To be sure, political culture is” paternalistic” at times, perhaps more so in inherently in education politics. “Paternalism” has been defined as “the interference of a state or an individual with another person, against their will, and defended or motivated by a claim that the person interfered with will be better off or protected from harm.” (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paternalism/ ) Why the paters get tagged with the label is beyond me: in education, it seems like “maternalism” would fit general patterns of gender bias in favor of interference more accurately But, nevertheless, it is political, first and foremost, and policy is only part of the picture, politicians also want to maximize office holding and votes as well. And if history teaches us anything, it is that the patron – client relationship is at the heart of policy trade-offs.
The reality of these trade-offs can best be illustrated by following the money. For the federal Department of Education a good place to get a start in understanding the resource flows and implications is to simply scroll through Table 26-1 “Federal Budget by Agency and Account” at https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/26-1_fy2025.pdf The Department of Education begins on page 111 and ends on page 121. Scrolling through the accounts gives one a good sense of how numerous are the clients and an idea of the enormous sums being controlled. Looking at page 121, we see the total proposed Department of Education budget authority is $278,488 million (yes, the op of the page says figures in millions) for FY2025. Does anyone seriously think that either the politicians gaining votes, campaign contributions, and patronage opportunities in return for dispensing that largesse or the recipients are simply going to roll over and give up such an arrangement because it would be what is best for the children, schools and the country? Contracts and grants are the mother’s milk of clientelism and it takes a Javier Milei to start the weaning process.
But lets say we want to play the good incremental conservative ground game. Wouldn’t the reasonable, intelligent, insider well-versed in the ways of Washington, work through the system to achieve better programmatic outcomes?
Well once upon a time, somebody got the brilliant idea that parental involvement in education might be constructive. So we find in Title 20 of the United States Code (If you want to have nightmares just go to https://uscode.house.gov/browse/prelim@title20&edition=prelim and click around the menagerie of horrors authorized therein) a subpart E “Family Engagement in Education Programs” in Subchapter IV “21st Century Schools” in Chapter 70 “Strengthening and Improvement of Elementary and Secondary Schools,” section 7274 of which, surprise, surprise, authorizes grants for “Statewide Family Engagement Centers” (https://uscode.house.gov/browse/prelim@title20/chapter70/subchapter4&edition=prelim )
And that these “Statewide Family Engagement Centers show up in the Department of Education budget justification document (https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/budget25/summary/25summary.pdf ) with a request for $20 million to fund the program, which “provides funding to statewide organizations to establish statewide centers that promote parent and family engagement in education and provide comprehensive training and technical assistance to SEAs, LEAs, schools, and organizations that support partnerships between families and schools. The Request would support continuation awards for approximately 20 centers that, by engaging parents and fostering partnerships between families and schools, particularly schools with concentrations of disadvantaged students, can help lay the groundwork for susained school improvement.”
It’s just $20 million, we are told. There are about 1,000 such programs, worth a total of
$500 billion or more per year and that number will only continue to grow. No policy reform, no matter how popular, will ever see the light of day unless it benefits a patron-client relationship. If you ask me, all of the policy talk and notions of paternalism are just red herrings that only distract from the foundational problems that must be addressed if we are not going to go the way of Argentina and others. It takes a Milei to raise a child right.
Let me offer two conjectures about impacts of political and fiscal 'path dependence' on any local or Federal UBI in the USA.
1) Local path dependence:
Half of school funding comes from local property taxes. The bulk of local government expenditures are for schools. Local property owners won't support a UBI because propertyless families will predictably spend much of their UBI on things they value more than school. A UBI, willy nilly, would reduce aggregate school expenditures (perhaps a negative externality for homeowners with children). In terms of political psychology, given path dependence, local property owners are willing to subsidize school for children of propertyless families, but not other family expenditures.
2) Federal path dependence:
In all likelihood, notwithstanding the intentions of theorists, a Universal Basic Income would be an addendum to — not a substitute for — extant government subsidies (welfare for food and shelter, healthcare; education; retirement). A UBI would backfire by increasing big government without really tackling the education establishment.
I don't have strong intuitions about path dependence at the State level.
“In all likelihood, notwithstanding the intentions of theorists, a Universal Basic Income would be an addendum to — not a substitute for — extant government subsidies”
BINGO!
People won’t be able to stomach kids going without food, clothing, shelter, healthcare or school when the parents “accidentally” blow the UBI windfall on meth and gambling. Thus, UBI will always be a supplement to already existing welfare programs. Case closed.
One could still have vouchers good for use in either government owned or privately owned schools or home schooling.
That we do not is in large part path dependence. The kernel of public schooling was a small community with not enough heterogeneity of demand for different kind os schooling to make voucher necessary even if the "technology" of voucher giving had been available. Not switching wholesale now is as much or more status quo bias as elites wanting to indoctrinate other people's children.
“Interestingly, the First Amendment does not apply to states.”
It may depend on what you mean here, but I’m not sure that’s right. My con law is pretty rusty, but I thought the First Amendment had been incorporated against the states.
Correct, it is incorporated through the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment and regulates state action. Interestingly, before incorporation, the 1st Amendment would appear to limit actions by Congress and not the Executive Branch (a literal interpretation of the language).
I know very little about this, but I think that is the role of the 14th amendment. States were not held to the constitution but the amendment was designed to apply it to states.
