SCHOOL’S OUT

Coulson’s thesis is simple: An analysis of history demonstrates that education provided by open markets is consistently better than education funded and operated by government. This thesis holds as far back as the ancient Greeks. The open markets of Athenian education gave us Plato and Socrates, Sophocles and Aristophanes. The Spartans’ governmental monopoly on education has left us, as Coulson remarks, with a nickname for football teams.

You can see the same pattern occur over and over again: in classical times, the middle ages, and the early modern era; in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The fact that this outcome appears in so many different cultures in so many different eras is an exceedingly strong indication that the deficiencies of government-sponsored education cannot be overcome.

Coulson’s analysis of contemporary education, especially charter schools and private scholarship programs for students from kindergarten to twelfth grade, is particularly insightful. Market Education is the first book to show why privately funded scholarships for these students in the United States today will result in better education than government-funded vouchers. He presents an imaginative but plausible scenario of how they might replace government funding as the dominant system for financing elementary and secondary education. But he is at his best in demolishing the arguments for the public school monopoly. Anyone who thinks that public schools foster harmony among the American people should read Market Education. The reader who isn’t convinced is probably immune to evidence and logic on the issue.

The story of how Market Education came to be written is as astonishing as the book itself. Coulson is a graduate of McGill University, where he majored in mathematics. After working for Microsoft, he retired at the ripe old age of twenty-six, having earned enough to live comfortably and spend the next four years working on Market Education.

That’s not to say that the book is perfect (even though the author does thank me in his introduction, when all I did was recommend it for publication). The weaknesses of Market Education result from Coulson’s effort to squeeze too much into one book. Fortunately, this doesn’t affect the main argument; in fact, the problems relate to matters that could simply have been deleted or shortened. The book, for instance, sets forth an extensive argument that public schools are failing — when this issue, which preoccupies a great deal of current discussions, is substantively irrelevant to the desirability of a market system of education. Henry Ford’s Model-T was not a failure. On the contrary, it was a huge success, but it was the product of an industry in which improvement is essential to survival. Our schools are not such an industry, however, and the arguments over whether it is a “failure” do not matter as much as the attention given to them suggests.

Of course, such discussions have an important political dimension: Citizens who believe that our public schools are failing are more receptive to proposals for a different system. But there is a downside even to the political case for emphasizing it: Many Americans (especially older ones) remember their public schools with affection; labeling their schools “failures” can generate resistance as well as support for alternative systems of education.

Like most supporters of schools choice, Coulson devotes too much attention to issues that would be settled by the system he advocates. His lengthy discussion of the best way to teach reading illustrates this point. Instead of showing why phonics is superior to the whole-language approach, Coulson would have been better served by emphasizing how such issues would be resolved under markets instead of bureaucrats. In his discussion of teacher training, he is critical of the fact that teacher take courses in the history and philosophy of education — an odd objection from a man who has just spent four years researching and writing on these topics.

One advantage of the careful work Coulson has done is that his Market Education cannot be characterized as the product of a zealous right-wing extremist. His case for a competitive education industry does not rest upon any particular denominational or political or cultural position. Instead, Coulson argues that a market system is the most effective way to achieve better educational outcomes at a lower cost. Such a system would greatly diminish the pervasive conflicts that result from efforts to impose majoritarian educational policies on widely diverse groups in our society.

A useful adjunct to Market Education is the new volume Vouchers for School Choice, a collection of thirty brief articles on school choice — ten devoted to the implications of vouchers for the Jewish community — edited by Marshall J. Breger and David M. Gordis. At present, there is overwhelming support for vouchers from the orthodox community and strong opposition from reform and conservative Jewry. As reform and conservative Jews become increasingly concerned over the loss of Jewish identity, however, they are beginning to reconsider vouchers as a way to reverse or at least halt assimilation. In the past, reform and conservative Jews were primarily interested in protecting Jewish pupils in public schools from the imposition of Christian practices such as school prayer, Bible reading, and nativity scenes that isolated or embarrassed Jewish students. Today, the desirability of maintaining Jewish identity is becoming a more persuasive consideration.

The articles in the book are uneven, but a few raise issues that are just beginning to affect the controversies over school choice. Perhaps the most important is the idea that treating denominational schools equally with nondenominational schools cannot, or should not, be construed as an unconstitutional establishment of religion. Indeed, if the government were to provide vouchers to nondenominational schools, wouldn’t it be contrary to the First Amendment not to provide them to denominational schools as well? The implications of this argument are staggering. It turns the separation issue on its head by making the issue not whether it is permissible to provide government benefits to denominational schools, but whether it is permissible to exclude them from benefits.

Vouchers for School Choice is a helpful overview of the current education controversies in the American Jewish community. It does not, however, try to predict the near future of vouchers. On this issue, Andrew Coulson, who supports privately funded scholarships for children, may have hit the jackpot. On April 21, the Children’s Scholarship Fund, an effort to provide four-year scholarships to children from poor families, announced that it had received 1.23 million applications from low-income families for the first 40,000 awards.

What’s incredible about this is not the number of applications, but the fact that they’re only partial. Applying families are required to pay $ 1,000 a year over a four-year period (though they can substitute in-kind services if necessary). In other words, 1.23 million families who can ill afford to pay anything at all are willing to pay for a service that is available at no cost from the public schools. The numbers we’ll see once vouchers or tax credits or privately funded scholarships are made available to every family will prove, once and for all, that Americans are ready to embrace a market system of education.

 

ANDREW J. COULSON

 

Market Education

The Unknown History

 

Transaction, 471 pp., $ 25.95

 

MARSHALL J. BREGER and DAVID M. GORDIS, eds.

 

Vouchers for School Choice

Challenge or Opportunity?

An American Jewish Reappraisal

 

Wilstein Institute for Jewish Policy Studies,

 

201 pp., $ 14.95

Myron Lieberman is senior research scholar of the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.