A most unkind thing to do is to take someone’s arguments seriously and then ponder what could be done to solve the problem being described. The Black Lives Matter movement says the United States is a structurally racist and divided society and that we ought to do something to remedy this situation. OK. Let’s do that.
Take the wealth gap, for example. It’s entirely true that black people have lower average household wealth than do white people. Accidents of birth for both of us and John Rawls’s veil of ignorance insist that we do something about this. Great. Let’s abolish rental housing subsidies. If this generation lives in subsidized rental housing, the next won’t inherit housing equity. For all but the top 10% of our society, housing equity is by far the largest portion of familial wealth. This actually explains a large part of the wealth gap. Yes, there were redlining and horrendous mortgage contracts forced upon black would-be homeowners. But it is also true that we’ve been subsidizing rentals and keeping black people from gaining housing equity for the past 60 years or so. Stop doing that, and in a generation’s time, the situation will be improved.
I’ve already pointed out that abolishing police unions would correct much of the problem with police brutality. Disbanding police departments also solves that problem, albeit with some consequences. In Camden, New Jersey, the local police department was disbanded, nullifying the union contract, and the county police department took over. The results were excellent. No, they didn’t replace the cops with social workers but with a nonunion police department. The police actually got going and did some policing, lowering crime.
The defining feature of the American dream, though, is not that people inherit wealth but that they can make good themselves no matter how they started. This requires an education system capable of equipping them with the tools to do so, something in short supply in the inner cities. Baltimore’s school system is so bad that even Sen. Bernie Sanders has been known to complain about it, but it’s not a shortage of money causing the problem. Among the top 100 school systems by size back in 2011, it was the third-best-funded in the nation. It actually got 50% more funding (after we account for the difference in the costs of things and wages, etc.) than the world’s widely agreed-to-be-best school system in the world, in Finland.
It isn’t the money that’s short here. It’s the system that’s spending the cash that’s dysfunctional. It’s thus the system, not the budget, that needs to be changed. One alternative might be the Swedish system (the rest of the country is so admired by Sanders, so why not?) whereby any two qualified teachers can set up a school and get paid by the amount of students who turn up to be taught. Yes, this is the charter school system or close enough, and it works there. Heck, it works here, too, as most academic literature shows.
Those opposed to school choice often say that regular public schools improve at about the same rate as those charter schools. So, don’t have the independent ones; all can be raised, which is to miss what is happening. It is the very competition itself that raises the outcomes, as is true in all those other areas of life. After all, how much worse would McDonald’s be in the absence of Burger King? It’s that they fight for our choice that improves them. So, too, with school systems.
What is it that such independence gives those schools? It’s the independence from the management structure that currently exists. We’ll be killing centralized management, the politics, the union shops, and the stranglehold that all have on creating what we should be desiring, an education system that does some educating.
Defunding a police system in order to make room for a wholesale replacement has been proven to work. Doing it again to the inner city (at least, there is no reason why this should not be universal), school systems would do so again. That this means getting rid of the teachers unions is of course a joy, but it’s not just that. It’s rather the point of the exercise.
Want black lives to matter? Kill the current education system. Kill it stone dead. Then rebuild it anew and without any of the people who currently misrun it.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at the Continental Telegraph.