"The libertarian approach... would be to trust parents to do what is best for their children, and it would trust the market to provide educational (and day care) services that parents deem to be cost-effective." However, some parents are downright neglectful. Children get only one lap around the track to learn the three R's and other knowledge before they must be self-supporting adults. How are we to deal with neglected children before they lose their chance for a good education? Enforcing laws against child neglect is a slow and uncertain process. Requiring minors to attend school seems economically and time efficient in many ways, if paternalistic. Is there a better way to ensure innocent children have a fighting chance when parents neglect their responsibilities?
There definitely would be drawbacks to allowing parents to send their children to schools that do not prepare them to integrate into the larger community with a good, comprehensive, and up to date understanding of how our universe operates. Unfortunately, it is also true that everyone who has authority over the day to day government school curriculum neither recognizes nor respects the difference between fact and opinion sufficiently to avoid the temptation to misuse the public schools for indoctrinating the children into their preferred ideology which they tend to incorrectly claim is necessary to being ethical. In other words, whereas secularism ideally eschews ideology, in practice the staff of secular public schools sometimes are, and therefore behave like, narrow/intolerant ideologues under a social justice banner. I do not think it was always this way, but it has increasingly been going this way and this is a problem.
Mat G - you have rightly pointed out a growing problem. Perhaps the middle ground is requiring children to attend a reasonably good school (defined how? the devil is in the details) and to have active parents responsible for monitoring the quality. Their monitoring would be a public good in the formal sense of the phrase (i.e., part of the "commons"), and thus many parents could free-ride on the active parents' efforts, but that's OK. We've seen parents becoming more active of late, especially after the Pandemic.
A related and interesting case has been NY State's attempts to impose English and math curriculums at specific Yeshivahs on grounds that those schools are failing to prepare students for participating in civil life. I have mixed feelings about these particular cases, but it does illustrate the dilemma.
I think the minimal/incomplete education that students receive at some insular religious schools is a tragedy. I would prefer that government intervene to help those kids. I favor a case by case, examine the context, evaluation, over a one size fits all approach, which can be difficult to do. In practice locally large groups that vote as a bloc can undermine the effectiveness local oversight, so like it or not, there needs to be oversight by, and accountability to, non-local and less self-conflicted authorities.
As said, the devil is in the details. That's one of the good things about a federal nation. We have 50 states, several territories, and numerous local governments experimenting with solutions. On top of all that, charter schools, IMHO and in the main, have been helpfully disruptive if often underfunded and stifled.
I think government’s role is to try to ensure that all youth are given a complete secular education. The details of how that is financed and carried out are important primarily in relation to whether or not they are consistent with achieving that primary goal. I reject the notion that by doing this government violates freedom of exercise merely because the content of a secular education sometimes conflicts with religious concepts, provided that the secular content at issue is properly grounded as best fit the available empirical evidence or is demonstrated to have general practical utility for society.
"Post-lockdown has also turbocharged America’s already strong homeschooling tradition. The option for parents to opt out of state schooling provision and do-it-themselves exists in most Western countries (in principle at least) but the take-up has tended to be minimal. America is the big exception with currently 4 million homeschooled children...." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/teach-your-children-well
"If the resources that the government provides low-income families for educational purposes are in the form of vouchers, then the government is likely to claim a right to regulate the choices that low-income families make."
Surely the same is true for a universal basic income. I think that's why there will be no UBI... the desire for control is too great.
this is an interesting topic. the libertarian perspective of no "government scbools" is shared by many conservatives. however, the idea of government providing a basic income to some citizens but not all citizens fails the "fairness" test. it also fails the "Liberty" test, because within one (1) generation, that basic income will become the yoke that government uses to control the recipients. that puts us back to where we are now -- government buying votes with welfare and other types of handouts to a certain group of citizens/non-citizens in return for the expected support at the polls.
For the most part, I'm sympathetic to libertarian arguments, but consider whether you want state and federal tax dollars funding madrassas in Hamtramck or Minneapolis.
" It would be to trust parents to do what is best for their children, and it would trust the market to provide educational (and day care) services that parents deem to be cost-effective."
I don't think this is nit-picking but ... I wish people would stop using the term "the market". There is no unitary market that deals with economic transactions. There is no entity that kind of has volition and power and does good or bad things depending on your politics. Righties talk about "the magic of the market" and lefties talk about "the tyranny of the market". In fact, reading leftie stuff, "the market" seems like some sort of diabolical inhuman thing.
It would be more accurate, and less likely to lead to semi-mystical social thought, if people instead referred to "markets". Entrepreneurs often *create* markets. People often desire markets. They don't petition "the market" or regulate "the market". So I would change the quoted sentence to:
It would be to trust parents to do what is best for their children, and it would trust MARKETS to provide educational (and day care) services that parents deem to be cost-effective.
Probably a bridge too far to suggest people say:
It would be to trust parents to do what is best for their children, and it would trust PEOPLE ACTING THROUGH MARKETS to provide educational (and day care) services that parents deem to be cost-effective."
"There is no "the market", there are only markets, which are useful things people engage in quite *naturally* absent coercion to do something else ..."
The shorthand tends to signal that people are moving away from thought toward ideology.
You certainly could argue that the reality which "the market" tries to describe is plural. In which case, markets with an "s" seems like a better term to me.
It’s not necessary to abolish government schools and indeed that may, for practical reasons, be a bridge too far. Instead we could do what Sweden did, years ago, and go to a universal voucher system. The government would still collect school taxes but instead of handing these over to the unionized teacher cartels they would go to parents in the form of education vouchers. The government schools would still exist, and could still compete with the various private schools which would arise, but now they would have to compete on an equal financial basis. The current system requires parents that wish to opt out of public education to pay double: Once via school taxes and a second time as tuition. The fact that many parents do, in fact, pay double tells us just how bad the public school system is.
