Free Our Markets

by Howard Baetjer Jr

  Providing schooling to poor people—and everyone else—at government-run schools is equally foolish. The government school bureaucracies are inefficient and expensive, and they offer schooling that is mostly mediocre to lousy. If the poor had “school stamps” to spend, schools would have to compete with one another on price, quality, variety of instruction offered, location, and you name it.

  How to Make the Change

  How might we make the change from our current system, in which some eighty-eight percent of American children go to education dispensaries owned and run by government, to a free market in schooling, in which every family chooses its entrepreneurial education providers?

  Freeing our schooling markets would be as simple on the government end as it would be wild and unpredictable on the entrepreneurial end. All a government would need to do—and state or district level governments could take the initiative—is to repeal the taxes that pay for schooling and to auction off government school property: buildings, land, books, desks, computers, chalk, maps—the works. The state or locality might announce that:

  1. effective immediately, the state or locality will begin to take bids on the school system’s land, buildings, and other property;

  2. effective at the end of the next complete school year, the land, the buildings, and other school property will be sold to the highest bidders; and

  3. effective at the end of the next complete school year, all the taxes that pay for schooling will be repealed.

  A full school year’s lead time would probably be necessary to allow the private sector to make plans, arrange financing, etc. At the end of that school year, on the effective date of the tax repeal, payment for all school property would be due from the high bidders, and that state or locality would be out of the schooling business. From then on it would be up to parents to make sure their children’s education is paid for.

  What gales of creative destruction would blow across that region’s educational landscape! What innovations we’d see in organization, curriculum, and teaching techniques! What new kinds of schools would emerge! What cost savings would be discovered!

  What would schooling—what would education—come to look like? We can’t possibly know until real entrepreneurs are set free to innovate, and parents are set free to reward some with profit and punish others with loss, but let’s speculate.

  Then What? Who Might Own and Operate Schools?

  Who might want to buy government school buildings and land? Who might want to run schools? Please consider the questions for a while before reading on.

  I foresee property management companies and real estate investment trusts buying many of the government schools’ land and buildings. I would expect them immediately to turn around and rent back most of the space to education providers of various kinds.

  In particular, I imagine groups of the really good teachers in today’s really bad government schools gathering in joyful relief and hope and excitement, thinking, “NOW, we’ll be able to teach the way we’ve always wanted to!” I imagine teachers joining together, laying plans to lease a wing of their current building, and organizing a school of their own, free of union rules, burnt-out colleagues, impertinent bureaucracy, endless testing, and the like. I imagine them eagerly contacting the parents of their current students, urging them to sign up to come back to the same building and even the same classrooms in the fall, to a much better, new school there.

  I have already mentioned that in and around my home town of Baltimore there are some two hundred small independent schools, many of them connected with local churches and synagogues. Once they and others like them were free from competition from tax-funded schools, they would have the incentive to expand. Money that interested parents once had to pay in taxes could go to pay private school tuitions. Many of these independent schools might expand right into the buildings that used to house the government schools they would replace.

  No longer needing the permission of a regional board of education to open a new school, many organizations now running charter schools, such as Green Dot, KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program), and Aspira, would likely set up new schools of their own brands. All they would need is the willingness of enough parents to give them a try.

  Parent groups might take the initiative in organizing schools, much as they now organize charter schools: hiring teachers and a principal they know and trust, leasing space (again, probably in a formerly government-school building), laying out a curriculum, and eagerly taking control of their children’s education.

  In a true free market for schooling, a wide variety of new schools might just happen. A young woman providing day care for small children, for instance, might discover the joy of teaching them, and do it well enough that the children’s parents ask her to keep the children for a kindergarten year. She does so and teaches the children to read and do basic arithmetic; other parents learn of her good results and ask her to teach their children, too, so she hires a colleague to help her, looks for some larger space, and a new elementary school is born.

  Similarly, groups of home-schooling parents, who even in the present day organize themselves into cooperatives, might actually evolve into schools, perhaps just focused on subjects that are learned best in groups, and meeting maybe only two or three times a week.

  Ethnic or immigrant groups might establish schools to smooth the adjustment of immigrants to their new homes, or to preserve their home country’s culture and language.

  Universities might set up schools, in part as a service to their communities, and in part as teaching labs to give university students the experience and satisfaction of teaching the subjects they are studying.

  Museums might set up schools designed to make intensive use of the museums’ educational resources.

  More schools for children with special needs would probably arise, and possibly companies dedicated to creating and running schools for special-needs children.

  Large education corporations, such as Sylvan Learning, might invest in running schools. To make the transition as smooth as possible, they might contract with selected teachers and principals in the year or so before privatization in order to be staffed when the schools go private.

