severoon's Journal: Public Vs. Private Education

Below is a post I coopted from another discussion board to which I post. This post is a response to a user "Magnum", whose point was that private schools work better than public schools in America, and this should be fixed. I got the sense from his post that he was for fixing public schools, but one of the ideas he presented in his post was that the public school system cannot accomplish this with a simple patch here and there; his position was that something more fundamental needed fixing. I seized on this idea to make a point that I've long felt about this issue.

(I've altered my post slightly in the transfer to improve my argument.)

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Magnum makes an interesting point in his post...private schools are not simply better than public--they are systemically better. In other words, the conditions in which they exist require that they be better in order to survive. There is no such push towards excellence in the public schooling system. In fact, it's the opposite. The public school system fosters an environment where the teacher's union garners a lot of power, and the teacher's union is to blame for much of what is wrong with public education.

Here is one such idiosyncracy of the current public schooling system. School disctricts are divided into two categories: districts that run K-12 or K-8, and districts that only run 9-12 (high school). High school teachers generally want to teach in high school districts, districts of the second category. These districts have more aggressive pay increase schedules, and reward higher education with significantly more money. Advanced degrees in districts of the first category garner less of a wage increase (who cares if a 1st grade teacher has a PhD or a Bachelors--at that level, many BA's will be better suited to the job anyway). The teacher's unions have lobbied hard for this system because it is a group that is literally ruled by committee--the teachers themselves--and that's the best compromise they could come to for those districts.

You guessed it...poorer communities cannot generally support a separate high school district, and that's often why they are not able to attract good high school teachers. They're enslaved by a system of teacher compensation that won't allow it.

I've often heard supporters of the public education system say that teachers ought to get a small percentage of each of their students' salaries. (This happens to some degree via taxation, but by the time the funds have worked through so many levels of government there is no direct relationship.) If you believe this, you might want to consider that private institutions function exactly in this way, except on a slightly higher level of granularity. Like universities, these schools accept donations from satisfied parents and alumni (and if you don't think that teachers who engender such donations get rewarded, you are mistaken).

I don't think we can fix our public education system and make it fair, because it is the system itself that is flawed. People worry that moving to a fully privatized system of education is a mistake because only rich people will be able to afford it. The truth is, there is no environment for less expensive private schools, but if we did away with public schooling, there would be and they would spring up to fill the void. Does anyone really think that public education is costing the average family less, going through all those levels of government inefficiency and anti-competitive unions and the like, than if they were to just pay a private school directly?

Even so, I understand the poorest of the poor would still not be able to afford any private school, no matter how cheap. My solution to this would simply be to tax private schools like any other business, and reinject those taxes back into the system in the form of scholarships for low-income families. Needless to say, these taxes should be targeted--they should most definitely not go into the general tax coffers so politicians can debate how much of it they want to release for these scholarships, how much overhead should be extracted from these dollars, etc. People need transparency and visibility on this, and a 100% funding from this targeted taxation could easily be administered for no extra bean counting costs.

Another source of funds for these scholarships: the income-education taxes that every citizen now pays would be recognized separately, and families with children under 18 or in school (college included) would be rebated for this amount. This leaves every person with no children paying into the system what they currently pay into it. This seems fair and square to me--it increases no one's taxes, more importantly no one's overall costs of education (in fact it would likely drop them), people with children get help for putting them through school, and people without children pay a fair amount for getting to live in an educated society.

In this alternate world, there is reason to think that local communities would become far more involved in their education systems. Even now, when people's hands are tied by government and the only real way they can contribute is by voting to increase local taxes, that's exactly what they do. Indeed, this is the only kind of tax increase that's regularly been passed by popular vote, so don't make the mistake of thinking that people don't care. This is perhaps the one issue that people care so much about, they'll willingly sacrifice as long as they can see the fruits.

These ideas are not just off-the-cuff...like Magnum, I feel this issue is very important for our country. We should not be underperforming as much as we are with respect to the rest of the world. If there's any lesson we can learn from that alone (and other research that's been done in this area), more money does not necessarily equal better education. We need a system based on promoting personal responsibility in students for their educational careers. We need students to feel as though they have something real at risk if they don't excel, and though that's a little more uncomfortable for everyone, no one ever does anything great when they're comfortable coasting along.

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