The Free Market Won't Save Public Education

It's been an article of faith since Milton Friedman first started fantasizing about getting government out of education and replacing it with a voucher system.

Competition will spur excellence. Free market schools will save students from failing schools in poor districts. Free markets will stave off inequity. 

Folks keep saying it. And yet there isn't a shred of evidence that it's true.

Name a single free-market sector of the economy that serves all citizens with excellence. Automobiles? Restaurants? Technological tools? 

None of them, because what the free market excels at is picking winners and losers. The free market says these folks over here can have a Lexus and these folks over here can have a used Kia and these folks over here can take the bus (if there is one) and these folks over here can just walk. 

What the free market excels at is sorting people into their particular tier, their particular socio-economic class. If you want to move up a level, then show some hustle and grab those bootstraps to prove that you deserve to move up the ladder. Otherwise, we'll just assume you're right where you belong.

There's no version of our free-ish market that is about lifting every single citizen up to a decent level, no function of the free market that says, "Let's get every single person in this country behind the wheel of a Ford." The free market doesn't like the poor. 

Economist Douglas Harris laid out a solid explanation of why education is a lousy fit for the free market, and there's one more problem-- the free market and the public education system don't want the same thing. The free market wants to sort people out, put them at the top, bottom, middle-- and then provide them with what they deserve. The US public school system, however imperfectly, promises to provide every student with a quality education, without ever asking if one child deserves something different from another. 

For some free market fans, inequity is not a bug but a feature; it's a way to sort people into their proper place. Equity for them means "equal chance to prove that they belong in a particular tier." The social safety net is disruptive and wrong because it "rewards" people with stuff they haven't proven they deserve. 

Some free market fans believe that the free market will provide equity and even things out. Hell, Friedman appears to have believed that the free market would fix segregation and not, say, give rise to segregation academies. But the notion that free market mechanisms will bring greater equity than we now have in education is silly. Your ability to vote with your feet will always be directly related to your wealth.

But more to the point, we know that the free market will not correct the inequities of the education system because it is the free market that cemented them there in the first place. The primary mechanism for creating public school inequity is the policy of linking school funding to the housing--one more free market where winners and losers are sorted out. The free market was instrumental in giving us educational inequity; how can we possibly imagine that the free market would help get rid of it?

Well, that's not really a free market, free market fans will complain; it's a market that has been hampered and hamstrung by various government policies. But that's all markets. To start with, money is just made up stuff, and it takes government policies to maintain the illusion. Nor is there some pristine natural economic playing field that exists naturally; all economic playing fields are created, maintained, and regulated by governments. "That's not a true free market" just means "that playing field is not tilted the way I want it to be." 

There are playing fields more severely tilted than others, markets more free-ish than others. I'm actually a fan of our free-ish market system. And some free-ish markets are excellent at handling some sorts of commodities, companies and customers. But education is not a commodity, and no free-ish market is going to help us create a more equitable system fir universal education of young humans in this country. 

Free Market vs. The Poor

Some people just aren't worth the trouble and expense.

That's the underlying message that comes through repeatedly as GOP legislators across the country line up to cut the foundations out from under public education and the ACA.

Sometimes they're pretty transparent about it. Pat Toomey just compared sick people to burned out houses to make the point that it's just unfair to ask insurers to cover them when they are already, I guess, a lost cause. And in Pennsylvania, the chair of the State Senate Education Committee argued in an interview that we should stop wasting time trying to get minority inner-city kids ready for college and just put them in some vocational training.

But how can this be? I thought the free market approach would liberate everyone, provide students and families with the same choices available to the rich and so unjustly denied them in our current system?

That's the pitch we hear over and over-- the free market will liberate students from failing schools (as well as liberate health care and our pension funds).

It's a lie.

The free market (or, at any rate, the free-ish market we've occasionally enjoyed in this country) has never been about getting top quality products and services in the hands of all citizens. That's because of a simple reason-- the free market does not like poor people.

The free market has never said, "Let's find a way to get the very best product in the hands of every consumer, no matter how much they can pay for it." Instead, the free market is set to reward you with a product commensurate with the amount of money you have to offer. You get what you deserve, and what you deserve is determined by how much money you have to spend.

It is, in fact, the free market that helped us establish the unequal system that we have now. We tied school finance to real estate, and real estate is a free market world-- you get what you can afford (this free market system has occasionally been disrupted by cities that decreed that black folks could only live in certain neighborhoods e.g. Chicago). So we get a system in which poor people in poor people housing get underfunded schools, and rich folks live in rich folks housing near a rich folks school. Rich folks have choices that poor folks don't.

So, how can the free market possibly fix that?

There are two problems: 1) in a free(-ish) market, poor people get fewer choices (or none) because they cannot pay for more, better choices and 2) in a free market system (and most others as well) you cannot take choices away from rich people. I don't mean you shouldn't or it's wrong-- I mean you can't do it.

Consider abortion. If you remember the bad old days before Roe v. Wade, you know one simple thing-- it has always been possible for rich women to get safe, clean abortions. It will always be possible. No amount of law-passing will stop it from happening.

Likewise integration. Busing was going to fix inequity by sending poor kids to rich schools and rich kids to poor schools. But you can't take the choices away from rich families, who just enrolled their kids in private and charter schools. Inequity remained.

The problem remains that poor people cannot, on their own, "buy" rich schools. So the next solution is for the government to buy it for them. But so far, charter-choice systems propose to do that with the same inadequate pot of money that made poor schools so underfunded in the first place. It's like telling someone who was about to buy a used Kia, "I'll give you what you were going to spend on the Kia in a voucher, and send you right over to the Lexus dealer." Turning inadequate funding into a voucher does not make it adequate. Instead, poor folks will get the choices that the businesses choose to give them, the choices that make good business sense, not-a-Lexus sense. In the freemarket, you get the choices you can demand, and poor folks are not equipped to demand much.

No matter how you turn it, free market solutions for education will always result in inequity, with poor folks in poor schools. To give poor folks the "purchasing power" to allow them to go to better-funded, well-supported schools would require us to pump a bunch of money into the system over and above what we're spending now. You can say we're moving away from government schools-- but we're still funding everything with government money. And if we were going to pump a bunch more money into the system, why wouldn't we just use it to pump up the schools we already have? And don't forget-- if you don't make those poor schools appealing enough, rich folks will always have the option to make other choices that your government-sponsored can't match.

The free market reserves its best, most high-quality products for its most attractive, most wealthy customers. Poor folks are the least attractive customers in a free market system. There is absolutely no reason to believe that unleashing the power of the free market would lead to better schools for our poorest, our most vulnerable, our least market-attractive students. And I think on some level the acolytes of free market know that-- as someone who argues by analogy a great deal, I can't help noticing that no free market school fan has ever explained, "Of course it would work. It would be just like [insert business sector here]." There is no sector of the free market in which this trick has worked, because the free market always hates poor folks.

But I don't think leaders in this DeVosian age really care about the outcomes for students in a charter-choice system. It's not that I think they're evil and unconcerned, exactly-- but for this crowd, the free market is a Higher Moral Value in and of itself. When Betsy DeVos remakes Michigan in her preferred image, or praises Florida as a great model for the nation, she isn't concerned about how well students from across the range of backgrounds are being served by the system-- I am coming to believe that she thinks that a free market system that serves poor students poorly is better than a government managed system that erases inequity across the nation and provides each student, no matter what zip code, with a great education (not just "access") to one in their own neighborhood-- I am coming to believe that she feels that implementing the free market has a higher moral value than providing each child with an excellent school, that choice, or the illusion of it, combined with an unfettered opportunity for businesses to compete for tax dollars-- that is more important than actual education.