  Large companies with a lot of employees might sponsor schools or even provide schools on site so that parents could be near their kids and not have to worry about leaving work to pick them up. Of course we wouldn’t expect companies making, say, fuel injectors or smoke alarms to set up their own schools—they don’t have the skills or expertise to do so. No, they would probably contract with schooling companies that specialize in setting up little schools on corporation grounds. Done well, it would be a valued fringe benefit, attracting employees with children.

  Other companies might set up and financially support trade schools that teach not only basic subjects and skills, but also the specialized skills they need in their industry.

  Entirely new ventures would likely arise, including companies running chains of for-profit schools. One such company, Kunskapsskolan, was started in Sweden after that country went to a universal voucher system. (All taxes raised for schooling in Sweden now go not to schools but to parents in the form of a voucher, what I have called school stamps. Parents in Sweden now choose their children’s schools; schools in Sweden now compete for students.) The company has been very successful, growing to thirty-four schools in Sweden and licensing its program to three schools in the United Kingdom and now one charter school in Manhattan. Its first school in India is scheduled to open next year.

  Maybe education companies would evolve that specialize in delivering particular subjects at many different schools. A school might contract out, say, its science or art instruction to an education company that specializes in science and art. Perhaps language immersion schools might arise in which all (or most) subjects are taught in the foreign language.

  If this kind of arrangement should prove efficient, children would in effect attend more than one school at the same site, learnin
g different subjects from different education companies. For example, a child might get her reading and writing from a traditional teacher in a traditional classroom, her music instruction from a special arts school located in her same building, and science instruction from an online academy with which her local school has a contract.

  What about the huge number of good government schools? The residents of the region might buy and own the school system, reconstituted as a non-profit corporation, much as those residents had “owned” it before in their role as taxpayers. We would expect them to continue on very much as at present, at least initially, with the same teachers, buildings, and administration. As long as those schools could attract funding through tuition and donations they could continue to operate.

  Indeed, to an extent that is impossible now while they are subject to the political process, really outstanding school systems might expand as private-sector, non-profit entities. But if too many parents preferred the new educational offerings that emerge from competition, like any other enterprise, these schools would have to adjust, improve, or go out of business. We would expect them to adjust pretty quickly in a lot of small ways and a few big ones as they discovered their relative strengths and weaknesses and sought out ways to teach children more effectively and at lower cost, responding to their new competition and the need to earn student enrollments.

  Again, it’s impossible to know what forms of school ownership and management would emerge and last (for a while, at least) in a free market. It would be fascinating to watch the evolution.

  Unleashing Innovation in Teaching and Learning

  What about curriculum and teaching techniques? An on-going tragedy of our current, government-owned, centrally planned schools is their of lack of innovation in teaching. Surely there must be much to discover about better teaching and learning, especially making use of the fantastic information technologies that have emerged in recent years.

  For example, we might expect some schooling company to arise that offers much more individualized education than the standard classroom approach where all the kids work on math at the same time, then they all work on science, then history, with every student in every class studying the same material in the same place at the same time. Different children learn differently; they have different strengths and weaknesses, different aptitudes and rates of development, different interests at different times in their lives. Couldn’t schooling be customized to each child’s own aptitudes and interests, allowing her to proceed at her own pace and to some degree in her own way, using the latest information and communications technologies?

  We can imagine a kind of school in which each child has personal goals and a learning plan, worked out in advance with the help of skilled instructors. Teachers at such a school might serve not just as instructors in a subject, but also as learning coaches with responsibility for overseeing the progress of particular students toward their individual goals. In weekly meetings with a personal teacher-coach, each student would be guided to make steady progress toward achieving her goals. She would proceed at her own pace, going on when she had mastered a subject but not before. She might lay out her weekly timetable in her individual logbook with her teacher-coach each week, after reviewing her accomplishments of the previous week.

  At such a school, with today’s information technology, a lot of the work that students can do individually might be kept on a web-based “learning portal” where “students [could] find most of the learning material…: the courses, the content, objectives and criteria for every step, assignments, texts, pictures, links and tests.” If a school were to use a web-based system such as this, the line between homework and schoolwork would be blurred or erased. A student would “have work to do, and [she could] get it done in school, at home or anywhere there is an internet connection.”

  Would such an individualized approach to schooling work well? Could it be provided cost-effectively? If so, would parents choose it for the children? Actually we don’t need to speculate because such an approach is working well in practice right now. The Swedish company Kunskapsskolan mentioned above has been developing this individualized approach since 2000. The quotations in the last few paragraphs are taken from their website.

  An intriguing characteristic of Kunskapsskolan’s approach is the way it combines personalized schooling for each student with standardized, best-practice lessons. Their website explains that their (trademarked) “Learning Portal” “contains all the best material, developed by all the best teachers” in their network. The Learning Portal, accessible on the web to all schools in the network—from Manhattan to India—“assures students, families, and society that what is learned is not solely a function of an individual teacher.” Making their best practices available throughout their network of schools also keeps costs down and increases the individual attention that teachers can give their students. As their website explains,

  [E]very minute saved for a teacher who doesn´t have to prepare a lesson that has already been developed by colleagues is a minute that could be spent on personal coaching instead of preparation. That is one of the reasons why it is possible for [Kunskapsskolan] schools to provide more personal coaching time with the same staff resources as a conventional school.