When Sweden went to this system the public schools quickly became quite competitive and are thriving today, as a major part of a mixed public/private system. Isn’t competition wonderful?
Who gets to pay the transition tax to get to a fully voucher system?
Hint: it’s the wealthy parents in the neighborhoods with good public schools. And, it’s these districts that are already spending millions in robin hood taxes for the poor and rural districts. Why should they feel obliged to pay double taxation to educate other people’s children? The freedom to choose a school at the expense of others isn’t freedom - it’s faux freedom.
Lastly, what assurances are there that once the transition is complete that taxes will decrease by a commensurate amount?
I wonder. Older relatives and friends sometimes speak of their public school educations fondly. It seems like a generation or so made a difference. My MIL born in 1950, references the school band trips to distant towns (she attended a school coached by a legend; yes, in Texas, high school football coaches pass into legend). She waxes effusively about the production of "Our Town" on which she worked on the lights and stage crew, as if it were the Mercury Theatre. A girlfriend of mine, born a few years later, attended high school about 7 miles from the border. Her memories include biology teacher-led trips to Mexico to tag monarch butterflies in their mountain homes, which had only just been discovered! &etc.
People like this faithfully attend their high school reunions, I've noticed.
Something may have changed besides funding, to make school more miserable or dull. I wonder if kids spend more hours in school now, than they used to. Or if there was less effort to make it compulsory.
I'm simply struck by how much less freedom there seems to be in school today then when I was a kid. Our private school doesn't do anything particularly special. It gives kids lots of time outside for free play and nature study. No screens. Gets the learning done quickly an efficiently. No homework. Curriculum is basically what I grew up with.
They also let parents get involved and communicate well with them. Public school ranges between indifferent to hostile to parents.
I do think the attitude toward field trips is an indication that the decisionmakers are typically on the wrong foot. That and the naivete about technology (school administrators love to "do by shopping", I've noticed, but that's a big and other topic in itself ...).
What I remember most about school (70s/80s) is the field trips. Isn't that true for many people? Such days were much more plentiful then, and sometimes even overnight.
I saw that field trips were steadily diminishing when I last had reason to pay attention to public school. This was imputed to the importance of measuring "instruction hours" in connection with the benchmarks of the mandated testing, which did not exist when I went to school - but that may have been an excuse.
The testing is fine, I suppose, if you want to collect statistics about how well kids take up their educations; but neither the testing nor the teaching-to-the-test probably puts much of anything in anyone's mind. Not enough so to displace actual experiences.
Field trips are way down here. Having been a public school teacher, I think the reason is a boring one: field trips are a hassle. You have to arrange transportation and chaperones. On the trip itself, you have to make sure the kids behave and nothing bad happens. Woe to you if something bad happens. And someone is bound to ask, "What are they actually learning?" Easier to just stay on campus. (And, of course, in high school and middle school, where students take several different subjects every day, a field trip causes them to miss those classes. So, for example, a natural history field trip causes the math, english, history and language classes to miss a day.)
A private school has to be an environment people want to choose.
A public school gets customers by default. It seeks to avoid lawsuits and inconvenience to administrators. Field trips are always a risk compared to sitting still in a desk.
I have never seen a compelling reason to explore private schools in the area and that wouldn’t change if vouchers were on the table. It’s the proverbial “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality among us folk economists.
As an aside: I’m surprised that no one has yet mentioned administrative bloat in the public schools. To me, that’s the second most compelling reason for vouchers after academic freedom.
The vast majority of private schools would be free or close to free under a voucher system. The average K-12 private school tuition is $12,000, while the average per pupil public school spending is $16/$17k or so.
We have a cheap private school near us and our kid is a lot happier there (and I'm not even talking the covid/indoctrination issues, its just a more fun place to be).
My daughter has fun in her public school and loves it. And, the school board here has the cojones to take on the Biden administration and protect our daughters.
****
SOUTHLAKE, Texas — Southlake’s Carroll ISD filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging the Biden administration’s recent changes to Title IX that extended protections to LGBTQ+ students, court records show.
The lawsuit comes after the Carroll ISD board of trustees voted 7-0 after an executive session during a board meeting May 15 to “proceed with litigation against all necessary parties related to proposed changes to Title 9 and their effect on Carroll ISD,” according to a social media post by the district.
I find parents tell themselves a story about how public school is fine because they don't want to pay for private and don't want to admit its the money behind their choice. When you've experienced both the difference is easier to see.
Our school district is all in on progressivism, as all districts will be in time. Though that isn't the main driver of why my kid likes private school more.
That depends on how quickly the transition happens, whether the community is growing, and how many transition, right?
As for tax increases, my community is growing and recently increased taxes to pay for new schools. Do you think that tax increase will ever go away?
Whether it's a big issue, little one or none, I get your point though depending on how many people you label as wealthy, the larger group toward the middle may pay as much as the "wealthy."
Regardless, your point prompts questions about whether significantly more parents will chose public alternatives and whether private schools will add capacity to meet demand.
To get from option A to option B, there is a transition cost. In other words, adding options aren’t costless. In most states that option is worth $8-10k per student/year in the form of an educational savings stipend. Meanwhile the public schools are still getting the same state funding. Not that complicated to understand unless you think infrastructure, overhead and transaction costs are trivial somehow.
