Choosing to be Choosey About Schools
The Surprisingly Low-stakes Upheaval of American Public Education
Republicans around the US have zeroed in on school choice as an actionable policy leftover from when they possessed some kind of decipherable creed. Several states (North Carolina, Arkansas, Utah, Iowa, Florida, etc.) have recently enacted (near-)universal school choice legislation, and many others have expanded their programs. It’s amusing to watch pre-Trump conservatives continue to furtively move policy through the backdoor, wondering if he’ll notice them and object. Outside abortion, Trump has enjoyed free reign to remodel their platform entirely, and I’m unsure why school choice was deemed eligible for preservation (rather than heaving it overboard with jetsam such as fiscal responsibility and hawkish foreign policy), but somehow it made the cut.
Republicans are unusually thin on ideas right now: conservatism isn’t an inventive stance to begin with, and most of the pre-existing stuff had to be ejected after Trump hacked in and revamped the demographics (I want to disentangle what a working-class Republican party could possibly support, policy-wise, in an upcoming post). One exception to this funk is school choice: basically, the idea is that parents could send their kids to private school with monies that would otherwise pay for that child to attend public school. Parents could still just send their children to the public school, but they could also now re-route that funding if they dislike it. In theory, the policy affords non-wealthy families more options and puts market pressures on lousy public schools to shape up.
School choice is a rare deviation for Republicans: it’s a domestic policy that unambiguously focuses on uplifting the indigent. Too often, Republican tactics for reducing poverty—to the extent they exist—are unfeeling and bootstrap-ish: for many, it’s like conservatives are recommending that poor people impersonate the feats of Baron Munchausen and pull themselves up by their own hair from the swamps (of poverty). Some right-wing economics arguments can, given sufficient broad-mindedness, be interpreted as trying to ameliorate economic struggles by focusing on second-order policy effects or long-run sociocultural implications, but the logic of school choice is refreshingly straightforward. Whether it works is a different question, but even rolling out an idea about how to improve peoples’ situations outside of scaring/punishing them into greater industriousness is a novelty for some conservatives. It’s taken time to accrue popularity, though. The idea has been kicking around since Milton Friedman’s 1955 monograph, The Role of Government in Education. Friedman had lots of clout and policy input throughout his life, but his school voucher idea has taken nearly 70 years to gain substantial traction.
Why Publicly Fund Schools?
Friedman’s essay clarifies that the question of whether to have public schools is separable from the question of whether to have public funding for schools. Some more anarcho-capitalist types are inclined to reject all governmental projects, especially those requiring taxation, and even more especially those that could induce redistributive effects outside of private charity. Friedman, who shared many of those instincts, justifies government funding for schools on neighborhood effects (i.e., positive externalities). For some transactions, non-parties have interests that aren’t reflected by the decisions of buyers and sellers. Often, these externalities are negative (e.g., people who suffer from a buyer choosing an inefficient car aren’t included in that decision-making process); conversely, education provides benefits to society that wouldn’t be accurately represented in an anarcho-capitalist system. Friedman puts it like this:
A stable and democratic society is impossible without widespread acceptance of some common set of values and without a minimum degree of literacy and knowledge on the part of most citizens. Education contributes to both. In consequence, the gain from the education of a child accrues not only to the child or to his parents but to other members of the society; the education of my child contributes to other people’s welfare by promoting a stable and democratic society.
Of the many positive externalities for education that one could hypothesize, this is among the most ineffable and least convincing; it’s all very 1950s, I suppose, but it’s not like our presently overeducated citizenry is flush with admirable representatives and highbrow politicking. How about skilled workers being more productive or paying more taxes? Compare the issue with immigration: most people are sympathetic to facilitating the immigration of skilled workers; the advantages of upskilling the existing citizenry are hardly different.
Despite his bizarre (or maybe outmoded) selection of argument and the fact that education was already nationalized, Friedman devotes a nontrivial portion of his essay towards reassuring everyone that there’s some justification for government involvement and then acting as if the reasoning he supplies is definitive.