Free Market Winners and Losers

One of the foundational arguments of modern ed reform is that free market forces would make education work better, that having to compete would make public and private schools work harder, smarter, better and create a rising tide of educational awesomeness that would lift all boats.

This is unlikely for a variety of reasons, but the biggest problem with the free market when it comes to public education is that by its very competitive nature, it picks winners and losers. And that's actually a couple of problems.

First, it picks winners and losers among the providers. A study by the Network for Public Education has found a staggering amount of federal money spent on charters that fail, or even pre-fail by collapsing before they even open. For free market fans, that's a feature, not a bug. In their conception of the education market, schools come and go as those that sink to the bottom are pushed out of business, to be replaced by potentially superior new competitors.  Some are sincere in this deep belief in the markets, and some are simply opportunists; when a reformster complains about the "closed system" or "education monopoly," what they mean is not a system that denies students choice, but a system that denies entrepreneurs the a chance to get in there and hustle for a piece of that mountain of sweet, sweet tax dollars.

The problem with the model of churning and burning our way to excellence is not just that the constant churn, the repeated tossing of students out to the curb with a hearty "Good luck finding your next school" is disruptive and destabilizing for students. That's bad, but then there's the whole "fail" thing. Because when a widget business fails, that just means it can't sell enough widgets to cover costs, or its widgets are low quality, or another widget business has better marketing materials.

But there are no widgets in schools. The way a school fails is by failing to serve students well. Reformsters know this--it's at the heart of their argument that students must be rescued from failing schools. And yet after "rescuing" these students, the next free market solution is to send the students to other schools, some of which we fully expect to fail some of those students. You can't have a failing school without stealing student educations. This is like arguing that this building over here has faulty fire extinguishers, so we've got to get the students out of the burning building-- but then we're going to put them in these other buildings, some of which have no fire extinguishers at all, and we're going to sort out which are which by setting fire to all of them. This is not an improvement.

Worse, reformsters often argue to prolong the failure. In Pennsylvania, we continue to support cyber-schooling even though we have ample data that cybers are failing all but a small group of students.

It's unquestionably bad practice and immoral to look at a school that is failing and do nothing to fix it. But how much worse is it to set up a system that deliberately posits that some of these schools must fail. The market is good at picking winners and losers, and that's fine for widget companies, but in schools it can only mean that some students will be literally set up to fail. When the market picks winners and losers among education providers, it is also setting up students to be losers as well.

But then, that's part of te issue anyway. Because the free market doesn't just pick winners and losers among businesses; it picks winners and losers among customers as well.

Customers do not get all the possible choices. They get the choices that businesses believe they can--or that they choose to--offer.

I live in an area that has taken many steps toward becoming another US retail desert. Sears, JC Penneys, Bon Ton, K-Mart have all pulled out of the area-- for general shopping, we've got Wal-Mart and Dollar General. There might be a new retailer moving into the old K-Mart, but most of our major employers have downsized or moved out, and our population is not Montana thin, but not particularly dense, either (abut 50K in the county). In other words, if you're looking to launch a retail business, particularly one with more upscale offerings, you are probably not looking at us.

Nobody operates a business out of a noble desire to make sure that people get to have a particular range of choices-- and charter schools are businesses. And the charter and voucher world is peppered with schools that are happy to be free of government regulation precisely because that means they don't have to offer choices to certain customers. "We don't have to make expensive adaptations for  students with that  particular special need? Super! We don't have to accept Those People if we don't want to? Awesome!"

The free market always chooses winners and losers from among the customer base. That has always been the point of some government intervention. If the free market were in charge of mail delivery, some parts of the country would never get any mail at all, and LGBTQ customers would have far fewer choices than everyone else. In some parts of the country, the free market didn't want to offer black folks any choices at all. In all cases, the government was instrumental in forcing the free market to rethink its ideas about who should be a loser.

But, free marketeers will argue, those gaps in the market will attract clever entrepreneurs who will find clever ways to make a buck serving underserved populations. Nope. Some populations are just too poor. The free market doesn't necessarily have anything against poor people--they just don't have very much money. That's why the free market reformsters do like the idea of having the customers pay the bill with taxpayer money; otherwise school choice would be really unprofitable.

The loosely/un-regulated education market likes picking losers. The big insight from the widespread use of vouchers in private religious schools that openly discriminate is not just tax dollars paying for discrimination, but the clear sign that the free market education will pick winners and losers, and customers will get the choices that vendors want to offer them. If you're an LGBTQ student, there are few-to-none choices available for you. Schools choose.

The free market, because it picks winners and losers, will never be an engine of equity. Free market reformsters like to talk about how poor folks should have the same kinds of choices that are available to rich folks, but a free market system will never, ever, ever make that happen. In a free market, rich folks will always have more choices than everyone else, and maybe that's not a bad thing (we can argus that another day), but the bottom line is that no free market choice system is going to leapfrog poor folks past rich folks, because rich folks can always pull out the checkbook and say, "I'll have some of that, too, with a little extra on the side." The free market does not say, "Yes, we could sell you that, but it would be inequitable, so we won't." And free market educational choice system will have inequity hard-wired into its core.

Because that's what a free market does. It sorts. Rich folks, you get these choices over here. Poor folks, you get these choices over here. And by basing the "buying power" of families on the money spent at their community school, reformsters keep that rich-poor inequity intact. In a free market education choice system, poor folks will get their choice of whatever edu-business operators feel like offering them.

Free Market Segregation

The free market will never provide solutions for segregation.

Segregation is part of a functioning free market. Not (necessarily) racial segregation, but business requires sorting out the customers.

Businesses compete for customers, but they don't compete for all customers. First of all, they can't, and second of all, not all customers are created equal. Most importantly, this is part of how they stay efficient-- by not wasting marketing dollars on the wrong customers. So Lexus doesn't spend any time worrying about how their marketing plays with minimum wage workers, and McDonald's doesn't worry about how well-regarded they are by gourmands.

Businesses can most efficiently compete for customers by identifying some single features that appeal to a broad group of customers. Call it the cable effect-- after the early explosion of cable channels, what we saw was a rapid rush to the middle. Where there were once highly differentiated channels, we now have a small group of channels mostly doing versions of the same thing. It's hard to make money working a niche market.

It's also hard to be aspirational. You don't make money by giving the people what they ought to want-- you make money by giving them what they actually want. Bravo and A&E were founded on the notion that people ought to want classy highbrow culture. They've long since abandoned that notion, just as MTV had the cold, hard sense to dump its entire original reason for existing in favor of what would help them win a huge swath of audience.

The free market does not run on equal opportunity for all. Its fans get confused on this point, thinking that if a Lexus is available to anyone who can afford it, that's the same as being available to everyone. The free market does not run on principle. There are occasionally folks who declare that even though something is bad for business, they will do it because it's the right thing to do. Mostly, the free market either eats those people or converts them. Remember Google's "don't be evil" motto? Somehow when they went from plucky upstart to corporate giant, that whole thing was shelved. The free market has neither a conscience or a moral compass.

Mind you, I'm not a hard-core anti-marketer. The free market is very good for accomplishing certain sorts of things, and a couple centuries' worth of free market has, I must acknowledge,  helped build me a cushy foundation of privilege.

But the free market has no more moral quality than  hammer or a waffle iron, and when we try to reinterpret our entire culture and society in terms of the free market, when we replace th commons with the marketplace, when we turn all interactions into transactions, then we lose a moral core to our actions and become a hollow people. Government, churches, schools, community-- none of these things is made better by being recast as a business, as a market-based enterprise. You can only have one top priority; if that priority is turning a profit, then that priority is not anything else.

