Race to the bottom is not a good analogy because the purpose of the process is to come out with a credential or the knowledge putting one on the path to more lucrative/higher status/personally enjoyable jobs, unlike with prison. If schools lower standards too much, the value of that credential is lost, or the truth comes out in standardized tests or work performance (if you can't do the job your school indicated you should be able to do, you'll get fired quickly and haven't really benefited). There may be an issue with time delay there, but civil torts might fix that: former students or their parents could sue schools for failing to uphold their end of the deal.
With that said, there are some subjects which are taught because they create positive externalities, not benefits to the individual: primarily, the knowledge needed to participate in representative government beneficially. What's covered in the standardized tests might take care of that, but it's a valid objection to school choice.
The inequality issue is a real one, but dragging some down in equality's name is not useful. Also, what you described happens currently in less direct ways, a big example being schools being funded by local property taxes from areas with zoning that prohibits low-cost housing. Even if you changed school funding to fix that, voluntary donations through social pressure could have a similar effect.
If the red tape issue is applicable to schools, why aren't all private schools in America drowning under red tape? Also, the issue in your analogy would have a simple solution: a law that a prison's operators have to pay a fine every time a prisoner escapes, or that any prison with above a certain rate of escapes is automatically shut down, instead of mandating a bunch of specific ways to prevent prisoners from escaping. As I noted above, test scores are the equivalent to this for schools.
Poor information, poor decision making, and perverse incentives in markets are problems as applied to schools, but again, test scores.
I have covered all the arguments you make here in the article. Schools achieve good reputation through creaming, rather than making standards higher. This is not just theory but also reality. A school with the brightest students will of course get higher standardized test score.
And suing schools sounds absolutely absurd. You spend 3-4 years there and fail to pickup on it being a bad school and that you aren't learning anything useful? And anyway how is it the responsibility of a school that you actually perform and do well? Ultimately that is your responsibility. Suing schools sounds like running away from personal responsibility.
If you ask me why private schools are not drowning in red tape then you didn't read the argument. Red tape is something that happens when you see negative effects in a market situation due to perverse incentives. Those negative effects would be most visible in a mostly privatized system as so many students would fall through the cracks.
When you have a privatized system which mainly care for the privileged by spending more money on the average student and creaming then there would be no clear visible problem. Quite the contrary the problem students will be stuck in the public sector which will then look worse. If anything it should push for more red tape in the public sector not in the private sector.
And as long as there is a functioning public sector school students can just go there if a private school performs too badly. Hence the public sector creates a lowest bar. The problem really arise when you try to replace most of education with market based solutions or you lower public sector standards to an absolute minimum as the US has done with things like Medicaid.
The problem is very visible in US health care system which is mostly private, and one of the most red tape infused health care systems anywhere in the developed world. Public sector health care system have some of the simplest regulations and least amount of red tape.
In our prison example you just described how red tape grows. You had to introduce a specific new rule, because otherwise prisons would let too many people escape. They can circumvent this with new draconian rules in prison, but now they become too inhumane, so government needs a new regulation to prevent inhumanity in prison and thus the red tape mill continues to infinity without ever really solving any problems. Each new red tape rule introduce a new incentive which is attempted circumvented, which requires yet more rules. You cannot win this game. US health care is an excellent example of what mess you get into when you try.
Not tests scores don't solve anything for many reasons: 1) You can teach to the test. 2) Creaming gives you higher performing students and thus better tests score average without actually improving school.
I have done standardized tests to get into US universities. I think they are utter rubbish. You got special schools just drilling people in these tests. They don't reflect actual knowledge. What they test is really superficial. What you want is real curriculum tests. You get that with standardized exams etc as we do in Norway.
And we have found that EVERY time the private schools try to cheat the system. There are independent grading which schools cannot influence on exams. Outsiders are used. But naturally you don't want a big system like that for all tests through the school year, hence about half or more are locally administered tests and locally evaluated.