Agree. But, they aren’t going to defund the rural districts or the too big to fail ones in the urban areas. Those “legacy institutions” aren’t going anywhere.
That will be the hurdle, yes. Drafting the legislation to avoid the loopholes where schools can get funding above what their student levels allow. I would be less worried about rural districts, and more worried about abysmally failing urban districts myself, although they may find it workable to ax bad urban schools within an urban district.
It will definitely require some careful legislative crafting, you wascally wabbit.
"How do you deal with the likelihood that the system would evolve into federal regulation of those schools?"
Arnold, you didn't answer the question.
This is a common question that has to be answered to get people to support vouchers.
My answer is as follows:
1) The government can regulate private education whether or not it provides any funding.
In my state for instance government gave many instructions to private schools as to how they had to handle COVID. Shutdowns, masks, etc.
We were lucky to have a private school that told them to shove off despite threats of fines, etc.
It's possible that if a private entity were intransigent on a government dictate, that the government could pull funding from that private school.
But then you are right back where you started! Nothing is lost.
Only if the parents are willing to pressure the school to conform in order to keep their voucher is the school in any way affected by the voucher. But if the parents are willing to conform then the imposition is not so great.
2) An awful lot of government impositions die on the vine. Our private school was threatened with all sorts of things during COVID. But if you stood your ground they didn't do much and even fines all got rescinded after the moral panic was over (or nobody forced you to pay).
Also, if the government interferes with one school, you can always dissolve and start another.
3) Some degree of control is inevitable. Sweden has school choice and Muslim's used it to set up fundamentalist schools where they didn't teach anything. You're probably going to have some standards to prevent that sort of thing.
But are you trying to set up a fundamentalist Muslim school? I'm betting you just want a fairly normal school setting reasonable people wouldn't object to.
Bingo on number one. An amusing aside related to that is in my state all school aged children have to take the same standardized test every year regardless public, private, or homeschool. If your kid fails it twice in a row and attend private school or homeschool, the court will forcr you to send your kid to public school. If your kid attends public school, well no big deal, they can just keep failing every year until they graduate.
One might think if the concern was the children, not the union, the court would order the kid to attend a private school at the public school district's expense after two failed public school years but of course not.
Aaaagh....should I laugh or cry!? Sounds familiar though: "If your kid attends public school, well, no big deal, they can just keep failing every year until they graduate."
As an example: I’m on a small, Christian school board in NC. NC has passed what they’re calling Opportunity Scholarships. It’s a big pot and is dolled out in 4 tiers to private schools on behalf of the students. Tiers are income based and if you won’t share income info you go in the last tier. This makes it available to all income levels until the allocated funds are all used up. Money goes directly to the private school. Currently, there isn’t anything extra being asked of the school other than what we’re already required to do as a private school in NC.
We agreed to take the money if the parents got the funds approved but we were very intentional and explicit about telling the families that if the state infringes upon us in a way we can’t agree that we will stop taking the funds. But like you said, the state already regulates us and we accept that. (Or possibly not, as in covid.) It will always be up to the people to hold the state in check on regulations, we are just used to the regulations that don’t bother us.
I disagree that the establishment clause and free exercise clauses, which focus on the government relationship to religions, has any relevance to deciding whether or not government should sponsor public education. Government is secular and government has an interest is secular education. The notion that religious education has secular substance or merit is dubious. Government has no responsibility to support religious education or practice. Religions can teach anything, they cannot be told they must confine themselves to what is acceptable within secular constraints. Therefore, it is inevitable that secular education or practice sometimes conflicts with religious education or practice. Such sometimes unavoidable conflict cannot be resolved by government and is not a first amendment issue. People will disagree regarding how much control over education should be given to government versus individuals. The religion clauses of the first amendment do not say anything about this.
What is the present purpose of government schools? Its historical purposes were to prepare children to be active and informed members of the electorate (Whig Party educational reform), prepare them for the political economy (progressive era educational reform), and lubricate social-economic mobility post-New Deal educational reform). See David Labaree, How to Exceed in School Without Really Learning. Now?
Every educator will tell you, "Young people with degrees make more money than people without." And parents believe that without school certification, their children are doomed.
Seems like marginal analysis rules here. Would government leave voucher accepting private schools alone? Of course not. But... they will be more independent than government run schools.
1 I pretty much agree, including with going the UBI route, but something about the way Kling stated calling it UBI and not voucher still makes me laugh.
2 In Illinois, home schooling is allowed. There is some monitoring that the kid is learning and can pass basic tests. Homeschooling tends to attract very motivated parents so the effort required to monitor is rather small. If parents got UBI money regardless of whether they spent it on education, I can't believe there wouldn't be a significantly greater motivation to provide little or no education and just pocket most or all of the money. This seems an advantage of vouchers.
To be sure, political culture is” paternalistic” at times, perhaps more so in inherently in education politics. “Paternalism” has been defined as “the interference of a state or an individual with another person, against their will, and defended or motivated by a claim that the person interfered with will be better off or protected from harm.” (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paternalism/ ) Why the paters get tagged with the label is beyond me: in education, it seems like “maternalism” would fit general patterns of gender bias in favor of interference more accurately But, nevertheless, it is political, first and foremost, and policy is only part of the picture, politicians also want to maximize office holding and votes as well. And if history teaches us anything, it is that the patron – client relationship is at the heart of policy trade-offs.