  Like for-profit businesses in other fields, Kunskapsskolan invests in on-going research and development aimed at continuously improving its product and lowering its costs. Their Learning Portal “is under continuous development and review as teachers contribute with new material and experiences.”

  Even the architecture of Kunskapsskolan schools is consciously aimed at facilitating learning: the layout is open and airy; there are spaces of different sizes for different purposes; glass walls provide both privacy and supervision; computer workstations here and there around the building give students many places to get their work done.

  Kunskapsskolan is compelling evidence of the kind of ingenuity that would be applied to schooling—no, let us say will be applied to schooling—as we increasingly free our markets in education. Impressive as it is, Kunskapsskolan is just one relatively small enterprise, started by one entrepreneur in only the first major country to let its parents decide where their children’s education money will be spent. (Sweden instituted vouchers for all in 1992; Kunskapsskolan opened its first school eight years later.) Imagine how much more ingenuity would pour into education, how many other innovations in curriculum and educational technology would be tried if a large country such as the U.S. were to free its schooling markets, so that every square inch of American schooling were open to entrepreneurial innovation. It would be magnificent.

  Consider one other curriculum innovation, also based on our remarkable advances in technology, this one based in the US. In 2009, Salman Khan, an MIT graduate with degrees in math and computer science and an MBA from Harvard, offered to help his niece with her math homework over the internet, using software with which he could talk to her and let her see on her computer the graphs and calculations he drew up on his own. When they were unable to find the time to work together simultaneously, he recorded instruction for her in a file that showed her his equations and graphs as he drew them, with his voice explaining what he was doing. It was not long before his niece told him she preferred the recorded lessons because she could replay portions at will when she didn’t fully understand the first time through.

  Khan had a flash of entrepreneurial insight. He could make such lessons available not just to his niece, but to anyone with an internet connection. Khan Academy was born.

  Khan Academy’s virtuosic use of information technology makes it possible for teachers to “flip” class work and homework. This means letting children watch “lectures” and other presentations of content at home instead of in class, and then, in class, apply and develop what they have learned, working problems and practicing where the teacher can help them. Students are set free to work at their own pace and receive more individualized attention from their teachers.

  If
this is the first you have heard of Khan Academy, look at its website; it is astonishing. Founded in 2009 as a web-based, non-profit enterprise, Khan Academy aims “[to change] education for the better by providing a free world-class education to anyone anywhere.”

  All of the site’s resources are available to anyone. It doesn’t matter if you are a student, teacher, home-schooler, principal, adult returning to the classroom after 20 years, or a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology. The Khan Academy’s materials and resources are available to you completely free of charge.

  They declare that their mission is “to help you learn what you want, when you want, at your own pace.” The rapidly growing company invites us to:

  Watch. Practice.

  Learn almost anything for free.

  Khan Academy makes this approach to learning possible by offering literally thousands of short (eight to fourteen minute) video lessons available on its website, initially in math, but now in science, finance and economics, and history also. The site’s software also generates practice questions and problems on which students can practice hundreds of skills. As of this writing, new content is going up constantly.

  With this technology, teachers don’t have the problem (painfully familiar in my own teaching) of deciding how to pitch a presentation to a class with a wide range of ability and current understanding. If it is not so fast as to leave behind the slowest learners, a presentation is likely to be so slow as to bore the fast learners; generally we have to pitch it at the middle, losing both the fast and slow learners to some degree. But with the kinds of individualized learning tools offered by Khan Academy and Kunskapsskolan’s Learning Portal, students can race ahead on what they find easy or take extra time to master a difficult concept, with the teacher free to answer questions and explain concepts for each student wherever she is in her learning.

  Suppose “flipping” class work and homework is a great idea, at least for certain subjects. We can’t know for sure that it is until it has been tried out in enough schools for enough years, but suppose it should turn out to be a terrific approach for most children in certain subjects. If so, how long will it take to spread in our current government-run school system? I fear that it would spread only to the most innovative teachers and schools, then tail off and stop spreading. It would never reach schools where it would be most valuable. Why? Because government schools don’t have market forces regulating them; they don’t have creative destruction driving them to innovate or close down. Would an average American school district support having, say, some of their fourth graders learning “fourth grade math” while others race ahead to math traditionally taught in fifth, sixth, or ninth grades? Or would that kind of disruption to established practice be blocked? I fear that no matter how good the idea turns out to be, most government schools will continue to keep class work as class work and homework as homework in the same old, familiar way.