In this election year, politicians blame one another for the failed state of the Baltimore City Public School System.
They ? and school-system bureaucrats ? squabble over money and control but refuse to make meaningful changes, as always. The private sector, however, can act to improve the public schools. I have a modest, but serious, proposal for private donors.
To spur structural changes in the city school system they should withdraw every penny of support they give to it. They should devote it instead to helping low-income parents send their children to some of the 200 or so inexpensive private and parochial schools in and around Baltimore. In short, they should fund the public schools? competition.
Money is the public school system?s problem, but not in the way the system claims. The problem is that schools receive funding whether or not they teach well. Inflation-adjusted spending in public schools nationwide has doubled in the past 30 years, with zero improvement. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the Baltimore City Public School System received $10,264 per student in 2003-04 ? the fifth highest of all Maryland counties.
Increasing funding regardless of results guarantees poor performance, because it weakens the incentive to perform. Worse, the school system uses poor performance to justify more funding: When the public protests poor public school results, teachers? unions and school-system bureaucrats cry, “How do you expect us to teach well with so little money?” Concerned individuals, businesses, civic groups, religious groups and foundations in the private sector react with myriad well-intended efforts to help. They fund books, computers, reading rooms and buildings; they fund training programs for teachers, superintendents and school boards; and they fund enrichment programs in reading, math, science and the arts.
Annual private contributions to the BCPSS in 2005, according to preliminary research I have done with a graduate student, are at least $2.5 million; the actual number is undoubtedly higher. And that does not count in-kind gifts and thousands of hours contributed by organizations such as the Greater Baltimore Committee and the Maryland Business Round Table for Education.
While this charity no doubt benefits individuals in the short term, it deepens the underlying systemic problem by rewarding poor performance.
Baltimore City public schools don?t need more money to improve; they need an incentive to improve.
Compelling evidence shows that private-sector competition motivates public school improvement. Harvard Professor Caroline Hoxby studied the Milwaukee public school system. She found that, “a school exposed to substantial competition raised its productivity 24 percent in the three years following the advent of voucher competition (24 percent is the average across five subject area tests).” And the stronger the competition, the greater was the improvement.
If private sector donors in Baltimore would redirect their giving to help parents remove their children from failing public schools, they would give the bureaucracy a potent incentive to make the drastic changes needed.
Full disclosure: I chair the board of Children?s Scholarship Fund Baltimore, which provides the kind of tuition assistance to low-income Baltimore families recommended here. CSF Baltimore matches gifts one-for-one; our average scholarship is about $1,700; and parents on average pay in tuition an equal amount again from their own pockets. That means the over $2.5 million of private-sector funds trying to mitigate the public schools? failure would provide tuition support for almost 1,500 children. If we could match the whole amount ? and I think we could ? it would support almost 3,000 children.
Leave aside the direct benefits of giving nearly 3,000 more children a meaningful education and a route out of poverty, putting low-income parents in charge of their children?s education, and sending $10 million in new tuition to hard-working, low-budget neighborhood schools. The indirect benefit would be a crucial gift to Baltimore?s public schools-an incentive to improve.
Howard Baetjer Jr. is a lecturer in the Economics Department at Towson University and the chairman of the board of Children?s Scholarship Fund Baltimore. He can be reached at [email protected].