The reality of these trade-offs can best be illustrated by following the money. For the federal Department of Education a good place to get a start in understanding the resource flows and implications is to simply scroll through Table 26-1 “Federal Budget by Agency and Account” at https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/26-1_fy2025.pdf The Department of Education begins on page 111 and ends on page 121. Scrolling through the accounts gives one a good sense of how numerous are the clients and an idea of the enormous sums being controlled. Looking at page 121, we see the total proposed Department of Education budget authority is $278,488 million (yes, the op of the page says figures in millions) for FY2025. Does anyone seriously think that either the politicians gaining votes, campaign contributions, and patronage opportunities in return for dispensing that largesse or the recipients are simply going to roll over and give up such an arrangement because it would be what is best for the children, schools and the country? Contracts and grants are the mother’s milk of clientelism and it takes a Javier Milei to start the weaning process.
But lets say we want to play the good incremental conservative ground game. Wouldn’t the reasonable, intelligent, insider well-versed in the ways of Washington, work through the system to achieve better programmatic outcomes?
Well once upon a time, somebody got the brilliant idea that parental involvement in education might be constructive. So we find in Title 20 of the United States Code (If you want to have nightmares just go to https://uscode.house.gov/browse/prelim@title20&edition=prelim and click around the menagerie of horrors authorized therein) a subpart E “Family Engagement in Education Programs” in Subchapter IV “21st Century Schools” in Chapter 70 “Strengthening and Improvement of Elementary and Secondary Schools,” section 7274 of which, surprise, surprise, authorizes grants for “Statewide Family Engagement Centers” (https://uscode.house.gov/browse/prelim@title20/chapter70/subchapter4&edition=prelim )
And that these “Statewide Family Engagement Centers show up in the Department of Education budget justification document (https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/budget25/summary/25summary.pdf ) with a request for $20 million to fund the program, which “provides funding to statewide organizations to establish statewide centers that promote parent and family engagement in education and provide comprehensive training and technical assistance to SEAs, LEAs, schools, and organizations that support partnerships between families and schools. The Request would support continuation awards for approximately 20 centers that, by engaging parents and fostering partnerships between families and schools, particularly schools with concentrations of disadvantaged students, can help lay the groundwork for susained school improvement.”
It’s just $20 million, we are told. There are about 1,000 such programs, worth a total of
$500 billion or more per year and that number will only continue to grow. No policy reform, no matter how popular, will ever see the light of day unless it benefits a patron-client relationship. If you ask me, all of the policy talk and notions of paternalism are just red herrings that only distract from the foundational problems that must be addressed if we are not going to go the way of Argentina and others. It takes a Milei to raise a child right.
Let me offer two conjectures about impacts of political and fiscal 'path dependence' on any local or Federal UBI in the USA.
1) Local path dependence:
Half of school funding comes from local property taxes. The bulk of local government expenditures are for schools. Local property owners won't support a UBI because propertyless families will predictably spend much of their UBI on things they value more than school. A UBI, willy nilly, would reduce aggregate school expenditures (perhaps a negative externality for homeowners with children). In terms of political psychology, given path dependence, local property owners are willing to subsidize school for children of propertyless families, but not other family expenditures.
2) Federal path dependence:
In all likelihood, notwithstanding the intentions of theorists, a Universal Basic Income would be an addendum to — not a substitute for — extant government subsidies (welfare for food and shelter, healthcare; education; retirement). A UBI would backfire by increasing big government without really tackling the education establishment.
I don't have strong intuitions about path dependence at the State level.
“In all likelihood, notwithstanding the intentions of theorists, a Universal Basic Income would be an addendum to — not a substitute for — extant government subsidies”
BINGO!
People won’t be able to stomach kids going without food, clothing, shelter, healthcare or school when the parents “accidentally” blow the UBI windfall on meth and gambling. Thus, UBI will always be a supplement to already existing welfare programs. Case closed.
One could still have vouchers good for use in either government owned or privately owned schools or home schooling.
That we do not is in large part path dependence. The kernel of public schooling was a small community with not enough heterogeneity of demand for different kind os schooling to make voucher necessary even if the "technology" of voucher giving had been available. Not switching wholesale now is as much or more status quo bias as elites wanting to indoctrinate other people's children.
“Interestingly, the First Amendment does not apply to states.”
It may depend on what you mean here, but I’m not sure that’s right. My con law is pretty rusty, but I thought the First Amendment had been incorporated against the states.
It is definitely incorporated against the states: Everson v Board of Education, 330 US 1 (1947). Good description of the case here: https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/everson-v-board-of-education/
Also regardless I believe all fifty states have the same first amendment language in their state constitution.
Correct, it is incorporated through the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment and regulates state action. Interestingly, before incorporation, the 1st Amendment would appear to limit actions by Congress and not the Executive Branch (a literal interpretation of the language).
I know very little about this, but I think that is the role of the 14th amendment. States were not held to the constitution but the amendment was designed to apply it to states.
"The libertarian approach... would be to trust parents to do what is best for their children, and it would trust the market to provide educational (and day care) services that parents deem to be cost-effective." However, some parents are downright neglectful. Children get only one lap around the track to learn the three R's and other knowledge before they must be self-supporting adults. How are we to deal with neglected children before they lose their chance for a good education? Enforcing laws against child neglect is a slow and uncertain process. Requiring minors to attend school seems economically and time efficient in many ways, if paternalistic. Is there a better way to ensure innocent children have a fighting chance when parents neglect their responsibilities?