Many progressives will scoff at support for publicly funded education being made contingent on the promise of outsized return on investment, essentially. And it’s crass vocabulary, but it’s mostly just vocabulary: coldblooded economic analyses can swallow up many of the pertinent lofty ideals. But this practice does easily overlook a moral notion animating much of conservative thought these days, actually: equality of opportunity. Conservatives persistently recommend that equality of opportunity should supplant leftist preoccupations with disparities in outcomes. Moreover, sufficient opportunity is the cornerstone of modern right-wing nonchalance about poverty, their counterarguments to progressive policies, and their dismissiveness about charitable instincts more broadly. So, they’re (rightly) invested in effecting more equitable schooling (cf., tuition-free pre-K/college), and even if their motivations are intertwined with them being hellbent on characterizing the whole remainder of society’s issues as shortcomings of personal responsibility and discipline, the temptation to provide more solid footing to otherwise disadvantaged school children is laudable.
But none of this means public schools are a good idea (just public funding), and the arguments for public schools (rather than mere public funding) are somewhat weak, and Democrat arguments for both supplying public schools and also inoculating them from market competition are utterly tepid. Sure, denationalizing schools presents legal details and policy issues to iron out, but most of these concerns about overly religious schools or looney curricula are about the particular implementation of education markets rather than the idea of school choice more generally.
Reducing the matter to brass tacks, leftist arguments for publicly operated schools primarily rely on paternalistic convictions that parents aren’t sagacious enough to make good choices about their children’s schooling. This is both self-aggrandizing and unpersuasive: assessing which schools are good doesn’t demand much expertise; the quality of schools is so widely known and available, despite the current paucity of choice, that real estate values fluctuate accordingly. And plenty of other industries that produce more opaque goods and require greater customer sophistication don’t become uncompetitive.
Ultimately, Democrats are conservatives about education. They share a defensive reflex to protect public schools and the idea of public education more broadly as a cherished institution. They also have vested interests (e.g., unions), and the status quo heavily involves the government. So, it’s unsurprising they’d be reluctant to change much, except that their attitudes and arguments in other domains suggest they’d be especially interested in testing new strategies that could benefit disadvantaged families. Instead, most of their arguments are either mealy-mouthed and overly granular or resemble the logically thin fear-mongering conservatives used to oppose stuff like gay rights—they’re just attached to the world being a certain way.
The False Promise of School Choice
So, while public funding for education is worth sanctioning, the best mechanism for that governmental involvement remains nonobvious. And absent some compelling reasons for purposefully uncompetitive public schools, those somewhat knowledgeable about economics will presume that free markets are preferable; even in Friedman’s essay, which is the touchstone for school choice policy, he hardly bothers to marshall any arguments for them. He’s juggling several lines of thought in that paper, so maybe the benefits of markets are purposefully left as exercises for the reader, but he repeatedly proves better at catching ground balls from imagined statist interlocutors with sheer logic than he is at teasing out the purported advantages of competitive markets, which are mostly taken for granted. Maybe this reflects Friedman’s priors, but it’s a rich irony, for a paper viewed as the genesis of school choice policy, that he doesn’t really argue for school choice at any point—he just downplays (correctly, I think) the counterarguments to them. The true kicker, unfortunately, is that while those leftist counterarguments to using markets for education do mostly whiff, the deeper reasoning and statistical evidence supporting the deployment of competitive markets is similarly (and uncharacteristically) weak.
The most salient upside to free markets is informational: people transacting organically sets prices, and those prices will (ideally) reflect the preferences of those market participants, allowing people to allocate scarce resources efficiently (e.g., high salaries in the market for software developers entices people to study computer science rather than other pursuits). Coordinating production and consumption efficiently without these market rates—by instead setting prices top-down (in a command-and-control-style economy)—is infeasible. Even within markets, arbitrarily setting price floors/ceilings (e.g., rent control) can generate shortages or surpluses.
