Liberty Alone

“A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare,” the judge wrote, quoting from a 1961 case on a similar issue.

Justice H. Walter Croskey

More here from Kevin Carson

The US has a massive problem with powerful Unions who are directly harming the prospects of children in the country. The Teacher’s
Unions stand opposed to anything which may upset their power base and deny them money. From forced membership of a Union and the Union decisions being binding upon non-members to arguing that teachers should not have to prepare lesson plans they directly affect the prospects of children, especially the poorest.

Drew Carey’s latest video for Reason TV is about one of the worst performing schools in the US and how the Union tried to prevent reforms designed to improve the school for the children. Listening to the Union spokesmen you’d think that schools are for teachers, not for pupils.
Thankfully, the story has a happy ending (so far - I would like a follow up to see what happened) with the school being granted charter status and being run by a non-profit organisation which successfully runs other schools with similar demographics and runs the schools for the pupils not the teachers (the head of the organisation says he’d sooner give up on a teacher than a pupil).

Also here

Thankfully, the situation is not as bad in the UK, although I’m sure there are trades unionists who would happily take such a line. Also the Professional Association of Teachers shows that it is possible to have a Union which looks after its member’s interests whilst placing the care and education of children foremost in their actions (Disclosure: My parents were both members for that very reason).

The worst thing about debates over education is they invariably bring out the worst on people.

This usually takes the form of class hatred, invariably taking the form of attacks on the private education sector for daring to provide a service which people desire.

I have a confession, I am one of those evil socially divisive people who went to a private school. I am glad I did. If I had not I would probably not be sitting here typing this. I would not have had the opportunity to attend the university I did. I would never have met my wife.
What angers me is that if my parents had not taken on large debts, if I had not used my savings to help pay for my last two years and if I’d been a few years older and thus not able to benefit from the assisted place scheme (scrapped by Labour as part of their keeping the poor down policies) I would have not had these opportunities, and even worse there are many many people out there who cannot benefit from the education they deserve because they cannot make the necessary sacrifices.

You should not have to make such sacrifices to get a good education, yet many do and even more are condemned because of where they live and their parent’s income.

My school would have leaped at the chance to have more pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. This was made impossible by the state, not by a money grabbing private sector.

It is the state which denies the private sector the opportunity to compete equally by seeking to control education. Quite rightly private schools refuse to sacrifice their commitment to providing the best education to their pupils which entering the state sector would require.

Yet still, the private sector is blamed for the failings of the state. The private sector is held up as an example of what is wrong when the failings are due to the state.

There is no reason why many more people could not get the level of education I benefited from, except for the collusion between class warriors, equality fanatics and those who seek a rigid hierarchy in society (that is between the socialists and the Tories).

Tim Worsall wonders if he’s gone insane.

Unfortunately not, its just that we’re ruled over by idiots.

The point of vocational education is that not everyone is suited to an intellectual education, so you tailor education towards the individual.
You let the nerds (like me) do our thing, study maths (or english, or history). Its what we’re good at. Let others study those things they’re good at - like my brother and his design and jewelery. Its not any lesser or greater in the grand scheme. To the individuals involved however the value of being able to pursue their own talents is huge.

Of course, forcing people to pursue vocational studies no matter what they’re good at is to be expected from a party of micromanagers with an ideological commitment against individual excellence.

Over at Charlotte Gore’s blog Matthew Huntbach launches yet another attack on markets in education.

This time he fails to understand the difference between the pressure to achieve centrally set targets and to provide services (or products) people desire.

He says:

The reality is that school teachers actually feel under intense competitive pressures to do whatever it is to drive their schools up the league tables, and this is having a negative rather than a positive effect on education.

I agree that teachers are under pressure to push the school further up the league table. However, this is pressure to conform to outside imposed targets. In a market, the pressure is to create what people actually want, not what some government department thinks people should want.

The current situation is like trying to meet this month’s quota for tractor production. Its an arbitrary target which has little to do with what is actually desired or needed.

In a market the pressure is to produce something which enough people want to make it worthwhile. So whilst some people want tractors, they will want different things from their tractors. Different companies can specialise in different types of tractor, or they could divert their energy and capital to the production of a different type of farm machinery for which there is a demand.

Thus, competition is driven not by government targets and trying to do best at them, but by the demands of the customer, and the customers are not a homogeneous group with the same desires and expected outcome.
Schools would then be able to specialise. Some people may prefer a school which gets very high grades at GCSE above any other considerations. Others may prefer a school which has a broader focus, or which specialises in a particular subject area. There are any number of considerations.

