There’s a strain of thought in the school choice movement that market forces alone won’t be enough to improve public education.
Harvard University economist Joshua Goodman recently explained how he came to this view.
Competition improves supermarkets, restaurants — why shouldn’t this model apply to schools? It seemed to me that anyone who denied this idea didn’t understand basic economics.
But the more I read, the more I realized that the empirical evidence for choice and market forces improving educational outcomes is thin at best. I found that disappointing and also puzzling, and I have spent some time thinking about why that theory doesn’t match current reality.
Here’s what I think the biggest problem in thinking of schools as a classical market. Econ 101 models assume consumers observe product quality. But schools are complicated goods, and quality, particularly a school’s long-run quality, is hard to judge for many parents. It takes a lot of time to figure out whether this school and these teachers are serving my child well. Unlike restaurants or supermarkets, where quality can be judged at the moment of the purchase, school quality reveals itself later.
In other words, sometimes, parents don’t know best, at least when it comes to judging school quality.
This week, at the Foundation for Excellence in Education’s annual gathering in Washington, Checker Finn of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute argued this point from experience.
“I’ve seen way too many charter schools full of kids, with happy parents, in which the student achievement results are in the tank,” he said.
There’s a problem, though. Some experts like Jay P. Greene argue regulators have at least as hard a time judging school quality as parents do. A charter school authorizer (or a state education agency that boots low-performing schools out of voucher programs) might wind up closing a school that’s actually serving students better than the available alternatives.
These advocates for market forces and regulatory humility often point to the “wild west” of Arizona, where test scores seem to be rising rapidly — and faster still in the state’s lightly regulated charter school sector. As Matthew Ladner has pointed out, parents have ruthlessly punished academically low-performing charter schools, forcing them to close by sending their children elsewhere.
State and national test scores are flawed measurement tools that might be obscured by other factors, like a state’s changing demographics. But a more rigorous empirical study seems to bolster Ladner’s take. By and large, it finds, Arizona charter schools that shut down due to a lack of parent demand were among the worst academic performers.
The study also adds an important caveat: After controlling for student characteristics, Arizona’s charters may actually perform slightly worse than similar traditional public schools.
Ladner himself added a different caveat, though, which may hold the key to resolving this schism between school choice “accountability hawks” and free-market advocates. Arizona is a unique animal. Thanks in part to its vast array of charters, it has one of the most robust public-school choice systems in the country. It also has one of the most diverse sets of private school choice programs.
As a result, Ladner said: “You don’t actually have to put up with an ineffective school. You can leave.”
Market forces may be stronger in the wild west, where parents have ample choices. But that approach might flounder in, say, Ohio. A state like Massachusetts might find a more regulated approach works best. The right balance between markets and regulation may vary from one state to the next.