When thinking about education, however, these worries about resource allocation are largely inapposite, because pretty much everyone attends school during the day for K-12, regardless of whether it’s private or public school; it’s a more uniformly consumed good and therefore crucially unlike from something like puffy jackets or skateboards. Thus, the benefits of market coordination would primarily be restricted to the type of schooling available rather than the amount of it.1
What school choice could supply—and what much of US education lacks—is creative destruction. Sadly, though, that upside is probably more destructive than creative. I’m deeply skeptical that introducing markets will jumpstart some era of massive educational advancements. Schools have been around for an extremely long time, and many of those schools have been private, and while public schools may be inflexible and archaic, it’s not like private schools are hotbeds of innovation whose creations are somehow permanently unportable to their public counterparts.
Plenty of wealthy individuals would outlay great sums for an educational edge, but don’t rich kids still attend class, study textbooks, complete worksheets, write essays, etc.? Maybe they have good tutors, but that’s hardly innovative. The idea that the education space harbors a pool of untapped innovation that will be unleashed by slightly restructuring the balance of public and private schooling isn’t impossible, but it’s dubious. Maybe some seismic improvement is nearby (efficacious AI-driven tailored learning, for example), but substantial developments like that will arrive regardless of whether the percentage of US schools run by the government is somewhat lower than before.
Thus, the upside to school choice might be primarily driven by destruction. Bringing markets into the mix should address crappy schools that are presently invulnerable. The idea behind such programs is to create a market for education where providers have to perform well to retain customers (rather than students having to attend whatever school they’re zoned to). And this fits nicely with those right-wing ideas about equality of opportunity mentioned above. In short, conservatives loathed having to teach Darwinism in schools, but they’re happy to teach Darwinism to schools.
School Choice in Theory and Practice
Prima facie, for people who appreciate the power of markets, school choice arguments are lucid and persuasive, and for people like me, who can sometimes be seduced by logic, evidence can be an afterthought. For economic prescriptions to be scientific, however, they should remain sensitive to data rather than depending on theory alone. And despite the elegance of school choice arguments, the data hasn’t been so unmixed.2 Per this recent Planet Money episode, school choice beneficiaries are happier with their educational experience, but they don’t clearly enjoy better educational outcomes.3
The mediocrity of school choice outcomes is both depressing and (initially) baffling. One might presume that extra choices are unambiguously good, at least for the choosers.4 But, as I touched on supra, different industries have varying amounts of headroom for innovation, and improvements to education, unlike many other fields, are constrained by human biology. Our brains have limitations and take years to become powerful enough to wrestle with many topics. You can keep rewriting the software, but at some point, if you’re limited to writing that software for a computer from 1986, you can only do so much. Maybe we can augment human capabilities someday through something like genetic engineering or cybernetics, but that day isn’t today.
The biological constraints to education may, in fact, be depressingly severe. One reason why the mixed evidence about voucher-style programs shouldn’t be surprising is that variation in schooling and other educational interventions often have weak or vanishing effects in general. Variables like natural ability are much more predictive.
, who wrote a book about this, put it like so:So, RAND Education is very much a neoliberal education policy shop. They are very pro teacher merit pay. They're pro charter school. They're pro the market mechanism in schools. Even they estimate that student-side factors are four to eight times more powerful than school-side factors in determining outcomes. And, so, I think conservatives just have a different myth, which is a common conservative myth, which is that the market mechanism will fix everything.