If I look at my experience. I was lucky enough to go to a private school (thanks to sacrifices by my parents and later the generosity of charity, the school and my own savings). The reason my parents were willing to pay so much? Because the local schools would not have given me an education which was suitable for me (and they were both teachers in the borough so they knew this very well).
When looking at schools, the one we chose was not chosen over exam results, it was chosen because of the whole atmosphere and ethos.
I assume other pupils and parents preferred the other school for their own reasons.

Of course, the school did not suit everyone, there were several people who did not respond well to the academic atmosphere (despite being very intelligent). They would have benefited from an even greater choice of schools.

In the US at least.

Nice to see all the do gooder ‘liberals’ want to protect them from their ‘mistake’. I suppose the poor can’t lobby or give donations so they don’t matter.

Of course, the UK isn’t in quite the same mess as parts of the US with the unions, but still, its interesting that the poorest in society want the opportunity.

This just goes to show that it is not poverty, but lack of opportunity which is the real problem for the poorest. Unfortunately, the parties which are thought to care for the poor most seem intent on keeping them in that state because nice, white, middle class people can make better choices than the individuals concerned.

I am a firm supporter of a voucher system in education as a solution to the current dire state of this country’s education system.
The current system whilst it has its success stories fails drastically too much, despite the best efforts of all involved. This is not due to evil intent, but due to fundamental flaws in the system as a whole.

Voucher systems however are opposed at all turns by people, despite evidence from countries like Sweden that they work very well.

I am going to concentrate on one of the most illogical objections - that it will help rich people most:

Consider a private school which charges £4000 a year to educate a child.
Under this voucher system the state gives each child £3000 to spend on their education. That brings the amount to pay down to £1000 a year making it far more affordable enabling a greater selection of society to attend, to the benefit of all.

Now, you may say what about those who cannot afford the £1000?
Well, the vast majority of schools are concerned with education and want to give the best education they can to those who will benefit. To this end many private schools have scholarship funds to provide that education to those who cannot afford it but who would benefit.
Say our school has one scholarship fund which is worth £4000 a year. Without vouchers there is enough for one pupil a year to benefit. With vouchers there is enough for 4 pupils to benefit. Clearly a good thing.

A clever school might also realise that the rich who are paying less would pay a bit more for the education, so they could charge a total of £4500 a year leaving parents to pay £1500 a year. That means that they make a profit of £500 per year per pupil. So two pupils paying that rate will fund a scholarship for another pupil.

Other effects may also come into play. If wealthy parents are paying less, then they will be more inclined to give donations or support activities at the school meaning the school can raise even more money to be spent on education.

I think I have demonstrated that all benefit, with poorer people benefiting even more. True, the rich pay less and benefit from tax money, but that is money they’ve paid for education rather than money they’re taking from the poorest. If you pay taxes surely you should be allowed to claim the services you paid for?
The poorest clearly benefit the most. The marginal benefit for the rich is a little bit of money. Not much in terms of their income (the benefit increases as they get less rich of course)
The marginal benefit for those who couldn’t afford to send children to the school is huge. They now have access to an education which previously they did not. That is worth far more than a few thousand pounds saved by a few rich people.

Lastly a note on the popular argument that its immoral for the rich to benefit from tax money.
This is wrong. Morally and practically.
Morally it is wrong because people should be equal under the law. That means the rich are entitled to receive the same benefits from their taxes as the rest of us, including education.
Practically it is wrong because whilst you may succeed in harming the rich a little, as I have demonstrated you harm the poorest most. The benefit from withholding tax benefits from the rich are minuscule compared with the overall benefits.

This is an interesting issue. Are there ‘mickey-mouse’ degrees which are a waste of money?

This is a case of government failure stemming from the fact that we cannot just say whether a degree is worth the money spent on it. Worth it to whom? The student? The community? Some nebulous concept of society? The taxpayers who paid for the education? Business?

We simply cannot tell whether its worth it or not.

If we take the benefit to the individual as our measure of worth then we can make a stab at assessing it. The student pays a small amount for their university education (even with top-up fees this is not much of the costs) and their life whilst at university. A student of even the most ‘mickey mouse’ degree surely benefits from this arrangement in most cases. They have a great time at university, living the student lifestyle. They get a degree at the end of it, hopefully a 2.i which will enable them to fill out the forms on recruitment sites easing their job search. Its all good. They will probably get a slightly better paid job with which to pay back the relatively small loans they’ve taken out to cover their time at university.

There is no way we can easily measure benefit to society or community. To the state it means slightly higher tax takings, although whether they will total the amount spent or not is not easy to say.
Business may benefit, they may be able to hire someone who will increase their profits by more than the tax they paid towards university education.
Its not clear whether the tax payer benefits. On aggregate, the tax payer doesn’t I would say.

So its the student who nearly always benefits from the current setup, no matter what the degree is worth. The student gets funding no matter what. It makes it an easy choice. The degree may not confer much benefit, but given the low cost you might as well do it.