And the market cannot solve our great moral problems. Like segregation and inequity. As long as there are racists in our society, there will be a lucrative market for segregated schools. To expect that the free market can provide solutions to problems of social justice and equity is like expecting the free market to provide every single citizen with a Lexus-- that's simple not what the market is for. It's like trying to perform brain surgery with a chain saw. The chain saw tends more toward ripping up than careful incisions, and the free market tends toward providing any brand of injustice and inequity that can be made profitable. When the free market is made the guiding power behind education, it will favor the rich over the poor, and it will sort children into worthwhile and discards, and it will leave many, many children behind, grossly underserved or not served at all, and the degree to which public schools already do these things is the precisely the degree to which government and public education have already been infected with the free market ethos.

Where the Free Market Fails

Donald Trump has proposed that we just get rid of Obamacare and replace it with free market forces. This is as original as any of his policy ideas (i.e. not at all), but it's still a bad idea because health care is like education in that the freemarket cannot possibly succeed in accomplishing what we claim to want as a society.

I'll explain in a moment, but first, let me insert my usual disclaimer that "free market" is a suspect term to begin with. At this point in human history, all markets are controlled and manipulated to some degree by the government. "Free market" is just a name for a particular type of government control. The last time there was a truly free market, a pair of humans were trading a shiny rock for a pointy stick somewhere near a cave.

Putting that aside, Trump's idea to leave health care "customers" at the mercy of the free market is nuts for the same reason that letting the free market run loose in the education sector is nuts.

Health care operating strictly on free market means that everyone gets the health care they can personally afford, which means the wealthy get great healthcare, middle class citizens (both of them) get mediocre health care, and the poor get no health care at all. People who are already sick, on whom the health care biz can never hope to make money, will also get no healthcare at all.

Because the one area where the free market will always fail is in the area of providing a good or a service to all citizens.

Milton Friedman said, "The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit." And there's our problem-- because there are some citizens in the country who cannot offer sufficient benefit to a company with something to sell.

It is the fundamental nature of the free market to sort customers into two groups-- those from which my business can benefit, and those from which it can not. Whether I'm making a fast-food burger, a fancy shmancy motorcar, or a pair of stereo speakers, my business plan involves saying, "We can only serve customers who are willing to pay $X.00. Anyone who isn't going to pay that will not be a customer." There is no office in this country where businesspersons are getting together and saying, "Okay, how can we best get this product into the hands of people who cannot meet our minimum price point?" The very closest we get is outfits like the phone companies, where the discussion is along the lines of, "How can we balance losing a little money up front for the promise of bleeding our customers for all the money we can get in the long run." And that's not very close.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. There is absolutely nothing wrong with saying, "Sorry, but if you can't pay the price of a Lexus, you can't have a Lexus."  That's how the system by and large works.

But there is something wrong with a system that says, "Sorry, but you're poor, so you'll just have to die" or, "Sorry, but you're poor, so you'll just have to go to a crappy school."

It is true that there are times-- bad times, disgraceful times-- when our current health care and education systems say exactly that. But there is at least the hope that we and they can do better. But a free market system must mark some people as too poor for the product. It has to. It is absolutely guaranteed that it will.

For a free market system to work, it must figure out which part of the market it can afford to profitably serve. That means it must absolutely also determine which part of the market it is not going to serve.

Imagine if the feds went to Ford Motor Co. and said, "You must get a car sold to every family in America-- and not just a mediocre car, but a good one. Every family."

Or if the feds went to Apple and said, "You must sell every single person in America a new iPhone. You cannot turn down a single customer. Regardless of their financial resources, you must get your current new phone into their hands, without fail."

Or if the feds went to Arby's and said, "You must feed every single American lunch, every single day, no matter what they can afford to pay for, and even if they aren't very excited about eating the food on your menu."

That would be nuts. It would be bad business, and no even semi-smart business leader would tolerate it.

And yet, if you want to talk about free market education or free market health care, that is the gig-- to provide your service to every single American, regardless of what they can afford to pay (or the government can afford to pay on their behalf).

It is the most fundamental part of the mission, and the free market has absolutely no clue about how to do it. On this point, the point of serving every citizen, the free market fails, and for that reason, the free market is uniquely unfit to take on the work of providing health care or education to the country.

The Market Hates Losers

Fans of market forces for education simply don't understand how market forces actually work.

What they like to say is that free market competition breeds excellence. It does not, and it never has.

Free market competition breeds excellent marketing. McDonald's did not become successful by creating the most excellent food. Coke and Pepsi are not that outstandingly superior to RC or any store brand. Betamax was actually technically superior to VHS, but VHS had a better marketing plan.

The market loves winners. It loves winners even if they aren't winning-- Amazon has yet to turn an actual profit, ever, but investors think that Bezos is a winner, so they keep shoveling money on top of him. And when we enter the area of crony capitalism, which likes to pretend it's the free market, picking winners becomes even less related to success. Charter schools were once a great idea with some real promise, but the whole business has become so toxically polluted with crony capitalism that it has no hope of producing educational excellence in its present form.

But then, the market has only one measure for winning, and that is the production of money. The heart of a business plan is not "Can I build a really excellent mousetrap?" The heart of a business plan is "Can I sell this mousetrap and make money doing it?"

There is nothing about that question that is compatible with pursuing excellence in public education.

The most incompatible part of market-driven education is not its love of money-making winner, but its attitude about losers. Because the market hates losers. The market has no plan for dealing with losers. It simply wants all losers to go away.

Here's the problem. I teach plenty of students whom the market would consider losers. They take too long to learn. They have developmental obstacles to learning. They have disciplinary issues. They may be learning disabled. They have families of origin who create obstacles rather than providing support. What this means to a market-driven education system is that these loser students are too costly, offer too little profit margin, and, in their failures, hurt the numbers that are so critical to marketing the school.

In PA, we already know how the market-driven sector feels about these students. It loves to recruit them by promising a free computer and a happy land of success where nobody ever hounds you about attendance and all homework can be completed by whoever is sitting by the computer. But sooner or later, those students are sloughed off and sent back to public schools. And by "sooner or later," I mean some time after the cyber-charter has collected the money for that student.

The market sheds its losers, its failures (well, unless they can convince some patron or crony that they are just winners who are suffering a minor setback). Schools cannot.

For the free market, failure is not only an option, but a necessity. Losers must fail, be defeated, go away. For a public school system, that is not an option. Only with due process and extraordinary circumstances should a student be refused a public education. And certainly no traditional respectable public school system can simply declare that it has too many loser kids, so it's going to shut down.

The free market approach to schools must inevitably turn them upside down. In a free market system, the school does not exist to serve the student, but the student exists to serve the interests of the school by bringing in money and by generating the kinds of numbers that make good marketing (so that the school can bring in more money). And that means that students who do not serve the interests of the free-market school must be dumped, tossed out, discarded.

To label students losers, to abandon them, to toss them aside, and to do all that to the students who are in most need of an education-- that is the very antithesis of American public education. The free market approach to schools will no more unleash innovation and excellence than did 500 channels on cable TV. What it will do is chew up and spit out large numbers of students for being business liabilities.

Free market forces will not save US education; they will destroy it. To suggest that entrepreneurs should have the chance to profit at the cost of young lives is not simply bad policy-- it's immoral. It's wrong.

Markets Smart and Free

Unlike many of my friends in the ed debates, I kind of like free market capitalism. Under the right circumstances, it can really get things done. But there are sooooo many reasons to believe that the field of public education is precisely the wrong set of circumstances.

The free market can be uber-excellent at setting a true price for goods and services-- particularly goods. But the market can only do this job well when it is smart. We've seen the market get way smarter in just the last two decades, so we have examples of the effects (and yes, some of what I'm going to talk about comes under the sexier term "asymetric information," but I am not feeling sexy today).