There definitely would be drawbacks to allowing parents to send their children to schools that do not prepare them to integrate into the larger community with a good, comprehensive, and up to date understanding of how our universe operates. Unfortunately, it is also true that everyone who has authority over the day to day government school curriculum neither recognizes nor respects the difference between fact and opinion sufficiently to avoid the temptation to misuse the public schools for indoctrinating the children into their preferred ideology which they tend to incorrectly claim is necessary to being ethical. In other words, whereas secularism ideally eschews ideology, in practice the staff of secular public schools sometimes are, and therefore behave like, narrow/intolerant ideologues under a social justice banner. I do not think it was always this way, but it has increasingly been going this way and this is a problem.
Mat G - you have rightly pointed out a growing problem. Perhaps the middle ground is requiring children to attend a reasonably good school (defined how? the devil is in the details) and to have active parents responsible for monitoring the quality. Their monitoring would be a public good in the formal sense of the phrase (i.e., part of the "commons"), and thus many parents could free-ride on the active parents' efforts, but that's OK. We've seen parents becoming more active of late, especially after the Pandemic.
A related and interesting case has been NY State's attempts to impose English and math curriculums at specific Yeshivahs on grounds that those schools are failing to prepare students for participating in civil life. I have mixed feelings about these particular cases, but it does illustrate the dilemma.
I think the minimal/incomplete education that students receive at some insular religious schools is a tragedy. I would prefer that government intervene to help those kids. I favor a case by case, examine the context, evaluation, over a one size fits all approach, which can be difficult to do. In practice locally large groups that vote as a bloc can undermine the effectiveness local oversight, so like it or not, there needs to be oversight by, and accountability to, non-local and less self-conflicted authorities.
As said, the devil is in the details. That's one of the good things about a federal nation. We have 50 states, several territories, and numerous local governments experimenting with solutions. On top of all that, charter schools, IMHO and in the main, have been helpfully disruptive if often underfunded and stifled.
I think government’s role is to try to ensure that all youth are given a complete secular education. The details of how that is financed and carried out are important primarily in relation to whether or not they are consistent with achieving that primary goal. I reject the notion that by doing this government violates freedom of exercise merely because the content of a secular education sometimes conflicts with religious concepts, provided that the secular content at issue is properly grounded as best fit the available empirical evidence or is demonstrated to have general practical utility for society.
And then there's the more homeschooling path?
"Post-lockdown has also turbocharged America’s already strong homeschooling tradition. The option for parents to opt out of state schooling provision and do-it-themselves exists in most Western countries (in principle at least) but the take-up has tended to be minimal. America is the big exception with currently 4 million homeschooled children...." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/teach-your-children-well
Indeed.
And, there is decided SCOTUS case law to back up ‘homeschooling.’ See Yoder v. Wisconsin, 1972.
"If the resources that the government provides low-income families for educational purposes are in the form of vouchers, then the government is likely to claim a right to regulate the choices that low-income families make."
Surely the same is true for a universal basic income. I think that's why there will be no UBI... the desire for control is too great.
this is an interesting topic. the libertarian perspective of no "government scbools" is shared by many conservatives. however, the idea of government providing a basic income to some citizens but not all citizens fails the "fairness" test. it also fails the "Liberty" test, because within one (1) generation, that basic income will become the yoke that government uses to control the recipients. that puts us back to where we are now -- government buying votes with welfare and other types of handouts to a certain group of citizens/non-citizens in return for the expected support at the polls.
For the most part, I'm sympathetic to libertarian arguments, but consider whether you want state and federal tax dollars funding madrassas in Hamtramck or Minneapolis.
" It would be to trust parents to do what is best for their children, and it would trust the market to provide educational (and day care) services that parents deem to be cost-effective."
I don't think this is nit-picking but ... I wish people would stop using the term "the market". There is no unitary market that deals with economic transactions. There is no entity that kind of has volition and power and does good or bad things depending on your politics. Righties talk about "the magic of the market" and lefties talk about "the tyranny of the market". In fact, reading leftie stuff, "the market" seems like some sort of diabolical inhuman thing.
It would be more accurate, and less likely to lead to semi-mystical social thought, if people instead referred to "markets". Entrepreneurs often *create* markets. People often desire markets. They don't petition "the market" or regulate "the market". So I would change the quoted sentence to:
It would be to trust parents to do what is best for their children, and it would trust MARKETS to provide educational (and day care) services that parents deem to be cost-effective.
Probably a bridge too far to suggest people say:
It would be to trust parents to do what is best for their children, and it would trust PEOPLE ACTING THROUGH MARKETS to provide educational (and day care) services that parents deem to be cost-effective."
We are on the same page about this:
luciaphile
Apr 1
"There is no "the market", there are only markets, which are useful things people engage in quite *naturally* absent coercion to do something else ..."
The shorthand tends to signal that people are moving away from thought toward ideology.
Proving you are an unusually perceptive person :)
Isn't that the way ;-).
One could argue "market" is plural. Either way, I don't think I see the difference.
You certainly could argue that the reality which "the market" tries to describe is plural. In which case, markets with an "s" seems like a better term to me.
It’s not necessary to abolish government schools and indeed that may, for practical reasons, be a bridge too far. Instead we could do what Sweden did, years ago, and go to a universal voucher system. The government would still collect school taxes but instead of handing these over to the unionized teacher cartels they would go to parents in the form of education vouchers. The government schools would still exist, and could still compete with the various private schools which would arise, but now they would have to compete on an equal financial basis. The current system requires parents that wish to opt out of public education to pay double: Once via school taxes and a second time as tuition. The fact that many parents do, in fact, pay double tells us just how bad the public school system is.