What they find is that private school give a grading on their tests which are often 2 grades/marks higher than what the same student gets with independent grading. In other words the classic grade inflation problem that you see all over the US system, which I described.
So how do you circumvent that? Oh I guess more red tape. Either more tests have to be done externally which requires more resources and regulation. After all locally administer tests are much easier to administer.
And this has been covered in the media and talked about with people who have gone to these private high schools in Norway. They are grade mills that to a large degree teach to the test. When you are teaching to test you are basically cheating.
Test scores is not the solution you imagine it to be. Anyone who has studied performance review systems know this. Take software development. Lines of code under normal circumstances will be a decent metric for how productive somebody is. However once you do a performance evaluation and reward based on it you change the system under observations. Developers will start producing reams of garbage code to crank up the line count. And suddenly your metric no longer has any value.
The same applies to standardized tests. In a normal school system they will match well with performance. You are basically doing random sampling from total knowledge/skills a student has. But once a school relies on outcomes of these tests they will change teaching to optimize for that test. Now you get the same problem as measuring lines of code. It no longer is a good proxy for how well a student is doing. That is the problem with teaching to the test.
This is one of the fundamental problems with heavily market based solutions. They run into this problem all the time. Systems are gamed all the time. Remember the camera megapixel race? It was absurd as it didn't really reflect image quality, but it was one metric which sort of made sense until everyone tried to only optimize for it.
Exact same thing happened with Microprocessors in the 1990s. The Mega Hertz of a CPU was a good rough metric for CPU performance. Except when everybody started comparing CPUs that way, the system under observation changed and everyone tried to game the system by pushing up Mega Hertz regardless of whether that actually improved performance or not.
And no I am of course not suggesting government CPUs. I am merely pointing out some problems which are prevalent in markets. We don't always have a solution for every problem. Some problems we kind of just need to live with. But with health care, education, prison etc we don't need to live with the problems as we have found good alternatives that work. The highest performing school systems in the world are pretty much all public based.
The same applies to health care, prison, train systems etc. There are many cases where we have figured out ways to do something better with government. Other times markets do it better. Both government and markets have incentive problems. It all depends on the particular of a market or service whether you are going to be able to do it better with one or the other. Looking for a one size fits all solution is futile. Neither government nor markets will always be the right solution. Only ideological extremists think there is a grand solution to all problems.
The purpose of public education is to socialize children to the needs of the State. Apparently that now includes convincing them to hate white people and submit to sexual mutilation. I think market forces prevent that sort of true evil from occurring. People who talk about “market failure” generally mean that the market did not deliver the specific results that THEY wanted.
In what part of the world are school teaching children to hate white people? North Korea? Certainly not my experience where I live, and I have two children in school. With respect to mutilation that has been a problem here in Norway with various religious minorities. That should be an argument against private schools teaching for instance religious fundamentalism which keeps such practices in place. A public school system is a good protection against such practices not a cause of it. Again what school system are you referring to? Public school in Saudi Arabia?
Those of us who live in functioning democracies with free speech are given a chance to decide how we want our educational system. Governments cannot go completely against the wishes of their voters. By making education public we make sure sensible generally agreed upon principles are applied in education rather than extremists views held by fringe groups.
I think that being in Norway you are insulated from events here in the United States. I recommend a subscription to Epoch Times to get the view from the center of the argument or if you feel daring, read the Gateway Pundit. Critical Race Theory is a dogma that is force fed to children all across the USA, and it is most definitely anti-white. Schools are also pushing "transition" therapy to turn boys into girls and visa-versa. That is sold all across the country by radical leftist teachers and children are specifically instructed not to tell their parents even when they are given hormone blockers and other medications to alter their gender. Look at what happened in Britain with Tavistock.
In the USA many public schools are so dangerous that children are in fear of being beaten, robbed or even killed AT SCHOOL. Parents want to have their kids attend a school that has safety and discipline as first principles and the public school system here, especially in the cities has completely abandoned that mission.
Not quite buying into that. I have followed American society for decades and lived there. What I have noticed more than anything is probably how conservative it is. My experience going to American University was not how liberal it was but how suffocatingly conservative it was. It is part of the reason I decided to leave after just half a year.
