Kevin Corcoran writes, Private sphere exit options in a capitalistic system have built-in systemic advantages over technocratic solutions, despite the fact that agents within both systems have the same cognitive limitations: He goes on to quote Jeffrey Friedman:
The issues raised in this blogpost are (a) access to exit, (b) bundling and unbundling of government programs, and (c) collective-action problems in exit from government public goods (e.g., roads).
Vouchers can address two of these issues; namely, access to exit, and collective-action problems.
Vouchers mimic already-existing "redistribution." They don't require new, additional redistribution.
Voucher-holders might achieve some substantial degree of collective action (to achieve exit from public goods) if entrepreneurs emerge to reduce transactions costs and to develop alternative (private?) supply of roads and the like.
Vouchers can improve exit without exitocracy and major new redistribution.
The third issue -- bundling -- seems the hard case.
According to the article some people in Houston, who believed that the 5 principles that the Harvard economist Dr. Roland Fryer espouses would result in better education, were able to do something about it. Dr. Fryer studied successful charter schools and came up with five tenets of better practice, and got to try them out in a failed Houston school district. Apparently the results were good, though I have problems understanding what 'Assessment scores increased by 0.15 to 0.18 standard deviations in a year' means -- because I don't know what or how students were 'assessed'. I also do not know how long people have been monitoring these students. Due to the Hawthorne Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect you often get better results in a pilot project than would happen if the new practice was more generally adopted. One thing I like about this study is that the students involved were not self or parent selected. The self-selected set problem is always troublesome when evaluating the success of charter schools. How much of the success is due to the methods? And how much is due to having the sort of parents that would move you do a charter school?
It has relevance to the 'voice' vs 'exit' discussion. According to the article, the problem Houston faced wasn't that the technocrats in the school board 'never absorb[ed] the correct information'. The problem was at a much lower level. From the substack article "19 out of 20 principals were replaced in the Houston experiment. It took over 300 interviews to find 19 principals to replace them. Of the teachers, 46% were replaced. The district spent more than $5 million buying out teacher contracts."
So, if replacing teachers who are still teaching using methods designed to take farm children and turn them into industrial factory line assembly workers is what it takes to improve education, then buying out the teachers who are unable to, or refuse to modernise may be a necessary part of the solution. It seems kinder and likely more effective than waiting for the schools to go out of business when enough people have exited. Indeed, one question is whether the schools will ever be allowed to fail? How did that section of Houston managed to declare failure? There are people today who are saying that various US initiatives to stop selecting students for higher education based on performance on tests is the education system throwing in the towel. If they were a private business they would have gone out of business a very long time ago.
If you had Dr. Fryer do a guest post here about how things are going, and how to measure that, I would be delighted to read it. I suspect the substack Journal of Free Black Thought would be interested as well ... you could do one of these new substack-collaboration things.
No, it does not require a redistribution of income. It only requires that people have line-item choices for some of the most expensive services. Only by forcing people to pay into services they neither want nor use do we end up locking people into the existing system.
The problem with bundling and unbundling exist in the private sector too. For example, I like Apple's privacy approach and iMessage app, while hating their walled garden approach. If I switch to Android I don't have to put up with the walled garden, but I lose Apple's iMessage and privacy. We're forced to make choices like that all the time.
The issues raised in this blogpost are (a) access to exit, (b) bundling and unbundling of government programs, and (c) collective-action problems in exit from government public goods (e.g., roads).
Vouchers can address two of these issues; namely, access to exit, and collective-action problems.
Vouchers mimic already-existing "redistribution." They don't require new, additional redistribution.
Voucher-holders might achieve some substantial degree of collective action (to achieve exit from public goods) if entrepreneurs emerge to reduce transactions costs and to develop alternative (private?) supply of roads and the like.
Vouchers can improve exit without exitocracy and major new redistribution.
The third issue -- bundling -- seems the hard case.
Last year I read this interesting bit of news on substack.
https://freeblackthought.substack.com/p/prepare-for-more-black-mathletes
According to the article some people in Houston, who believed that the 5 principles that the Harvard economist Dr. Roland Fryer espouses would result in better education, were able to do something about it. Dr. Fryer studied successful charter schools and came up with five tenets of better practice, and got to try them out in a failed Houston school district. Apparently the results were good, though I have problems understanding what 'Assessment scores increased by 0.15 to 0.18 standard deviations in a year' means -- because I don't know what or how students were 'assessed'. I also do not know how long people have been monitoring these students. Due to the Hawthorne Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect you often get better results in a pilot project than would happen if the new practice was more generally adopted. One thing I like about this study is that the students involved were not self or parent selected. The self-selected set problem is always troublesome when evaluating the success of charter schools. How much of the success is due to the methods? And how much is due to having the sort of parents that would move you do a charter school?
It has relevance to the 'voice' vs 'exit' discussion. According to the article, the problem Houston faced wasn't that the technocrats in the school board 'never absorb[ed] the correct information'. The problem was at a much lower level. From the substack article "19 out of 20 principals were replaced in the Houston experiment. It took over 300 interviews to find 19 principals to replace them. Of the teachers, 46% were replaced. The district spent more than $5 million buying out teacher contracts."
So, if replacing teachers who are still teaching using methods designed to take farm children and turn them into industrial factory line assembly workers is what it takes to improve education, then buying out the teachers who are unable to, or refuse to modernise may be a necessary part of the solution. It seems kinder and likely more effective than waiting for the schools to go out of business when enough people have exited. Indeed, one question is whether the schools will ever be allowed to fail? How did that section of Houston managed to declare failure? There are people today who are saying that various US initiatives to stop selecting students for higher education based on performance on tests is the education system throwing in the towel. If they were a private business they would have gone out of business a very long time ago.
If you had Dr. Fryer do a guest post here about how things are going, and how to measure that, I would be delighted to read it. I suspect the substack Journal of Free Black Thought would be interested as well ... you could do one of these new substack-collaboration things.
No, it does not require a redistribution of income. It only requires that people have line-item choices for some of the most expensive services. Only by forcing people to pay into services they neither want nor use do we end up locking people into the existing system.
The problem with bundling and unbundling exist in the private sector too. For example, I like Apple's privacy approach and iMessage app, while hating their walled garden approach. If I switch to Android I don't have to put up with the walled garden, but I lose Apple's iMessage and privacy. We're forced to make choices like that all the time.