Take used cars. Back in the day, you would go to the Used Car Dealer and do a long and complicated dance. You weren't sure exactly what the car you wanted was worth, but you knew what you could stand to pay. The dealer knew pretty well what the car was worth, but he was not about to tell you. If you were savvy, you might have checked the Kelly Blue Book, but mostly you had to drive from lot to lot to lot to lot, comparing prices and trying to build some sense of what a fair price was, particularly if those lots were priced all over the map.

Now we have internet. On the one hand, it's a bummer because it's extremely unlikely you'll find a surprise bargain wildly out of line with the common going price. On the other hand, you probably won't get hosed, and those days of interminable negotiation while the two parties tried to keep a grip on their own secret info (car price, buyer's budget).

A smart free market sets a value for objects; that value equals "whatever people will pay for it," and thanks to sites like eBay, we know exactly what that amount is. If the last 600 widgets sold on eBay for $10, you are not going to sell yours for $50. The market is too smart for that.

Surviving in a free market has always involved companies trying to make the market dumber in several different ways. The company can make the market dumber by withholding pricing information, like the old used car lot. The health care industry has made the health care market positively brain dead; no customer has any idea what anything costs.

We can also make the market dumber by concealing the nature of the product. "This is magic snake oil," I declare, holding up a jug of water. "These pictures of magic sea monkeys, with cute little faces, totally represent the real thing," declares the ad. "This maple syrup-like product is thick and colored a kind of dark amber," declares well-shot video of a completely synthetic crappy product.

Maple syrup is, in fact, a good example. Marketeers have convinced folks that good maple syrup is thick and rich and gooey, with a sort of dull faux-sweet tone, while actual maple syrup, when heated is thinner than water and cuts through waffles and your enamel with the same sharp, sugary edge. The market has been made dumb about maple syrup.

The free market is exceptionally dumb about education, and reformers have been working hard to make it dumber.

Nobody knows what the actual costs involved in education are (though there are many people who are sure they are Way Too Much). The ed reform debates have further muddied the water, because some reformsters like to characterize the cost of public education as Exorbitantly Expensive, whereas marketing for charters generally refers to them as Free. And unlike a used car or a beanie baby, education can involve a wide range of costs based on location.

Meanwhile, the effect of reformy focus on "outcomes" is to seriously dumb down the market's understanding of the "product" which has been reduced from the nebulous idea of self-actualization and personal growth leading to a better life-- well, we've boiled all of that down to "good score on a Big Standardized Test" which is such ridiculously reductive version of the "product" that it makes the market blindingly ignorant.

And on top of that, there is also a hidden market involved, transactions so unexamined that the market is completely ignorant of what's going on. That's the data market. The product being sold is personal data, and the vendors do not even know they're in the market at all. It's as if we walked onto a used car lot and said, "For a dollar, I'll clean up your trash" and the dealer said sure, fine, and we then drive a Lexus off the lot. The free market can't even function when at least one of the parties doesn't even know they're selling something,

Many of these factors keep the market dumb, and certainly some could be overcome (though, as with ebay and internet used car sites, at considerable cost to profiteers), but probably not the issue of knowing what the "product" is so that it can be valued. Different people get different kinds of education for different purposes, and often the true value of the education is not known for years-- or decades. Reformers try to work around this by suggesting that parents are the true "consumers": of education, but that's just not true. The primary "consumer" of a year of kindergarten is the five year old sitting there, and also her future employers, friends, neighbors, fellow citizens and even future family members. None of the yet have a clue what that year of education looks like as a product, or what its value will be. The free market demands that we put a value on our goods and services right now, today-- and that's just not possible.

The free market can't handle education because it's too stupid about education. That stupidity works out well for people trying to make a buck on education, but like the pre-internet used car market, it works out poorly for the "customers." And it certainly doesn't improve education itself, which the market deliberately fails to understand.

Involuntary Free Market

I've written before about how the free market is a terrible match for public education (here, here and here, for example).

The actual free market (or as we actually experience it in America, the free-ish market) offers plenty of examples of the such a market wouldn't really serve education well at all. There are myriad examples of the triumph of marketing over quality, or market forces discouraging excellence, but for the moment, I'm going to ignore all of that.

Instead, let's consider one way in which the educational "marketplace" differs from every other free market arena-- involuntary customers.

We recently shopped for coffee makers at my house, so let's use them as an example. The coffee gadget market has a wide range of choices, ranging from cheap crap with a limited lifespan up to really expensive machinery that will carry itself to planned obsolescence with style and grace. But they all have one in common-- they are all made to be marketed to people who want to drink coffee.

But what would happen if Congress passed the Personal Use Coffee Maker Act of 2015, requiring every single person in the country to have a working coffee machine?

PUCMA would have little effect on people already owning a perfectly good coffee maker. But now the market would expand to include people who don't actually want to drink coffee, and wise coffee maker makers would find ways to market to that group as well.

Here's a coffee maker that makes verrrrry tiny cups of coffee, so you don't have more than spoonful to drink. Here's a coffee maker whose main feature is that it looks pretty on your counter. Here's a coffee maker that is an absolute piece of useless crap, but it is as cheap as we could make it and still be PUCMA compliant. Here's a coffee maker that actually makes decent hot chocolate. This one is actually a smoothie machine. This one makes a great cheese sandwich.

When a market is expanded to include people who don't actually want your product, market forces not only fail to foster excellence, but they actually foster crappiness.

I believe in the power and importance of a K-12 education; that's why I chose the work that I do. But I recognize that not everybody sees value in pubic education. I have met parents who would like their children to attend a school that never, ever gives any assignment that requires work outside of school. I have met parents who would like their children to attend a school where only sports matter. I have met parents who would like their children to attend a school that only requires the child to show up only a few days out of every week. In a free market education world, could I make money marketing a school for those parents? You bet I could. Just as I could make money marketing a school that will never challenge a child's beliefs with science, or a school devoted to The One True Religion (whichever one will give me the best market share), or a school that lets them sit at home in their PJs and never do school work unless they're in the mood.

In fact, the one free market option that rarely comes up in these discussions of the power of competition in a free market is the option to not be part of the market.

You want to make a true free market for education? Repeal all mandatory school attendance laws.

Of course almost nobody wants to do that because we recognize that it would not only create chaos for the schools and, worse yet, a long-term mess for our whole society because (as I've said many times) parents are NOT the only stakeholders when it comes to education.

We don't repeal mandatory school attendance laws because it would be bad for society as a whole. Why would it be any better to allow a system in which a child could choose Might As Well Not Be Bothering To Attend High School? I'm thinking of the K12 cyber charter ads in PA that made the pitch, "Pick a school that won't get in the way of your kids' sports schedule" or asked "Is your child happy in school." Charter and voucher fans can say, "Oh, but there are no schools out there pretending to offer an education while marketing to students and families who want to look like they're doing the school thing without having to deal with any of the stuff they find annoying," and that's possibly largely true, but of course, given the lack of oversight in most states, we don't really have any way of knowing, do we?

Coke Provides a Marketing Lesson

Proponents of vouchers and choice systems never tire of touting the benefits of the free market. For them, the free market is like a colosseum in which gladiator products battle to become better, until the crown goes to those who are Most Excellent of All. It's a touchingly childlike belief; the free market will deliver excellence to customers just like Santa will deliver presents to good boys and girls.

But in our American free-ish market capitalism-lite system, the path to victory often has nothing to do with the pursuit of excellence.

Sometimes the market place just doesn't want excellence enough to pay for it; analysts have suggested that's why the airline travel experience is lousy and getting lousier. Or consider cable television, which promised a cornucopia of varied and quality channels and instead delivered 500 versions of the same bland culture-mulch.