There is certainly some extreme "woke" stuff in the US, but my take on that is that it is really a counter reaction to too much conservatism all over society. I mean there are still people in the US being upset that children aren't praying in school anymore.
We have had exchange students from the US at my school before and I am married to an American. It is pretty clear that US schools ware way more prudish and conservative. I would say religious indoctrination is a pretty big problem in the US. A lot of the wacky woke stuff may simply be a reaction to that.
I know how conservatives often exaggerate though. I have watched plenty of FOX News and very little they say can be trusted. That applies to a lot of conservative media. Hence I am not convinced that what you have learned about "transition" therapy is really reported in a neutral fashion. How do I know FOX and conservative media cannot be trusted? The most obvious proof to me is how much they lie every time they report anything from my part of the world (Nordics and Northern Europe). They twist everything they can to push their conservative ideology.
In short, I am not fan of the American woke left, but I think the problem with they are typically exaggerated grossly by American conservative media. Don't believe all you read. Sure American liberal media are always entirely truthful, but they are really as far off the mark. I know when they report from us in Scandinavia they aren't alway accurate, but they are nowhere near as wacky as American conservative media.
This is an interesting point. I don't have a TV, so I have no idea what is on Fox News or any other State media. I get information from many sources including international, far left and far right, including your Substack which somehow came to me. The points about CRT and the Transgender "movement" are very much at the front of pushback against the unionized leftist teachers and administrators who have taken over big city schools in the last decades. Matt Taibi wrote an excellent series about that subject recently. The FBI has started investigating PARENTS who complain at school board meetings, which enforces my point: the purpose of public education is to socialize children to the needs (or desires) of the State.
Your complaints about religion in America are certainly valid - the State was just differently constituted then. I grew up in Texas where we had school prayer and daily Pledge of Allegiance recital, now I live in Washington State where the anti-white victim ideology of Wokeness is popular and people still wear masks at the grocery store.
I really think parents are the people who are best at choosing what is right for children. Those who have the means should pick the schools that can do the best job of teaching their children. Government schools in big cities like New York are removing advanced classes in subjects like math and science because it is supposedly "racist" to let some students get ahead of others.
People are not equal. Many learn faster and those need to be helped ahead. If education is done at the speed of the slowest students the BEST are lost and the worst gain nothing extra of value. In the end, schools are NOT prisons. America has subcontracted prisons to private enterprise. I think schools are a better candidate for that approach than prisons. That said, another very successful education program I have seen in action is home school. If you are not familiar with it, I suggest doing some investigation before you reject the idea, which is much richer than you might imagine if you never peeked under the cover.
I know how leftists exaggerate and twist facts as well, living as I do in their nest. But I try not to out myself and my biases by making such statements, since it tends to lose the audience. Logic and clear statements have better effect.
It's been enjoyable discussing this with you. Thank you for taking the time. All the best.
Just a remark on being insulated. Nobody in the world is really insulated from American events. We use exactly the same internet as Americans as it is just as dominated by American media and perspectives for us as it is for Americans.
The problem is in reverse. Americans are very insulated from what happens elsewhere. Thus Americans have difficulty judging what happens in their country in context because they don't know what is really happening elsewhere. Thus ironically many foreigners can understand events in America better than Americans as we got something to compare with. We may know similar trends or events from other countries or part of the world.
One example: I never truly understood my own country, Norway, until I lived abroad. Likewise Americans cannot really understand America until they have tried living abroad and learned another language.
The point here wasn't that choice removed the possibility of getting shanked but rather made it possible for the privileged few to avoid it. By actually making a better system for all you can remove shanking from prisons entirely. In the Nordic prison system it is exceedingly rare with shanking and it is all public and not based on any choice. Likewise we have done a good job of reducing bullying in school without making a choice system where the privileged few avoid it. Not that it really works. To my knowledge the boarding schools for the rich in Britain were quite infamous for bullying.
