School Choice

As I walked along the street in a large American city, I was approached by someone who wanted me to sign a petition for something they called “School Choice.” I stopped and the individual described to me what they meant by it. You may not realize that public schools receive funds on a per-student basis. Each student enrolled nets the school a certain amount of funds, regardless of costs such as building maintenance, transportation, etc. Ideally, these things are considered, but often the dollar amount is decided top-down instead. That is, the state government is given a finite amount of money and they then must determine how many students, and reduce the budget by the amount spent on special programs (like ADA support). Whatever’s left is divided among a projected enrollment and divided up among schools based on the number of students enrolled. The argument was that citizens should be able to take this dollar amount and move their students to whichever school they deem fit.

For half a second, I thought this seemed like a great idea. Why wouldn’t anyone want a choice of where they send their child to school? Particularly, it may help in lower-income neighborhoods, where they can then send their children out of the neighborhood to other, presumably better, schools if they so desire. From a severely rational angle, it makes a lot of sense. And this is the exact argument that Milton Friedman makes in his historic economic book Capitalism and Freedom. He argues that yes, some schools will close, but that’s okay because the schools that close will close because the citizens have all sent their children to other schools as it wasn’t meeting their needs. He further argues that once you make this change, you can effectively do away with the federal organizations that monitor schools and the progress they make. You might recall the call from certain parties to dissolve the Department of Education. This is where the argument originates.

Once the emotion of elation passed, I realized that maybe it’s not such a good idea. There are a few reasons for this. First, let's address the assumption that closing a school has anything to do with the choice of the citizens within the community in which the school has closed. Since his arguments are largely economically based, I’ll do the same. In any business, there are two major types of costs: marginal costs and fixed costs. Fixed costs include things like buildings, building maintenance, services, etc. However, schools are paid for on a marginal basis (per student). Therefore, if the per-student money all leaves the school with the student, then funding for both the marginal cost, or the cost that actually does change with the student, and the fixed cost are both impacted. Unless the fixed cost is then redistributed over the remaining students, a school choice proposal would be disastrous for existing schools. Also, up until recently, schools have largely been funded by property taxes. So schools in lower-income neighborhoods would naturally be the ones that individuals immediately withdraw from, to send their children to other, better schools (the reason being that they have always had more funding). And finally, let’s assume a poor family whose child must attend an underperforming school, has their school closed. Does school choice also include the work of shipping children to the school of their choice?

Also, the idea that lower-income families might get better schools from the deal can only originate in the mind of someone who’s never been in a store where everything is a dollar. What actually happens in capitalist ventures (good or bad) is that a new offering springs up to fill the gap. This means what poor people can expect from the arrangement is far more likely a “bare-bones” school, that cuts costs to such a degree that it can be considered barely an education anyway. Any economy of scale from student consolidation is lost. Further, if we take existing parochial schools as examples, wherein we see teachers who don’t have college degrees (in other words, who haven’t been properly trained) teach students across twelve grades, we start to understand that perhaps a for-profit organization of schools isn’t the best incentive program. When profit is the goal, we see time and time again that if it comes down to providing quality service or making a profit, then quality service goes first. Friedman also makes the argument that it’s possible that school choice could also promote national unity, as though he’s never actually heard what’s taught in parochial schools about their neighbors. More likely, we’d get more variety of schools, based on what are increasingly in other markets identity causes. We’d get more segregation, and more division, and less unity. This isn’t speaking ill of parochial schools. It’s the nature of religion to have an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ approach because otherwise delineating who’s a good Christian, for example, becomes very difficult. Ultimately, Friedman’s arguments fall flat because he doesn’t account for true human nature, yet relies on the fictionalized rational person. Nor does he account for the past behavior of human organizations, like profit-seeking corporations, nearly as much as he claims to.

Finally, let’s talk about dissolving the government organizations that manage the schools. Friedman discusses a need for government to set a bare minimum education level, as he does for many of his ideas, but fails to determine how it might be that such a thing can be paid for. He’s all about dissolving existing government agencies but shies away from, specific to this case, the cost of a government agency that must ensure that the minimum requirement is met, which I might argue is, on a federal level, very much what is happening today. A large part of the Department of Education’s work is to ensure that schools and colleges meet the bare minimum for being able to deliver their services to the people. Part of that mission is to ensure some level of unity of purpose so that citizens are committed to the nation to some extent. A larger part is simply testing and evaluating to ensure that students are being educated. However I feel about the effectiveness of the testing, I can say that testing is being done.

School choice is no choice at all. What it ultimately leads to, once the glorious ecstasy of the name subsides, is a race to the bottom. That is, schools will provide less and less to their students as students shift from one to the other. Prioritization of profits over education will take control, and we’ll lose the opportunity to build a cohesive community for corporations. Far from helping lower-income workers, it will close schools in their neighborhoods, or offer them “lite” versions. Do you want your child to have an Amazon Basic Education? Because that’s what School Choice gets you.