No School District Gets Ahead

Yesterday, NPR featured a piece on the Los Angeles School District, which is in danger of losing funding, or more accurately in danger of being told it's in danger of losing funding, if it doesn't, you know, sprinkle magic seeds on the ground and grow great stalks of pedagogical greenery which each student may climb to Utopic, well-paid, scholarly adulthood.

Read the story yourself. The consider the absurdity of these so-called market-based education reforms. Schools are meant to "compete" now. If they do poorly, students can leave. If they do well, students will flock. There will be choices. The market will work its magic. We shall become consumers of education, even prior to the conspicious consumption of the American higher-education boondoggle.

Except . . . what competition? What market?

You can't graft free-marketism onto a state monopoly. A failing school can't run advertisements, lay off nonessential staff, raise additional revenue by courting investors, offer discounts and specials, or any other tool in the belt of enterprise. Even a failing business has options to convince, cajole, trick, or lure in customers. Certainly failing businesses can get loans or grants or new infusions of capital to actually improve. But a public school is a public school is a public school. Those that are failing have no option but to continue to fail, however valiantly (or not valiantly) their staffs may fight. They can't get rid of their rotten students, or at least not efficiently and effectively. They can't acquire additional revenue.

In short, they face the punitive aspects of markets--loss of "customers," loss of revenue (funding), decline of phsysical infrastructure, decline in reputation, decline in quality of new hires, etc.--with no corrective measures available to them, except, of course, to appeal to the government for more money, which the government will withhold because the school is already failing, and you can't throw bad money after bad, or whatever.

We're the government, and we're here to help.