Some parents cried, some screamed, and one man had to be
wrestled out of the room by security guards. It sounds like a
school hostage crisis, but that’s actually a description of a
Seattle School Board meeting last month.
The Board was considering whether or not to close nine city
schools, and the parents and students who would have been affected
weren’t especially keen on the idea. In the end, the closure plan
was suspended, but it is almost certain to resurface given the
district’s ongoing budget woes. When it does, the tensions will
resurface along with it.
These sorts of battles — which go on all over the country —
are endemic to the way we organize schools. Run the same way, any
other field would generate just as much conflict.
Imagine what would happen if coffee shops were run like schools.
Let’s say that state and local officials granted Starbucks a
“public coffee” franchise, paying it $10,000 annually per customer
(about what the public schools spend per pupil) to keep us all in
caffeinated bliss.
It would be the espresso shot heard round the world.
Not everybody likes the same brand of coffee, and the decision
to let Starbucks give its product away for free would drive most
other suppliers out of business. Coffee drinkers would get mighty
steamed about that. Aficionados of competing shops would demand the
right to spend their share of the coffee franchise money on the
baristas of their choice.
Of course, if things played out the way they have in education,
these dissenters would get nowhere. In the end, they would be
forced to cave and join the tax-funded coffee queue at Starbucks,
or foot the bill at their preferred shops and kiss $10,000 a year
in free coffee goodbye.
But that would be just the beginning. Once Starbucks had a
guaranteed source of tax revenue, customer satisfaction would fall
by the wayside as a motivating principle of its business. After
all, it would get paid the same amount whether or not folks were
served well or promptly. To improve its bottom line it would no
longer need to focus on consistency and innovative new products. So
it would look for ways to cut services.
Which brings us back to school closures. An official “public
coffee” version of Starbucks would soon start thinking about
closing down and consolidating shops to lower its costs.
Occasionally customer complaints might delay that process, as they
did at last month’s Seattle School Board meeting, but any such
victories would be fleeting.
In the early 1930s, there were about 130,000 school districts in
this country. Today, there are barely 14,000, despite massive
growth in the U.S. population. Consolidation at the school and
district level has been relentless, and it would be no different
with “public coffee.”
Another cost-saving move that Starbucks might adopt would be to
eliminate customers’ ability to choose even from among its own
shops — just as the Seattle School Board is considering
eliminating its already limited district choice program. After all,
if customer satisfaction doesn’t affect your bottom line, why allow
customers to gallivant all over the city? Much more efficient to
assign customers to a single shop, whether they like it or not.
Of course, anyone actually advocating a “public coffee” monopoly
would need round-the-clock police protection. We all understand
that it would be a terrible idea. But we need to acknowledge is
that it is also a terrible idea in the far more important area of
education.
There is no question that education has an important public
dimension, but that does not mean that it is best provided through
a government-run monopoly. On the contrary, it’s time we realized
that the consumer choice and market incentives that have made
America a coffee-drinker’s paradise over the past decade would do
wonders for our children’s education, as well.
In a free education marketplace, popular, well-managed schools
would grow, while unpopular, poorly managed schools would close.
There would be no politburo-like board threatening to merge schools
together or close them down for its own budgetary reasons. The
incentives of that marketplace would encourage innovation and a
variety of options to cater to the diversity of families’ demands.
Children would not be treated as interchangeable widgets to be
processed through a single official system based on their age, or
be shuffled around from one school to another just to make
someone’s numbers work out.
Obviously we would need to ensure that everyone had the
resources to participate in that educational marketplace, but that
would be easy to do. It is not a new idea. The Dutch, for instance,
have had a nationwide public and private school choice system for
nearly a century.
Public education is a set of goals and ideals, not a particular
institution. And there is a far better way to fulfill those goals
and ideals than our current system of central planning.
Andrew J. Coulson is director of the Cato Institute’s
Center for Educational Freedom, and author of Market
Education: The Unknown History. He blogs at Cato-at-Liberty.org.