To fix this situation, the student should bear the full cost of their higher education. Only then will the choice be whether the degree is worth the money spent on it. This would encourage people to give money to their old universities to fund them and to set up scholarships for the poorest of the able students. Or perhaps the state could provide each university with money for scholarships.
This would not only aid the student in making their choice of university and course be one which is value for the money spent. It is only right that the primary beneficiary should pay for the benefits.
Of course, if business does benefit from particular degrees, they could sponsor the degree or the individual, like the military does already.

This will ensure that those degrees taken are worth it, it will optimise the money spent to minimize waste.

The poor will be able to get an education, new loans, scholarships and sponsorship will emerge. There are many possibilities. Some which entail debt, others which don’t and in which risk is attached to the funder.

It will however throw other problems into sharp relief. It will highlight how much money determines the quality of education a child gets. This should not deter from reform of higher education however, it should instead prompt the much needed reform of our education system to a system where each child gets the best available education for the individual child and not what the state determines.

One of the arguments I’ve come across against choice and a market in education is that some parents won’t make use of that choice.

This may be true, but there are several problems with this line of argument.

Firstly, if some don’t make use of their ability to choose the best school for their child then why should others suffer because of their choice not to choose? You end up harming far more children by denying them opportunity than those few whose parents do not have the opportunity.

Secondly - many examples of people, generally poor, who apparently don’t care about their child’s education. Perhaps they don’t, but perhaps they are so jaded by the lack of choice, the fact that their child is forced to go to a particular, usually failing, school because they cannot afford to move to an area with a good school or afford the tuition fees for a private school. Even if their child is gifted enough to get a scholarship, the odds are against them because of the belief that private school is only for the rich and poor people stand no chance of getting in - a myth similar to that surrounding university (especially Oxbridge), and one often promoted by teachers.
If we give people the chance to choose a better education for their child, then I think a lot of parents may surprise us. There is not much point caring about your child’s education if they are forced to go to a failing school, with teachers who don’t have the time to teach because of behaviour problems. There’s nothing you can do about it, the decision is taken out of your hands.

Thirdly - it is claimed that these parents will just send their children to the most convenient school and that will create sink schools.
Aside from the fact that most parents who are claimed to fall in this category of not caring are already forced to send their children to a sink school, if funding is tied to the child then will such schools be able to get the funding to survive? They will be forced to up their game to attract the children of those parents who do care, or be forced to close, at which point those children will have to go to a better school.

Finally this invokes a debate about the role of the state in the raising of children. Parents and guardians are entrusted with the care of their children. This argument against educational choice removes some of that responsibility from parents and hands it to the state. This is an incredibly illiberal move. True, the state and society have a duty to intervene if a parent is abusing their position of power, or neglecting their responsibility, but this removes responsibility from all parents, causing a disconnect between parents and their children.
The state is also incredibly bad at being a parent. It is an immense disadvantage to be brought up by the state. The state is not a suitable apparatus for bringing up children. When the state interferes with the choice of parents (and children) in where and how they are educated it is bound to have negative consequences for most children.

To claim that parents need the state to force them to look after their children in the best way is authoritarian and reminiscent of both collectivist thought of the socialists and far right as well as much conservative thought.

Parents may not always make the best decisions, but they are best placed to make decisions. The fact that some parents will make bad decisions is not justification for removing all choice. The effects of poor choices can be mitigated, especially by children who can now see a way forward and teachers who have the opportunity and incentive to help children as there is opportunity now.

One of the things the left is always threatening to do is to take away the charitable status of private schools. This apparently has to do with the ‘unfairness’ that such schools exist and we aren’t a wonderful egalitarian society, or some such nonsense.

I heard the ‘coming up’ section of the Today program and they said they’d be discussing that (followed by a biased comment about them making lots of money - I think we see where the presenter was coming from there…).

Personally I think its a fairly simple situation. If the school is run for profit by its owners then it is a business. Charitable status should not be given to a business.

Many private schools are not set up on this basis however. I attended a private school which was set up as part of a bequest and is managed by the Worshipful Company of Drapers. It is run on a charitable basis, profits are kept by the school for improvements, scholarships and bursaries.
The school, like many others, wishes to educate those most suited to its education, not simply those who can pay. It is not a business, it is a charity.

I know of at least one private school which doesn’t charge fees, it has managed its money sufficiently well over the years that it can run off the interest and investments made from the original bequest and donations.

To remove the charitable status of such schools would be a crime, it would affect those who benefit most from the education, those who cannot afford to pay the fees but get scholarships and bursaries.
Just as the removal of the assisted place scheme has hurt the poorest, this will similarly hurt the poorest, all in the name of equality.