own means.
Even the more conservative and libertarian types have a difficult time accepting that public education is immoral, but those same people will turn around and protest President Obama’s healthcare plan. The principles are the same for either socialized medicine or socialized education. Plain and simple, public education is founded on theft and force, and such a system can never become moral, and therefore, can never be reformed.
Public Education Is Economically Unfeasible
The market is the archetype of reformation. Its entire purpose is to constantly and continually reform itself to fall in line with human action. When there is an oversupply of any given product or service, the market reforms by decreasing prices, which increases demand and diminishes the oversupply. When there is excessive demand, the market reforms by increasing supply to meet demand or by increasing the price to keep demand in check. When a business provides inadequate products or services, the market forces that business to reform itself to meet market expectations or go bankrupt.
Public education does not play by market rules. The “demand” for public education is created through compulsory education laws, and therefore, is artificial because it does not result from the subjective value judgments of consumers. In order to meet the artificially created demand, the state, through central planning, provides the supply of public education through taxation spread out over the general population. Further, public education cannot go out of business because it is not subject to the competitive forces of the private market. Consequently, public education misses out on the benefits of the market’s self-reforming characteristics.
As a result, public education abounds with inefficiencies. It is burdened with bureaucracies, confronted with endless demands from government-protected labor unions, and peppered with tenured teachers who have no accountability to either the market or the more lenient government standards.
Take Washington D.C., for example, which spends $24,600 per K-12 student. For that nearly $25,000 of “free” public education Washington D.C. boasts a high school graduation rate of less than 50%. On the low side of public education expenditures is California, which has the largest public education system with 6,275,469 students in grades K-12. California’s public education budget is $50,423,000,000, or $8,035 per student per school year. Nationally more than half a trillion dollars was spent in the 2008-2009 school year on elementary and secondary public education, that is, $10,418 per student.
Compare that with the national average K-12 private school cost of $8,302 (which absent government intervention in the education market would be significantly lower). Better yet, compare public education expenditures to the average cost of homeschooling which maybe reaches $500 per year per student (although there are no actual comprehensive studies on the issue), but that would be on the high side.
The differences in costs between privately funded education and public education is further evidence that the problem with public education is the system itself. Year after year we complain; year after year we dedicate more resources to the system; and, year after year we are faced with more students who after 13 years of being educated on the public dole enter the world with no education other than having learned how to be dependent on someone else. The system is fundamentally flawed.
Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has a brighter outlook. In a recent piece for the Washington Post, Mr. Duncan posited that he “…reject[s] much of the pessimism and age-old apathy about school reform” because he has met many “who hunger for change” and he has “seen high-performing schools and districts that are closing achievement gaps, raising graduation rates and shipping off to college kids who never thought it possible.”
Mr. Arne, like his equally optimistic predecessors, will be proven wrong, because education reform in this country will only occur when the government gets out of the educating business.
Copyright © 2009 Campaign for Liberty
