The Free Market Is Wrong For Education (Part #1,277,652)

You may have noticed lately that the streaming industry is going through meltdown challenging transition. It's a reminder that, particularly in late stage capitalism, the free market is fundamentally incompatible with public education.

Just as cable disrupted broadcast television, streaming has disrupted cable. The less obvious part of the transition was a transition in what the business was actually about. Broadcast television are in the business of collecting eyeballs and then renting those eyeballs out to advertisers. Streaming services are in the business of selling subscriptions to customers. Except that, in this stage of the game, neither is actually in those businesses primarily--all are in the business of "creating" money for shareholders. Specifically, the business of creating ever-increasing piles of money.

But there's a problem--there is a finite number of customers in the pool, and streaming services have about reached that limit, particularly as they have proliferated. You are now an Old Fart if you can sit and regale the youngs of the days when a subscription to Netflix would let you watch pretty much everything.

The most obvious issue at the moment (other than your steadily increasing subscription costs) is the mess at Warner/HBO Max/Discovery, in which the newly combined streaming services are obliterating a ton of material. Not just canceled as in "don't make any more" but canceled as in "we have removed this material entirely from the servers." There are plenty of reasons behind this move, but this sentence pretty well sums it up:

Discovery is cutting shows from its archives and unfinished movies from HBO Max as it prepares to merge it with its sister streaming service Discovery Plus, having promised its shareholders a $3 billion cut in costs.

Meanwhile, as Washington Post reports,

Faced with a plunging stock price and worrisome subscriber loss, Netflix plans to add an advertising-supported model for a lower price and may crack down on password sharing. Disney Plus, Hulu and ESPN Plus, which can all be subscribed to in a cable-esque bundle, are raising prices after taking a more than $1 billion hit in the fiscal third quarter.

This all makes sense as long as you understand that the business of these services is not what you think it is. It is not to produce and distribute quality viewing experiences, and certainly not to provide for support to the creative people who produce all this content. The business of these businesses is to make money, and if they have to slice off pieces of their supposed primary mission, they'll do that. Sell advertising space? Cut what they pay for content to the bone? Use algorithms and data to determine what is profitable rather than what is quality? They will do all of that because--

1) You've got to keep making not just money, but more money and

2) Once the market is saturated, there's no way to do that except by playing bean counting games, cutting costs, and finding more sources of revenue.

I've repeated my law in the past: the free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing. But that's probably incomplete, because the free market also, eventually, fosters creative corner cutting, even if the corners cut affect the pursuit of what is supposed to be the business's actual mission. 

We've already heard these kinds of noise from reformsters for years. There's a whole range of initiatives that are all really directed at just one question-- isn't there a way to have a "school" without paying so much for teachers? Maybe super-sardinemasters could teach a few hundred kids at a time. Maybe replace teachers with coaches or facilitators-- even call it something fancy, like microschool. Maybe lower the requirements so that any warm body can do the job and we don't have to pay for qualifications. 

And that's before we get to the lowering of expectations. How often are we hearing the message that a school should just teach students reading and math and maybe a little history, but only enough to make them employable.

The worst tendency for the free market is to look for that sweet spot where you spend the least you can get away with without losing too much of your market share, because your real purpose is to get money to shareholders. Is this what anyone wants for the schools their child attends? Do you want to hear from a building principal at orientation, "Rest assured that we have cut every corner in our attempt to provide your child with the bare minimum required."

The free market can, and has, accomplished some great things. But its values are incompatible with a system that promises to provide a full, rich, rounded education for every single student in the country.