When Sweden went to this system the public schools quickly became quite competitive and are thriving today, as a major part of a mixed public/private system. Isn’t competition wonderful?
Who gets to pay the transition tax to get to a fully voucher system?
Hint: it’s the wealthy parents in the neighborhoods with good public schools. And, it’s these districts that are already spending millions in robin hood taxes for the poor and rural districts. Why should they feel obliged to pay double taxation to educate other people’s children? The freedom to choose a school at the expense of others isn’t freedom - it’s faux freedom.
Lastly, what assurances are there that once the transition is complete that taxes will decrease by a commensurate amount?
There are no "good" public schools.
There are schools in the suburbs where violence and disruption don't make learning and even basic physical safety a concern.
But they aren't "good". You wouldn't send your kids there if you had a voucher.
In the voucher world you will be able to send your kids to better schools then you do now, even if you have "good" public schools.
I wonder. Older relatives and friends sometimes speak of their public school educations fondly. It seems like a generation or so made a difference. My MIL born in 1950, references the school band trips to distant towns (she attended a school coached by a legend; yes, in Texas, high school football coaches pass into legend). She waxes effusively about the production of "Our Town" on which she worked on the lights and stage crew, as if it were the Mercury Theatre. A girlfriend of mine, born a few years later, attended high school about 7 miles from the border. Her memories include biology teacher-led trips to Mexico to tag monarch butterflies in their mountain homes, which had only just been discovered! &etc.
People like this faithfully attend their high school reunions, I've noticed.
Something may have changed besides funding, to make school more miserable or dull. I wonder if kids spend more hours in school now, than they used to. Or if there was less effort to make it compulsory.
I'm simply struck by how much less freedom there seems to be in school today then when I was a kid. Our private school doesn't do anything particularly special. It gives kids lots of time outside for free play and nature study. No screens. Gets the learning done quickly an efficiently. No homework. Curriculum is basically what I grew up with.
They also let parents get involved and communicate well with them. Public school ranges between indifferent to hostile to parents.
I do think the attitude toward field trips is an indication that the decisionmakers are typically on the wrong foot. That and the naivete about technology (school administrators love to "do by shopping", I've noticed, but that's a big and other topic in itself ...).
What I remember most about school (70s/80s) is the field trips. Isn't that true for many people? Such days were much more plentiful then, and sometimes even overnight.
I saw that field trips were steadily diminishing when I last had reason to pay attention to public school. This was imputed to the importance of measuring "instruction hours" in connection with the benchmarks of the mandated testing, which did not exist when I went to school - but that may have been an excuse.
The testing is fine, I suppose, if you want to collect statistics about how well kids take up their educations; but neither the testing nor the teaching-to-the-test probably puts much of anything in anyone's mind. Not enough so to displace actual experiences.
Field trips are way down here. Having been a public school teacher, I think the reason is a boring one: field trips are a hassle. You have to arrange transportation and chaperones. On the trip itself, you have to make sure the kids behave and nothing bad happens. Woe to you if something bad happens. And someone is bound to ask, "What are they actually learning?" Easier to just stay on campus. (And, of course, in high school and middle school, where students take several different subjects every day, a field trip causes them to miss those classes. So, for example, a natural history field trip causes the math, english, history and language classes to miss a day.)
A private school has to be an environment people want to choose.
A public school gets customers by default. It seeks to avoid lawsuits and inconvenience to administrators. Field trips are always a risk compared to sitting still in a desk.
I have never seen a compelling reason to explore private schools in the area and that wouldn’t change if vouchers were on the table. It’s the proverbial “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality among us folk economists.
As an aside: I’m surprised that no one has yet mentioned administrative bloat in the public schools. To me, that’s the second most compelling reason for vouchers after academic freedom.
The vast majority of private schools would be free or close to free under a voucher system. The average K-12 private school tuition is $12,000, while the average per pupil public school spending is $16/$17k or so.
We have a cheap private school near us and our kid is a lot happier there (and I'm not even talking the covid/indoctrination issues, its just a more fun place to be).
My daughter has fun in her public school and loves it. And, the school board here has the cojones to take on the Biden administration and protect our daughters.
****
SOUTHLAKE, Texas — Southlake’s Carroll ISD filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging the Biden administration’s recent changes to Title IX that extended protections to LGBTQ+ students, court records show.
The lawsuit comes after the Carroll ISD board of trustees voted 7-0 after an executive session during a board meeting May 15 to “proceed with litigation against all necessary parties related to proposed changes to Title 9 and their effect on Carroll ISD,” according to a social media post by the district.
https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/education/southlake-carroll-isd-files-lawsuit-challenging-title-ix-changes-meant-protect-lgbtq-students/287-0db82ce6-b6b6-4e46-ba3c-768623c00c5e
Your daughter might like private school more.
I find parents tell themselves a story about how public school is fine because they don't want to pay for private and don't want to admit its the money behind their choice. When you've experienced both the difference is easier to see.
Our school district is all in on progressivism, as all districts will be in time. Though that isn't the main driver of why my kid likes private school more.
That depends on how quickly the transition happens, whether the community is growing, and how many transition, right?
As for tax increases, my community is growing and recently increased taxes to pay for new schools. Do you think that tax increase will ever go away?
Whether it's a big issue, little one or none, I get your point though depending on how many people you label as wealthy, the larger group toward the middle may pay as much as the "wealthy."
Regardless, your point prompts questions about whether significantly more parents will chose public alternatives and whether private schools will add capacity to meet demand.