Race to the bottom is not a good analogy because the purpose of the process is to come out with a credential or the knowledge putting one on the path to more lucrative/higher status/personally enjoyable jobs, unlike with prison. If schools lower standards too much, the value of that credential is lost, or the truth comes out in standardized tests or work performance (if you can't do the job your school indicated you should be able to do, you'll get fired quickly and haven't really benefited). There may be an issue with time delay there, but civil torts might fix that: former students or their parents could sue schools for failing to uphold their end of the deal.
With that said, there are some subjects which are taught because they create positive externalities, not benefits to the individual: primarily, the knowledge needed to participate in representative government beneficially. What's covered in the standardized tests might take care of that, but it's a valid objection to school choice.
The inequality issue is a real one, but dragging some down in equality's name is not useful. Also, what you described happens currently in less direct ways, a big example being schools being funded by local property taxes from areas with zoning that prohibits low-cost housing. Even if you changed school funding to fix that, voluntary donations through social pressure could have a similar effect.
If the red tape issue is applicable to schools, why aren't all private schools in America drowning under red tape? Also, the issue in your analogy would have a simple solution: a law that a prison's operators have to pay a fine every time a prisoner escapes, or that any prison with above a certain rate of escapes is automatically shut down, instead of mandating a bunch of specific ways to prevent prisoners from escaping. As I noted above, test scores are the equivalent to this for schools.
Poor information, poor decision making, and perverse incentives in markets are problems as applied to schools, but again, test scores.
I have covered all the arguments you make here in the article. Schools achieve good reputation through creaming, rather than making standards higher. This is not just theory but also reality. A school with the brightest students will of course get higher standardized test score.
And suing schools sounds absolutely absurd. You spend 3-4 years there and fail to pickup on it being a bad school and that you aren't learning anything useful? And anyway how is it the responsibility of a school that you actually perform and do well? Ultimately that is your responsibility. Suing schools sounds like running away from personal responsibility.
If you ask me why private schools are not drowning in red tape then you didn't read the argument. Red tape is something that happens when you see negative effects in a market situation due to perverse incentives. Those negative effects would be most visible in a mostly privatized system as so many students would fall through the cracks.
When you have a privatized system which mainly care for the privileged by spending more money on the average student and creaming then there would be no clear visible problem. Quite the contrary the problem students will be stuck in the public sector which will then look worse. If anything it should push for more red tape in the public sector not in the private sector.
And as long as there is a functioning public sector school students can just go there if a private school performs too badly. Hence the public sector creates a lowest bar. The problem really arise when you try to replace most of education with market based solutions or you lower public sector standards to an absolute minimum as the US has done with things like Medicaid.
The problem is very visible in US health care system which is mostly private, and one of the most red tape infused health care systems anywhere in the developed world. Public sector health care system have some of the simplest regulations and least amount of red tape.
In our prison example you just described how red tape grows. You had to introduce a specific new rule, because otherwise prisons would let too many people escape. They can circumvent this with new draconian rules in prison, but now they become too inhumane, so government needs a new regulation to prevent inhumanity in prison and thus the red tape mill continues to infinity without ever really solving any problems. Each new red tape rule introduce a new incentive which is attempted circumvented, which requires yet more rules. You cannot win this game. US health care is an excellent example of what mess you get into when you try.
Not tests scores don't solve anything for many reasons: 1) You can teach to the test. 2) Creaming gives you higher performing students and thus better tests score average without actually improving school.
I have done standardized tests to get into US universities. I think they are utter rubbish. You got special schools just drilling people in these tests. They don't reflect actual knowledge. What they test is really superficial. What you want is real curriculum tests. You get that with standardized exams etc as we do in Norway.
And we have found that EVERY time the private schools try to cheat the system. There are independent grading which schools cannot influence on exams. Outsiders are used. But naturally you don't want a big system like that for all tests through the school year, hence about half or more are locally administered tests and locally evaluated.