Yesterday, Coca-Cola delivered another lesson in how the free market really works. Coke has been having troubles financially, and it's worth noting that many of these troubles have absolutely nothing to do with the product at all, but with the financial machinations of international exchange rates. Apparently when those aren't tilted in the proper direction, you can magically turn your money into less money. Additionally, Coke has suffered some loss of market share because it has occurred to many people that they could put more healthful substances into their bodies.

So how did Coke handle this? Did they find a way to make their product better? Did they pursue excellence so that they could be rewarded by the free market? Of course not. As reported by the AP, they did this:

To make up for weak volume gains at home, the company has been using a variety of tactics including a focus on "mini-cans" and smaller bottles that are positioned as premium offerings and help push up revenue.

That's right. They looked for a better way to trick the customers into giving them more money. Specifically, they put their flavored fizzy water in smaller cans, essentially raising their price-per-unit and then marketing the increased cost as a Good Thing. They put less of the same old product in new cans. That's it.

This is the free market at its worst. The customer is your adversary-- they have your money and somehow, some way, you have to get it away from them. It's not that you need a product that actually has better quality-- you need a product that can more easily be sold.

I've written this many times. If I'm ever important enough to have a law named after me, this might be my best shot:

The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing.

The notion that unleashing these sorts of market forces in education would somehow lead to better schools would be funny if it weren't so destructive in practice. It is particularly problematic because under school choice, the school can't raise the price because that voucher payment is set by the state (I know we rarely call these vouchers any more, but that's only because the term has become a political liability-- school choice programs are still essentially voucher programs). So the only option for schools in a free market system is to cut services, to put less education in a smaller, shinier can.

When a school's guiding principle, its business plan, is to ask, "How much less can we give these students and still keep market share," that school is broken. A system that rewards better marketing of a poorer product is not a system that creates excellence, and we do not need to put education in smaller cans.

Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats

Schools, Transparency, and the Free Market

Scoop of the Week award goes to Stephen Dyer, who reported on his blog the surprising words of CREDO charter fan Margaret Raymond, who was speaking in Cleveland when she said

I actually am kind of a pro-market kinda girl. But it doesn’t seem to work in a choice environment for education. I’ve studied competitive markets for much of my career. That’s my academic focus for my work. And (education) is the only industry/sector where the market mechanism just doesn’t work. I think it’s not helpful to expect parents to be the agents of quality assurance throughout the state. I think there are other supports that are needed… The policy environment really needs to focus on creating much more information and transparency about performance than we’ve had for the 20 years of the charter school movement. We need to have a greater degree of oversight of charter schools. But I also think we have to have some oversight of the overseers.

This is not surprising in a "Gee I never thought of that" way. It's surprising in a "consider the source" way, coming from someone who works with a raftload of people who believe in the Invisible Hand and its magic powers.

Now, I disagree with her about education being the only sector where market mechanism doesn't work-- health care comes rapidly to mind followed by the food industry and by the military-industrial complex and by, well, almost everything. The free-ish market in this country is heavily bound up in regulation and government control, and much of that is not exerted on behalf of citizens, but on behalf of corporations for whom government regulation is just one of the avenues for using giant piles of money to tilt the scales. From Vanderbilt to Carnegie to Gates, rich folks just love the free market until they're winning, at which point they aren't so keen on the "free" part.

But you can get her point, particularly in follow-up comments that she sent to Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post.

In other industries, real markets are able to develop and function because suppliers and consumers get to meet each other in an unfettered set of offers and demands for goods or services.  There are no intermediary agents who guard access to supply or who aggregate demand and thus sway the free exchange of supply and demand.  Part of that free exchange relies on complete transparency about the attributes of the goods on offer and their prices, and the transactions are “known” by the participants in an open and complete way.

Again, I think she overestimates how many real markets work like this, but her point is well taken. To have a free market, you have to have transparency about all aspects of the transaction.

You also have to have some agreed-upon vocabulary. If I'm trying to sell you a "luxury" automobile or "good" maple syrup, we both have a pretty good idea of what I mean. But if I'm trying to sell a "good" school, nobody is sure what the heck I mean. The reformsters have tried to clear this up by imposing a definition of "good" on schools and teachers, but that definition is "high scores on a couple of standardized math and English tests" and nobody really believes that it's correct.

Some markets have taken years, decades to create that shared vocabulary. For instance, most of the market agrees that "good" maple syrup is "rich and thick."  Except that if you grew up around actual maple syrup, you know that it's thinner and slicker than water and cuts into your food like the sweetest battery acid ever imagined. Marketers had to train the public to associate rich and thick with maple syrup, just as marketers taught us that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

The American free market doesn't run much on transparency. For some products, like cigarettes and beer, the market depends on a definite lack of transparency. We Americans are hustlers. We like smoke and mirrors. We expect to hear and see bullshit, and we deal in a little bit of it ourselves from time to time. I'll repeat myself here-- the free market does not foster excellent products; the free market fosters excellent marketing.

When it comes to education, the general public does not agree on what they want, how to get it, or how to recognize it when they see it. Add that education is a product that every citizen is required by law to purchase, putting educators in the unique market position of having to market a product to people who do not want that product. And that education is a product that everybody thinks they are qualified and capable of producing. Open the market, as the Obama administration and various state governments, and you have a market that is absolutely ripe for charlatans, humbugs, and well-meaning incompetents.

Finally, layer on our love of invisible regulation. We hate regulation, but we take for granted that nothing we buy in a store could actually hurt us. We hate regulation, but we never check our groceries for possible poisons, and we assume that any electrical appliance we bring into our home will not electrocute us. We like to believe that our world is just naturally safe in some magical unregulated way.

In that same way, people in the education marketplace have just assumed that some place that calls itself a school must automatically have certain programs in place, must address certain student concerns, must have some actual commitment to staying open. As many many many folks in Ohio can now tell you, making assumptions about what a charter is going to do (or not do) turns out to be a huge mistake.

I think Raymond's love of the free market blinds her to many hard truths about it. But as with any bad relationship, it's great to see her at least recognize that things aren't working out now. I believe that her faith that things can some day work out between the market and education is misplaced, but baby steps. Baby steps.

Non-wealthy People and Choice

When it comes to school, the poor, the argument goes, should have the same choices that wealthier folks have. The ability to choose a neighborhood gives wealthier folks the ability to choose a school, so even folks who attend public school are making use of school choice, the argument goes.

Let's skip over the usually-ignored part of that argument, which suggests that the problems of school selection could be addressed via zoning. Break up the last bastions of redlining, and put low cost housing in every neighborhood, including the ritzy ones and voila! everyone can exercise real estate based choice. I wonder why we never talk about that solution.

Instead, the preferred solution is to set loose the power of the free market to provide the non-wealthy with all sorts of choicey alternatives, a rich buffet of options. Reformsters used to say that choicey competition would create excellence as well, but that's no longer part of the pitch. Choice need not promote excellence; it's enough for reformsters that choice promotes choice.

It doesn't matter; any way you frame it, you run up against the same problem-- choice will not accomplish what its fans say it will accomplish.

The problem is that the free market is not a friend of poor people.

Oh, it likes them when it comes to marketing. Note-- the unwealthy are not stupid and they are not lazy, but they are busy just trying to hold things together between jobs and families and too few resources. Just the mechanics of being a family with two or three jobs but just one car can make for a very busy week, People who are spending all their energy just to tread water don't have a lot of time to extensively research advertising and PR claims.

Add to that Greene's Law: The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing. The market has a vested interest in making sure that consumers don't make informed choices, or at the very least, choices that are informed the way the marketeers want them to be informed.

So well-informed carefully-researched decisions uninfluenced by spin and puffery are not a very common thing in the marketplace.

