Today, there are three great blots on the American Dream. Unsurprisingly, in all three areas, the state, at various levels, calls most of the shots, either through straight-up racketeering or by rigging the rules in a way that makes it nearly impossible for people to escape. Americans, ever inventive, keep constructing elaborate workarounds to circumvent the tired regulations that support these three vast empires of concentrated political power.
But it’s time to stop sneaking out windows and creeping through back doors. Forget “winning the future” — if America has any hope of winning the present, it’s time to confront head-on our profound problems with education, health care and retirement.
The specific paths to improving each area are different, but the problems stem from a single dynamic: A tightly controlled, politically operated system created to address the issues of the past is at odds with current and future needs and demographics.
We are personalizing and tailoring everything else in our lives to our different needs. Yet, despite their centrality to our lives, education, health care and retirement offer us considerably less choice than we have at the 7-Eleven soda fountain.
Let’s focus on K-12 education, which is hugely expensive and thoroughly mediocre. Unlike in higher education, there is virtually no consumer choice at the K-12 level.
If you want to go to college, law school or graduate school, there are more than 4,000 institutions of higher learning to sample. If you want to switch from one grammar school, middle school or high school to another, even within the same district, unless you can afford private school, good luck.
The basic measurement of student performance is the National Assessment of Educational Progress. And the long-term trends are terrifyingly flat. In math, “There was no significant change in the scores of 17-year-olds in comparison to either 2004 or 1973.” In reading, the average score in 1971 was 285; in 2008, the average score was 286.
To get your head around that, think back to 1970. What else in your life hasn’t gotten better since then, only more expensive? Since the 1970-1971 school year, per-pupil spending in real, inflation-adjusted terms, has more than doubled, from about $4,500 to more than $10,000.
The number of students per teacher in public schools has declined from about 22.3 in the 1970s to around 15.5. There is simply no question that we are spending significantly more to achieve the same results.
Yet, the system is staying on a course set decades, or even more than a century, ago. No other industry still adheres to a calendar based on 19th-century agricultural cycles — even agriculture has given up that schedule.
The system is the problem; dumping more money onto a broken assembly line isn’t going to produce more or better widgets.
So what can we do? We can start with backpack funding, or weighted-student formula, where funding follows students to the public schools of their parents’ choice.
The formula pushes budget and curricular decisions out of central district offices and into schools, which flourish or falter based on their ability to attract and retain students.
Long-struggling school districts in San Francisco and Oakland adopted versions of the formula and saw sharp increases in parental satisfaction and test scores.
Other potential reforms include homeschooling, online learning and a thousand flowers yet to bloom. All are worth trying to the extent that they place power in the hands of students and parents.
Clearly, K-12 education is a $600 billion-plus monopoly that is failing our kids and impervious to its customers’ needs. It is time for some choice and competition.
Nick Gillespie is editor in chief of Reason.com. Matt Welch is editor in chief of Reason magazine. They are co-authors of the new book “The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America,” from which this column is excerpted.