What they find is that private school give a grading on their tests which are often 2 grades/marks higher than what the same student gets with independent grading. In other words the classic grade inflation problem that you see all over the US system, which I described.
So how do you circumvent that? Oh I guess more red tape. Either more tests have to be done externally which requires more resources and regulation. After all locally administer tests are much easier to administer.
And this has been covered in the media and talked about with people who have gone to these private high schools in Norway. They are grade mills that to a large degree teach to the test. When you are teaching to test you are basically cheating.
Test scores is not the solution you imagine it to be. Anyone who has studied performance review systems know this. Take software development. Lines of code under normal circumstances will be a decent metric for how productive somebody is. However once you do a performance evaluation and reward based on it you change the system under observations. Developers will start producing reams of garbage code to crank up the line count. And suddenly your metric no longer has any value.
The same applies to standardized tests. In a normal school system they will match well with performance. You are basically doing random sampling from total knowledge/skills a student has. But once a school relies on outcomes of these tests they will change teaching to optimize for that test. Now you get the same problem as measuring lines of code. It no longer is a good proxy for how well a student is doing. That is the problem with teaching to the test.
This is one of the fundamental problems with heavily market based solutions. They run into this problem all the time. Systems are gamed all the time. Remember the camera megapixel race? It was absurd as it didn't really reflect image quality, but it was one metric which sort of made sense until everyone tried to only optimize for it.
Exact same thing happened with Microprocessors in the 1990s. The Mega Hertz of a CPU was a good rough metric for CPU performance. Except when everybody started comparing CPUs that way, the system under observation changed and everyone tried to game the system by pushing up Mega Hertz regardless of whether that actually improved performance or not.
And no I am of course not suggesting government CPUs. I am merely pointing out some problems which are prevalent in markets. We don't always have a solution for every problem. Some problems we kind of just need to live with. But with health care, education, prison etc we don't need to live with the problems as we have found good alternatives that work. The highest performing school systems in the world are pretty much all public based.
The same applies to health care, prison, train systems etc. There are many cases where we have figured out ways to do something better with government. Other times markets do it better. Both government and markets have incentive problems. It all depends on the particular of a market or service whether you are going to be able to do it better with one or the other. Looking for a one size fits all solution is futile. Neither government nor markets will always be the right solution. Only ideological extremists think there is a grand solution to all problems.
The purpose of public education is to socialize children to the needs of the State. Apparently that now includes convincing them to hate white people and submit to sexual mutilation. I think market forces prevent that sort of true evil from occurring. People who talk about “market failure” generally mean that the market did not deliver the specific results that THEY wanted.
In what part of the world are school teaching children to hate white people? North Korea? Certainly not my experience where I live, and I have two children in school. With respect to mutilation that has been a problem here in Norway with various religious minorities. That should be an argument against private schools teaching for instance religious fundamentalism which keeps such practices in place. A public school system is a good protection against such practices not a cause of it. Again what school system are you referring to? Public school in Saudi Arabia?
Those of us who live in functioning democracies with free speech are given a chance to decide how we want our educational system. Governments cannot go completely against the wishes of their voters. By making education public we make sure sensible generally agreed upon principles are applied in education rather than extremists views held by fringe groups.
I think that being in Norway you are insulated from events here in the United States. I recommend a subscription to Epoch Times to get the view from the center of the argument or if you feel daring, read the Gateway Pundit. Critical Race Theory is a dogma that is force fed to children all across the USA, and it is most definitely anti-white. Schools are also pushing "transition" therapy to turn boys into girls and visa-versa. That is sold all across the country by radical leftist teachers and children are specifically instructed not to tell their parents even when they are given hormone blockers and other medications to alter their gender. Look at what happened in Britain with Tavistock.
In the USA many public schools are so dangerous that children are in fear of being beaten, robbed or even killed AT SCHOOL. Parents want to have their kids attend a school that has safety and discipline as first principles and the public school system here, especially in the cities has completely abandoned that mission.
Not quite buying into that. I have followed American society for decades and lived there. What I have noticed more than anything is probably how conservative it is. My experience going to American University was not how liberal it was but how suffocatingly conservative it was. It is part of the reason I decided to leave after just half a year.