But the free market is also not a friend of the non-wealthy because, well, they don't have much money. And that is important because of another True Thing about the market--

The market does not provide consumers with choices because it thinks those would be nice choices to have; the market provides the choices that businesses think they can make money providing.

My town has long needed some kind of youth facility, whether it be a youth-focused dance club or a specialized recreational facility. People have been saying it as long as I've lived here. We still don't have one. This is not because of any government regulations or state-sponsored monopoly or other market impediment. It's because no business thinks they can make money, as demonstrated by the two or three who have attempted it and then closed up shop because they couldn't make money doing it. We could talk about why they don't make money, but my point is that as much as we want it, as much as we would benefit from it, the free market is not providing it.

The free market is not Santa Claus. It does not provide goods and services because people need them or even deserve them.

Combine that truth with the lack of money in poorer communities, and you have a problem with the choice theory of action.

Can you name one kind of business that is providing poor communities with a rich buffet of choices. Maybe the fast food industry, but that encompasses a range of choices that go from A to B-- upscale restaurants are not in there tryin to enrich the choice list. Not supermarkets or other food providers; their absence from poor communities is why there's such a thing as a food desert. Auto dealers? Computer hardware stores? Dress shops?

Whatever the sector, what you find are a range of downscale choices with a business plan of catering to people without a lot of money.

There are businesses that specifically target such communities-- Walmart, and now Dollar General (five years ago there were none in my area-- now there's a DG roughly every ten miles on local roads) aim for the non-wealthy crowd, and again, that crowd is offered what Walmart execs figure they can pay for. Do wealthy people go shopping at Walmart in pursuit of top quality. Does Louis Vutton open shops in poor areas because those folks also deserve a chance to check out overpriced luxury luggage? No, because that's not how the free market works.

A school choice system will claim to circumnavigate this by using government money to pay for the schooling, thereby artificially inflating the wealth level of the families involved. It's almost like choice creates a new entitlement to send students to private school at public expense, but you'll never hear choice fans describe it that way because they are mostly conservatives and the "entitle--" word is verboten.

At any rate, that doesn't really help because in many states, the per pupil spending for education is already too little to really support a school, and then, anyone who's operating a free market business expects to keep some of that revenue as salaries or profit or, if they're part5icularly shady, fun vacations and a generally cushy lifestyle. So now there's really not a lot of money left to spend on the choice school. Some of the charters deal with this by hitting up parents and wealthy donors for some more cash. The vast majority of voucher schools are church related, so the church can help chip in. But a less wealthy community is limited in the ways it can help the charter business stay solvent.

Choice schools will make decisions based on business concerns. For instance, enrolling students who have special needs-- but special needs that are not expensive to deal with. Student performance is part of the marketing, so it becomes important to push out students whose performance will mess up the PR.

All of these considerations affect how charters approach doing business in not-so-wealthy communities. Advocates will point to some charters in those communities and say, "See? Charters are providing the same options as wealthy families have." And I could run on at greater length about why that's not true, but it's quicker to ask just how many wealthy families consider these charters as good a choice as any other they've considered and decide to send their children there. (And the answer is that occasionally that does happen-- and it's Step One in gentrifying a neighborhood by pushing the locals out.) Nobody is pulling their kids out of Phillips Exeter in order to enroll the child in Success Academy.

So what you end up with is many top educators or schools or just plain entrepreneurs saying, "Well, I'm not going to try to make money running a school in that neighborhood" and a few, maybe just one, saying, "Yeah, I think I can do this cheaply enough to make a buck at it." And some students will get a small choice, but not the choice they imagine, just the choice that "make a buck" company wants to offer. And choice fans will say, "Yes, but we got a better education to some of those students," and I will say, "By leaving everyone in a system that wastes a bunch of money that could have been used to educate folks."

The public education system is riddled with inequities as it stands. A choice system doesn't propose fixing that problem; it just promises to let a few more kids get in on the high side of the inequity, while making the low side worse off. In the meantime, choice turns out to mean "give businesses the choice of cashing in on the education racket" while providing little in the way of actual, legitimate choices for the non-wealthy.

AEI: Previewing New Reformy Rhetoric

Over at AEI, Robert C. Enlow and Jason Bedrick have some thoughts for new, improved rhetoric for pushing school choice. It's worth a look to see where the argument is headed in the year ahead.

Enlow is the president/CEO of EdChoice (formerly the Milton Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice). Bedrick is the director of policy at EdChoice, as well as a scholar the Cato Institute.

Given their background and affiliation, there is no surprise with their kick-off premise, which is that conservatives should still keep choice at the heart of their education agenda. This is framed as a resolution to the tension between choice and accountability, which has indeed always been a problem with reformster rhetoric--it's hard to create a world in which schools are held tightly to standards and test-centered accountability but certain schools are also free to do whatever.

Accountability has been doomed as a reformy cause for a while now. For one thing, it has already accomplished the task of cementing the narrative that public schools are "failing," and for another, charters haven't turned out to be any better at the accountability game than public schools. And accountability has always been poison to choice incursion into private schools, which largely have little interest in collecting taxpayer dollars if they have strings attached.

Enlow and Bedrick have three specific suggestions for rhetorical changes in how to frame the debate (and they are remarkably in line with the rhetoric used by Betsy DeVos).

First, replace "school choice" with "educational choice."

Way over the right, this has always been the dream--not choosing between public schools and charter schools, but letting families shop at a smorgasbord of edu-busineses vending a variety of edu-products. The dream is to make the entry requirement for getting into the edu-biz market as low as possible, so let's dispense with the model of a "school," and get on to selling education wherever, however. Enlow and Bedrick offer a good, old rosy-glassed libertarian vision of the benefits:

Importantly, these options allow families to pursue classical education, a content-rich history and civics curriculum, and more rigorous curriculum generally where these opportunities are otherwise lacking.

These options also allow families to avoid all of these options. And, of course, the options are only going to be available if someone decides it's worth their while to offer them.

Second, ditch "failing schools" for "the right fit."

Here's something they get right:

Predicating eligibility for choice programs on district schools’ test scores needlessly pits families and choice advocates against educators and schools. 

If there's anything I don't miss from a decade ago, it's the endless drumbeat that schools are terrible because they are filled with terrible teachers and therefor students must be plucked from these hellholes (with hellishness measured by a single bad, narrow standardized test). If you miss that routine, you can still get it from Jeanne Allen at the Center for Education Reform, or any Trumpist on Twitter.

Picking at the low-hanging fruit has been a reformy tactic for a while, from plans like a state-run district that takes over the bottom 5% of schools to states that offer voucher program aimed specifically at students in low-wealth communities and low-score schools.

The "right fit" approach, beloved by Betsy DeVos for a while, opens the market stem to stern. Under this theory, even a wealthy student at a high-rated school might still need some school choice in order to find her "right fit." This angle also allows choice to include religious private schools more easily, a DeVos goal for ages.

Then there's this:

The “failing schools” paradigm also makes choice only about providing equity for the disadvantaged rather than systemic change. Equity is certainly important—it is a matter of justice—but significant improvements will require large-scale changes in how education is delivered.

Since the beginning of the Trump/DeVos administration, reformsters have wrestled with the schism between social justice reformsters and free market reformsters. AEI and EdChoice are solidly in the free market camp, which believes in its heart that the market should decide which schools are "failing" and which are not, that, in fact, the definition of "failing" should be "not selling enough product to be financially viable."

I have huge problems with the "right fit" framing, because it adapts easily to the systemic preservation of inequity. It fits all too easily with the classist notion that everyone would be so much happier if they just settled into their proper place in society. This No Excuse Academy might follow oppressive policies that emphasize compliance and subservience that no rich white parents would ever tolerate, but hey, it might be just the "right fit" for some of Those People's Children. And Our Lady of Perpetual Motion can go ahead and reject any of Those People's Children because, well, this school just wouldn't be the "right fit" for them.