Despite the countervailing evidence, many people presume education is ripe for humongous technological and efficiency gains, and our medieval education system has become a favored scapegoat that allows people to bypass difficult and needed conversations. The “learn to code” meme is a good example of this. Worries about economic hardship or structural changes in labor market demands are all waved away as educational shortfalls, but America has become radically more educated over the past few decades, and complaints that people are overeducated and complaints that people are undereducated pass each other like ships in the night. Techno-optimists will frequently rely on this myth of large outstanding educational improvements when dismissing worries about future technological innovation permanently displacing workers—people seem to think we can even outlearn artificial intelligence! According to this widespread outlook, massive and irreversible economic changes are unthreatening because whatever downsides emerge must be byproducts of inflexible ed policy or outdated training infrastructure. It’s an inaccurate and pernicious assumption that people tacitly acquiesce to in the bulk of modern conversation about the floundering American working class.
In sum, the school choice debate has much lower stakes than you’d think. Suboptimal education policy is hurting the US, but that’s primarily because of the time, resources, and opportunity costs related to higher ed.5 Even though I instinctively endorse demands for modifying education—I hate the stifling rigidity and unchanging intellectual diet of modern K-12 schools, too—it’s unclear whether such alterations would generate measurable improvements, and my arguments for rehauling the education system hard to make outcome-based.
Family Resemblances
So, these Republicans are recommending a bureaucratic apparatus to provide money for impoverished private citizens to spend in a regulated market on a quasi-necessary good (and meanwhile, Dems are rebuking it), and everyone’s just going to let this delicious irony sail by? Do other people (including the Beltway elites) not realize this is basically Obamacare for education? It’s uncanny. But this shouldn’t be too startling, I guess: it’s no secret that Obamacare shares DNA with right-wing healthcare policy ideas.
I can’t unpack US healthcare problematics here or whether there might be valid distinctions to be carved, and completely private healthcare is maybe imperfect in different ways than wholly privatized education, but both cases involve subsidies to poor people who can’t afford something vital (but also costly) to spend in a highly regulated market context, partly justified by theorized positive externalities.
Of course, Obamacare was a national program, whereas school choice is being passed by the states severally, and the big Supreme Court case challenging Obamacare partly centered around the federal government’s authority to enact such a program, but—Scalia stans and Enumerated Powers junkies notwithstanding—I’m pretty doubtful that the bulk of conservative opposition to Obamacare boiled down to high-minded ideas about federalism. In fact, it’s pretty clear that their outrage wasn’t even about policy, really. But it’s interesting to sometimes pretend that it was (or at least devote outsized attention to those arguments).
I suppose we could afford everyone a charitable interpretation that they’re just incrementalists: Obamacare involved new spending and more government interference, and school choice doesn’t, given the respective situations ex ante. Reconciling leftist hypocrisy is somewhat straightforward—they want a single-payer healthcare system; Obamacare is merely a waystation. Conversely, some fraction of rightwingers would gladly disassemble public education altogether. Even if this incrementalism is logically defensible, though, it highlights a noxious, blinkered predisposition towards political wins over theoretically minded debate that plagues modern politics: the politicos are trying to advance the ball, unaware of their self-contradictions. Still, it’s humorous to view these twin industries moving in opposite directions, passing each other by, with Democrats and Republicans needing to get out and swap debate chairs depending on the topic at hand.
Of course, we do have systematic overconsumption of education in the US, but that’s mostly of higher education.
I recently heard (non-leftist economists) Tyler Cowen and Russ Roberts admit the data hasn’t been so unmixed when talking about Friedman.
It’s plausible that school choice programs would require many years to effect drastic change. I haven’t scoured the literature, so I’m assuming these things are accounted for with sufficiently lagged variables and such.
People have suggested potential drawbacks to limitless selection (e.g., too many choices leading to uncertainty/regret), but here we’re talking about upgrading from a single option.
Relatedly, as I’ve written elsewhere, conservatives dislike subsidizing loans for post-secondary education and often blame the runaway upsurge in tuition rates on those subsidies. But notice that the mechanism of school choice is surprisingly like the fiasco in higher ed: the government is subsidizing private choices about education in both cases. Perhaps public K-12 schools remaining totally free allows families to avoid loans and maintains a downward pressure on tuition and fees, but then that invites some questions about why making state universities free couldn’t achieve a similar effect.