There is certainly some extreme "woke" stuff in the US, but my take on that is that it is really a counter reaction to too much conservatism all over society. I mean there are still people in the US being upset that children aren't praying in school anymore.
We have had exchange students from the US at my school before and I am married to an American. It is pretty clear that US schools ware way more prudish and conservative. I would say religious indoctrination is a pretty big problem in the US. A lot of the wacky woke stuff may simply be a reaction to that.
I know how conservatives often exaggerate though. I have watched plenty of FOX News and very little they say can be trusted. That applies to a lot of conservative media. Hence I am not convinced that what you have learned about "transition" therapy is really reported in a neutral fashion. How do I know FOX and conservative media cannot be trusted? The most obvious proof to me is how much they lie every time they report anything from my part of the world (Nordics and Northern Europe). They twist everything they can to push their conservative ideology.
In short, I am not fan of the American woke left, but I think the problem with they are typically exaggerated grossly by American conservative media. Don't believe all you read. Sure American liberal media are always entirely truthful, but they are really as far off the mark. I know when they report from us in Scandinavia they aren't alway accurate, but they are nowhere near as wacky as American conservative media.
This is an interesting point. I don't have a TV, so I have no idea what is on Fox News or any other State media. I get information from many sources including international, far left and far right, including your Substack which somehow came to me. The points about CRT and the Transgender "movement" are very much at the front of pushback against the unionized leftist teachers and administrators who have taken over big city schools in the last decades. Matt Taibi wrote an excellent series about that subject recently. The FBI has started investigating PARENTS who complain at school board meetings, which enforces my point: the purpose of public education is to socialize children to the needs (or desires) of the State.
Your complaints about religion in America are certainly valid - the State was just differently constituted then. I grew up in Texas where we had school prayer and daily Pledge of Allegiance recital, now I live in Washington State where the anti-white victim ideology of Wokeness is popular and people still wear masks at the grocery store.
I really think parents are the people who are best at choosing what is right for children. Those who have the means should pick the schools that can do the best job of teaching their children. Government schools in big cities like New York are removing advanced classes in subjects like math and science because it is supposedly "racist" to let some students get ahead of others.
People are not equal. Many learn faster and those need to be helped ahead. If education is done at the speed of the slowest students the BEST are lost and the worst gain nothing extra of value. In the end, schools are NOT prisons. America has subcontracted prisons to private enterprise. I think schools are a better candidate for that approach than prisons. That said, another very successful education program I have seen in action is home school. If you are not familiar with it, I suggest doing some investigation before you reject the idea, which is much richer than you might imagine if you never peeked under the cover.
I know how leftists exaggerate and twist facts as well, living as I do in their nest. But I try not to out myself and my biases by making such statements, since it tends to lose the audience. Logic and clear statements have better effect.
It's been enjoyable discussing this with you. Thank you for taking the time. All the best.
Just a remark on being insulated. Nobody in the world is really insulated from American events. We use exactly the same internet as Americans as it is just as dominated by American media and perspectives for us as it is for Americans.
The problem is in reverse. Americans are very insulated from what happens elsewhere. Thus Americans have difficulty judging what happens in their country in context because they don't know what is really happening elsewhere. Thus ironically many foreigners can understand events in America better than Americans as we got something to compare with. We may know similar trends or events from other countries or part of the world.
One example: I never truly understood my own country, Norway, until I lived abroad. Likewise Americans cannot really understand America until they have tried living abroad and learned another language.
The point here wasn't that choice removed the possibility of getting shanked but rather made it possible for the privileged few to avoid it. By actually making a better system for all you can remove shanking from prisons entirely. In the Nordic prison system it is exceedingly rare with shanking and it is all public and not based on any choice. Likewise we have done a good job of reducing bullying in school without making a choice system where the privileged few avoid it. Not that it really works. To my knowledge the boarding schools for the rich in Britain were quite infamous for bullying.