I have no doubt that some folks will adopt this language with nothing but good intentions. But racists, classists, and those who think inequity is The Way Things Should Be can adopt this language without blinking an eye.

From "top-down" to "bottom-up."

This is the least-new part, and is simply a restatement of the idea that schools should be driven by market forces, or as the essay puts it, "True accountability is when service providers are directly accountable to the people who bear the consequences of their performance."

Well, schools are not "service providers" or Uber drivers or taco stands, and the free market remains a bad match for public education. Enlow and Bedrick are correct in arguing (as teachers already had argued for years and years and years) that the single high-stakes test messes up the system; it's nice to have them on board, as outfits like AEI had previously argued that the Big Standardized Test was a necessary part of the free market, informing the decisions of parents.

This part is complicated. How will parent decisions be informed? The free market does not foster superior quality; it fosters superior marketing. How many tax dollars do we want to see funneled into marketing campaigns? What do we say to parents whose children are rejected for not being the "right fit" with the brand? What will the market offer to students who are rejected by all the vendors as  not the right fit, aka too much trouble and expense to educate? When has a free market sector ever focused on serving every single customer? In the free market, you can win by avoiding high quality and shooting at the middle (eg Walmart) or you can shoot for quality and aim at only a limited number of customers (eg pick your favorite super-expensive home sound equipment).

I have written a ton about the free market approach to education (like here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) but the short form is this-- I don't think the free market is inherently evil or bad (though lately it has suffered from some very bad actors); I just think it's incompatible with a system intended to fulfill the promise of a free, quality education for every single student. That bad fit is made even worse when you treat parents as the only stakeholders with a say, blocking out all community members and taxpayers who don't have children.

What the free market does well, besides fostering great marketing, is pick winners and losers, both among vendors and customers. Parents would be just as "empowered" as the market chose to make them, and they will have access to just the choices they are offered.

These three rhetorical twists are offered by the authors as a way to promote choice, but they don't strike me as making the argument any more convincingly than the old rhetoric. DeVos seems to like them, though, so I guess we'll be hearing them for a little bit longer.

Backpacks Full Of Cash

Jeanne Allen's magical phrase, turned into a rhetorical weapon against her and other free market choicers, never seems to quite go away, perhaps because all sides find it an apt description of free-market choice. Right now they're getting ready to load up more backpacks out in LA. Allen was sure that this was a great portrayal of the awesomeness of choice, but I'm not sure we ever thought it through.

After all, in this vision of school, students are couriers. Their job is to carry backpacks full of cash to various vendors and business operators like little pack animals. The backpacks full of cash image unintentionally focuses on what many fans of the free market model are very interested in--easily moved, largely unguarded cash. We could as easily describe students as little foxes or minks, important mostly for the valuable pelts that they carry with them (and from which they will eventually be separated). 

One of the great tricks of free market choicers has been to hide their primary focus in plain sight, and the focus is not education or even choice, but in free marketizing public education. 

And yet, for years, few people stop to ask, "Hey, wait a minute. Why does school choice have to involve market forces? Why do we have to strap money to the backs of children?"

After all, we could offer school choice within a public system. We could offer a variety of different schools in one system. We could (and I'd argue already do) offer a variety of school options under one roof. If legislators believe that public schools are choking in too much red tape and regulation, well, then--get rid of them. Every educational goal that choice fans espouse could be met within the public system we already have. The goals the public system can't meet are the structural ones, the ones that are all about freeing businessmen to pocket some part of the vast stack of money we spend on education. 

Why does a requirement of school choice have to be that private operators must make money from it? 

I get that some folks have a sincere belief that market forces drive competition which drives excellence and innovation. I don't see a lot of evidence in the real world. Success in the market comes through many means other than excellence in products (eg Coke, Walmart, Microsoft), and once market dominance is achieved, market command is used to squash competition and buy up innovation before it can become a threat (eg see above). The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing. They compete over the fat middle and leave the outliers to fend for themselves (eg cable tv). Then multinational winners in the marketplace create their own sets of laws, regulations and bureaucracy that any nation's government would envy. 

So I see no benefits to letting free market forces loose in a vital public service. On top of the fact that they don't deliver any of the benefits ascribed to them, they foster this view of students as pack animals tasked with delivering backpacks full of cash. 

There are valid arguments to be made in favor of some version of choice. But none of them require the inclusion of privately owned-and-operated marketeers.

Of course, to offer choice within the public system would require more money. Choice as we're currently doing it requires more money, but various shell games are being used to hide that fact. But here we are in the same old place--we can think of cool things that might make education better, but those things would cost more money, and when it comes right down to it, we don't want to pay that much for the education system (our own kids, sure--but not for Those Peoples' Children). 

So for some folks, the solution is to strap cash to the backs of children and turn them loose so that various business operators can compete at the work of coaxing the cash couriers into one business's doorway. Instead the object of education, the center around which school revolves, free marketeering transforms them into conduits of cash, one more cog in the machinery instead of young humans that the machine should serve. 

Demonstrating Why Business Ideas Don't Help Public Education (Example #3,244,781)

As always, let me say up front that I don't hate the free market and business, and that I believe there are things that they do pretty well. But the free market does not belong within six-to-ten feet of public education (or health care or basically anything that involves taking care of human beings, but let me try to retain some focus here).

We are living through yet another demonstration of the ways in which market-based approaches fail, and in some cases, fail really hard.

Long Term Preparation Is Inefficient But Essential

Back when I was a stage crew advisor, there was a pep talk I had to give periodically to crew members, particularly those working in the wings as grips or fly. "I know that you sit and do nothing for a lot of this show," I'd say, "but when we need you, we really need you. In those few minutes, you are critical to our success." In those moments we were talking about, every crew member was occupied; there was no way to double up or cut corners.

Emergency preparation is much the same. It's economically efficient to, for instance, keep a whole stockpile of facemasks or ventilators. Big-time businessman Trump justified his cuts to various health agencies by citing business wisdom:

And rather than spending the money—I’m a business person. I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them. When we need them, we can get them back very quickly.

This turns out to be just as smart as disbanding the fire department and figuring you'll just round up personnel and equipment when something is actually on fire. It doesn't work. And as we have witnessed, it leaves you unprepared to deal with the critical moment when it arrives.

But the market hates tying up money in excess capacity or emergency readiness, because you're spending all that money on capacity that isn't being used this second. Are those guidance counselors and school nurses seeing students every single minute of the day? Well then, we should be able to cut them back. Are we sure that every teacher is teaching the maximum number of students possible? Couldn't we just put some of those students on software? This is why so many business heads are convinced that public education is simply filled with waste--because there seems to be so much excess capacity in schools.

But in many schools, there's not enough excess capacity. When a student is in the middle of a crisis, we should be able to respond immediately, whether it's a personal crisis, a medical crisis, or an educational issue. The response should not be "tough it out till the counselor is on duty tomorrow" or "we'll just wrap that in some gauze until the nurse comes in three hours from now" or "I know you need help with the assignment, but I can't take my attention away from the other thirty-five students in this classroom." And that's on top of the issue of preparedness, or having staff and teachers who have the capacity--the time and resources and help-- to be prepared for the daily onslaught of Young Human Crises. When wealthy people pay private school tuition or raise their own public school taxes, this is what they're paying for-- the knowledge that whenever their child needs the school to respond, the response will come immediately.

Sure, you can cut a school to the bones in the name of efficiency, but what you'll have is the educational equivalent of a nation caught flatfooted by a global pandemic because it didn't have the people in place to be prepared.