Option A: Pay to send others' kids to public. Option B: Pay to send others' kids to private schools. Why is one double the other?
The Catholic schools in my area used to make up the difference by having the kids work part-time as chocolate salesmen.
To get from option A to option B, there is a transition cost. In other words, adding options aren’t costless. In most states that option is worth $8-10k per student/year in the form of an educational savings stipend. Meanwhile the public schools are still getting the same state funding. Not that complicated to understand unless you think infrastructure, overhead and transaction costs are trivial somehow.
I think the standard solution there is to fund public schools on a per student basis as though they were also receiving vouchers, no?
Wassup Doc.
Agree. But, they aren’t going to defund the rural districts or the too big to fail ones in the urban areas. Those “legacy institutions” aren’t going anywhere.
That will be the hurdle, yes. Drafting the legislation to avoid the loopholes where schools can get funding above what their student levels allow. I would be less worried about rural districts, and more worried about abysmally failing urban districts myself, although they may find it workable to ax bad urban schools within an urban district.
It will definitely require some careful legislative crafting, you wascally wabbit.
"How do you deal with the likelihood that the system would evolve into federal regulation of those schools?"
Arnold, you didn't answer the question.
This is a common question that has to be answered to get people to support vouchers.
My answer is as follows:
1) The government can regulate private education whether or not it provides any funding.
In my state for instance government gave many instructions to private schools as to how they had to handle COVID. Shutdowns, masks, etc.
We were lucky to have a private school that told them to shove off despite threats of fines, etc.
It's possible that if a private entity were intransigent on a government dictate, that the government could pull funding from that private school.
But then you are right back where you started! Nothing is lost.
Only if the parents are willing to pressure the school to conform in order to keep their voucher is the school in any way affected by the voucher. But if the parents are willing to conform then the imposition is not so great.
2) An awful lot of government impositions die on the vine. Our private school was threatened with all sorts of things during COVID. But if you stood your ground they didn't do much and even fines all got rescinded after the moral panic was over (or nobody forced you to pay).
Also, if the government interferes with one school, you can always dissolve and start another.
3) Some degree of control is inevitable. Sweden has school choice and Muslim's used it to set up fundamentalist schools where they didn't teach anything. You're probably going to have some standards to prevent that sort of thing.
But are you trying to set up a fundamentalist Muslim school? I'm betting you just want a fairly normal school setting reasonable people wouldn't object to.
Bingo on number one. An amusing aside related to that is in my state all school aged children have to take the same standardized test every year regardless public, private, or homeschool. If your kid fails it twice in a row and attend private school or homeschool, the court will forcr you to send your kid to public school. If your kid attends public school, well no big deal, they can just keep failing every year until they graduate.
One might think if the concern was the children, not the union, the court would order the kid to attend a private school at the public school district's expense after two failed public school years but of course not.
Aaaagh....should I laugh or cry!? Sounds familiar though: "If your kid attends public school, well, no big deal, they can just keep failing every year until they graduate."
Agree.
As an example: I’m on a small, Christian school board in NC. NC has passed what they’re calling Opportunity Scholarships. It’s a big pot and is dolled out in 4 tiers to private schools on behalf of the students. Tiers are income based and if you won’t share income info you go in the last tier. This makes it available to all income levels until the allocated funds are all used up. Money goes directly to the private school. Currently, there isn’t anything extra being asked of the school other than what we’re already required to do as a private school in NC.
We agreed to take the money if the parents got the funds approved but we were very intentional and explicit about telling the families that if the state infringes upon us in a way we can’t agree that we will stop taking the funds. But like you said, the state already regulates us and we accept that. (Or possibly not, as in covid.) It will always be up to the people to hold the state in check on regulations, we are just used to the regulations that don’t bother us.
I disagree that the establishment clause and free exercise clauses, which focus on the government relationship to religions, has any relevance to deciding whether or not government should sponsor public education. Government is secular and government has an interest is secular education. The notion that religious education has secular substance or merit is dubious. Government has no responsibility to support religious education or practice. Religions can teach anything, they cannot be told they must confine themselves to what is acceptable within secular constraints. Therefore, it is inevitable that secular education or practice sometimes conflicts with religious education or practice. Such sometimes unavoidable conflict cannot be resolved by government and is not a first amendment issue. People will disagree regarding how much control over education should be given to government versus individuals. The religion clauses of the first amendment do not say anything about this.
I actually don't understand why the federal government should be involved with primary and secondary school at all.
What is the present purpose of government schools? Its historical purposes were to prepare children to be active and informed members of the electorate (Whig Party educational reform), prepare them for the political economy (progressive era educational reform), and lubricate social-economic mobility post-New Deal educational reform). See David Labaree, How to Exceed in School Without Really Learning. Now?
Every educator will tell you, "Young people with degrees make more money than people without." And parents believe that without school certification, their children are doomed.
Seems like marginal analysis rules here. Would government leave voucher accepting private schools alone? Of course not. But... they will be more independent than government run schools.
1 I pretty much agree, including with going the UBI route, but something about the way Kling stated calling it UBI and not voucher still makes me laugh.
2 In Illinois, home schooling is allowed. There is some monitoring that the kid is learning and can pass basic tests. Homeschooling tends to attract very motivated parents so the effort required to monitor is rather small. If parents got UBI money regardless of whether they spent it on education, I can't believe there wouldn't be a significantly greater motivation to provide little or no education and just pocket most or all of the money. This seems an advantage of vouchers.