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March 27, 2007

Coulson vs. Rotherham and Sara Mead

Andrew Coulson takes on both Andrew Rotherham and Sara Mead over some of their assertions regarding school choice, specifically that market incentives are not possible in education.  Essentially, he states that there's far more empirical evidence to indicate that market incentives exist in other nations and that they can provide educational services to children much more efficiently and effectively than the government can.  No response from Rotherham yet, but Sara Mead responds here. 

Sara's comments were made in the context of some blog posts from last week (which include some very articulate points I hope to address soon).  Rotherham's statements were from a Cato forum last week.  I haven't gotten a chance to listen to the whole thing (it's nearly an hour and a half long), but his opening remarks got my attention.  First off, he criticizes efforts to push authority back to the states with this punchline (30:30-31:00):

The fundamental problem here is we have built an education system that is designed to serve the adults that work in it and work around it, and not necessarily designed to serve the kids that it ostensibly serves.  It's very easy--and Rod Paige has a new book out that lays it all at the feet of the teachers' unions.  And I've been a critic of many of the things that they've done, but the fact is that it's not just them.  It's adults across the system.  So this notion that you just hand it off to the states and the bureaucrats at the state level are more enlightened than the bureaucrats at the federal level, it just doesn't work like that.   

Fair enough; bureaucratic ineptitude surely lives at every level of government.  But I'd suggest that the real solution here is to hand it off to those adults that are most likely to have incentive to act in the best interests of the children--namely, parents.  I'd say the solution isn't to push the problem up (i.e. to the feds), but to push it even lower (i.e. to the local level to give parents choice--and to his credit, Rotherham calls for greater choice in public schools).  This portion from his opening remarks is also worth a listen (32:15-32:48):

You know, there's some new data that's about to come out, I'll sort of scoop it from the Department of Education, you know, these transfer provisions--which I supported, I mean, I'm strongly in favor of the flexibility for accountability bargaining--the usage of them, and sort of the uptake by states and school districts, it's next to nothing.  I mean, I think this data is really going to surprise some people.  So the notion that they're out there just clamoring to get this flexibility, they've been given a lot and no one's really using it.  I think that speaks to some other--again, sort of other problems, cultural problems, institutional problems in American education less than some of the specific, the nature of some of these programs.

On one hand, Andrew is entirely correct; see our administrative action in Los Angeles and Compton regarding lack of enforcement of NCLB transfer options, which has been roundly ignored by district authorities and the California Department of Education.  But this also undercuts his apparent defense of federal involvement in education, as Secretary Spellings has been all talk and no action on any actual enforcement of NCLB transfers.  It seems to me that arguing against greater state power due to equal amounts of bureaucratic sloth on the state level is hardly a solid case in favor of federal authority. 

UPDATE: Andrew Coulson fires back at Sara Mead: "...if you actually look at all the relevant evidence, and make an effort to understand it, the kind of superficial objections that are offered by the anti-market crowd fall apart."  And she responds in kind: "Coulson knows a lot about choice in Denmark, Sweden, etc. because he's spent a lot of time trying to find examples that will support his ideological support for vouchers, not because he's seeking a comprehensive understanding of the world's experience with educational choice from some neutral scholarly position."

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