Competition Guarantees Losers

Ed Reformsters just love the bromide about how competition raises all boats and makes everyone better. And yet, the pandemic's free market approach to critical medical supplies doesn't seem to bear that out. States are being forced to compete with each other  and the federal government, and all it's doing is making vendors rich. This is free market competition at its baldest-- if you have more money, you win. If you have less money, you lose. At some point, if it has not already happened, some people in this country are going to die because their state, municipality or medical facility will not have enough money to outbid someone else.

The free market picks losers, and it generally picks them on the basis of their lack of wealth. The notion that losers can just compete harder, by wrapping their bootstraps in grit, is baloney. It's comforting for winners to believe that they won because of hard work and grit and not winning some fate-based lottery, and it also releases them from any obligation to give a rat's rear about anyone else ("I made myself, so everyone else should do the same").

A system built on picking losers and punishing them for losing is the exact opposite of what we need for public education. You can argue that well, we just want free market competition for schools and teachers, but if that kind of competition is in the dna of the system, it will stomp all over students as well, just as all free market businesses pick customers to be losers who don't get served because they aren't sufficiently profitable. Kind of like a low-revenue state or old folks home that can't get its people necessary supplies because they don't have enough wealth to bid with.

"Compete harder" just means "be richer." It is not helpful advice.

Expertise Isn't Always Marketable

May I introduce, once again, Greene's Law-- "The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing."

Now sure, marketing can sometimes be based on actual quality or expertise. But that's not always the best way to sell your stuff, and we are living through a yuge demonstration of the results of a focus on marketability over actually knowing what the hell you're talking about. It gets us things like a movement by anti-vaxxers to replace Dr. Fauci with a miserable quack. It gets us Fox News and an endless parade of ignorant talking heads who can sell the heck out of their ill-informed answers to the current crisis. It gets us officials whose scientific illiteracy informs a parade of bad decisions because they pick based on what appeals to them, based on their deep distrust of "experts."

Letting these kinds of forces loose in public education is not now, nor has it ever been, a good idea. The notion that schools should be devoting time and money to marketing themselves is a dumb idea. It's not just the waste-- it's the tendency of the marketplace to favor what is sexy and truthy and appealing to biases over what is actually recommended by actual experts.

We are living through the kind of mess created by devaluing expertise. Public education would not be helped.

None Of This Is New

These are not new reasons to reject free market businessized thinking for public education (and, for that matter, for private education as well). But we are living through a full-scale demonstration of what happens when you try to apply free market business-ish philosophy to the care and support of actual human beings in a functional free society. We can do better than this.

Things Milton Friedman Got Wrong

I've been reading some Friedman lately, trying to refamiliarize myself with the intellectual granddaddy of education privatization. I'm fascinated by Libertarian thought, because I think they get some things really right, but it's canceled out by the things they get terribly wrong, and it was the wrongness that jumped out at me from some of Friedman's words. And yes, he's a major figure in economics and I'm a retired English teacher, but if economists can pretend to be education experts, well, then...

The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.

The great stumbling block of Libertarianism is dealing with racism. As demonstrated in a gazillion different ways from lunch counters to real estate, the market may not care what color people are, but racists operating in the free market care a great deal. Our history is filled with racists being compelled to stop behaving badly by force, and I've never heard a Libertarian offer a convincing explanation of how an unregulated free market would have solved issues like slavery and segregation, nor of how to create a school choice system that does not empower racists and segregationists.

Just as importantly, while the free market may not care what color people are, it cares very much how rich or poor they are. The free market is very good at picking winners and losers--not just among operators, but among customers as well. It is hard to make a lot of money providing goods and services to poor people, and with very few exceptions, the free market prefers to offer poor folks either low quality options or no options at all. The free market is not a good tool for providing poor folks with health care, mail delivery or education. 

Government has three primary functions. It should provide for military defense of the nation. It should enforce contracts between individuals. It should protect citizens from crimes against themselves or their property.

This raises more questions than it answers. What, for instance, do we do with contracts between individuals and corporations? And then there's that word "crimes." Crimes are defined by the folks in power; Jim Crow laws were actual laws. Libertarians seem to have a working definition of real crimes (Friedman, like many Libs, didn't think smoking weed was a real crime), but they're awfully fuzzy. A crime against a person covers what, exactly? Physical injury? Emotional injury? Limiting one's freedom? That one sounds good, except that if I'm poor, that limits my freedom considerably. However, being poor comes in the category that many Libs would call "your own damn fault" and therefore not a real crime. But if being poor is your own fault, then all the injuries to your freedom that come from being poor are also your own fault. Also, if you have no property, then that type of crime has nothing to do with you. The more one looks, the more it appears that government's function is on a sliding scale--the less wealthy you are, the less government is supposed to help you.

The problem with a sliding scale of government service is that it doesn't help much with education and schools; in fact, it pretty much mimics how the free market deals with schools-- good stuff for those who can pay, and subsistence junk for those who can't, with the lower end of the scale always looking for one more corner to cut in order to squeeze out a bit more ROI. 

There is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.

This is a good summary of why a critical public service like health care or education should not be handled by business. Imagine a school where the leaders' philosophy is "Job One is making money for Educorp. Never let trying to educate these kids get in the way of that." Imagine sorting students (including admitting and expelling them) based on how they affect Educorp's bottom line. 

Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power. Government is necessary to preserve our freedom, it is an instrument through which we can exercise our freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom. Even though the men who wield this power initially be of good will and even though they be not corrupted by the power they exercise, the power will both attract and form men of a different stamp.

This belongs to that family of quotes where it seems like he's on the verge of getting it. Because concentration of power is a threat to freedom--but government is not the only place that such a concentration can occur. Business and corporations can also gather enough power to be a threat to freedom as well, and wealth will always attract and form men of a different stamp. And when wealth and power become great enough to capture the power of the government, we have another set of issues, and arguing that the wealthy free marketed their way to this kind of power fair and square doesn't negate their threat to freedom.

The key insight of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it.

Yes, but-- one way to game this system is to drive one party down down down until they can "benefit" from a crumb. "Voluntary" is a fuzzy idea here. If you have engineered a person's choices to the point that they're choosing between crumbs and starvation, then you get a bargain and their "voluntary" choice is not very voluntary at all. 

Education spending will be most effective if it relies on parental choice & private initiative -- the building blocks of success throughout our society.

"Effective" is doing a lot of work here, but since Friedman believes that taxes should be cut often, for any reason, it seems his effective school would be a cheap one. But he's forgetting a third building block of success--coming from a family that has wealth. That building block is, unfortunately, already well wired into public education, but since the free market values it a great deal, it's unlikely that free market schooling would do anything about it. 

We need a system in which the government says to every parent: "Here is a piece of paper you can use for the educational purposes of your child. It will cover the full cost per student at a government school. It is worth X dollars towards the cost of educational services that you purchase from parochial schools, private for-profit schools, private nonprofit schools, or other purveyors of educational services. You may add from your own funds to the voucher if you wish to and can afford to.

Almost seventy years later, privatization fans like the Mackinac Center argue that Friedman's idea would be the antidote to things like collapsing schools in which students can hardly be expected to learn. This makes no sense. We'll still have the same public schools we have now--only they'll have even less money to maintain the facilities. Wealthy people will have a taxpayer-subsidized chance to attend the private school of their choice, and those of you who can't "add from your own fund" will settle for what you get. And, of course, these private schools hoovering up public tax dollars would be free to segregate and discriminate as they wish, giving some students even fewer choices. 

There will always be parts of Libertarianism that make sense to me; I am, for instance, a great respecter of government's ability to really screw things up. I also like freedom a lot. But the free market and freedom are not synonymous or even, in some cases, compatible, and the free market certainly doesn't provide high quality for all, nor does it provide any sort of restraint on certain brands of human misbehavior.