Expected by Whom?

A new report by the Georgetown Public Policy Institute finds that DC public schools did not respond to rising competition from charter schools “as expected”?


Expected by whom?


No one who has studied the behavior of monopolies, or simply stood in line at the DMV, would expect the public school bureaucracy to react with vigor and dispatch to the loss of its customers. It gets paid anyway.


The Census Bureau recently reported (.xls) that DC public schools spent $1.079 billion for 59,616 students in 2005–2006. As I reported earlier this month in the Washington Post (and in greater detail in this blog), the District is spending $1.216 billion for 49,422 students during the current 2007–2008 school year. The District lost one fifth of its students but its budget grew by 13 percent.


Where is the incentive for it to improve?


And, even if it had a strong systemic incentive to improve, how on earth could it do so? Because of the system’s design, it must hire teachers who have pedagogically worthless degrees in education; the curriculum is centrally planned district‐​wide, denying teachers any real professional autonomy; students are rigidly grouped by their age instead of by what they know and can do, making it much harder to teach them, etc. Even if this system had all the incentives in the world, it likely could only muster modest improvements.


Want a system that is truly responsive, efficient, diverse and constantly seeking to better serve families? Look at what sorts of school systems – and more broadly, what sorts of economic systems — already behave that way: free markets. It wouldn’t be hard to give all families access to a free educational marketplace.