S.O.S. (Save Our Schools); Milton Friedman letter to the editor in favor of vouchers
educational visionaries can see, through the mist, the coastlines of these new schools. They see schools in which students are much more engaged in their "job" of learning; schools where teachers are paid like other professionals; schools that are hybrids between our current brick-and-mortar model and home-schooling techniques; schools where the assets of our magical digital age are fully unleashed, not to replace teachers, but rather to work in seamless combination with them. These designers know we can move our schools -- and our educational results -- to another level, just as we moved from the candle to the light bulb, from the prop plane to the jet.For this to happen quickly and well, however, our national political leadership must fund a whole new level of educational innovation. Great new schools do not just happen. As with every business innovation, they must be thoughtfully developed and designed -- and that takes real resources that are simply not available to local school systems.
S.O.S. (Save Our Schools)
November 4, 2005; Page A14, WSJ
What if Ford announced tomorrow that it was eliminating all research and development in order to add $7.4 billion to its annual bottom line? Readers of these pages would instantly recognize the absurdity of such an action because only through R&D can a company maintain its competitiveness and value. That an organization with more than twice the annual revenues of Ford has virtually no R&D budget will surely be surprising. But R&D was not stopped. Rather R&D was never seriously begun.
The entity with virtually no R&D? American public education. The revenue for K-12 schooling in the U.S. is around $400 billion per year. Our spending on K-12 education in just two school days equals the entire revenue of an entry-level Fortune 500 company. Yet despite spending so much to operate our schools, our investment in advancing their design and updating their systems is negligible. Why?
It was not intentional. It largely just happened -- an artifact of the historical development of public schools. As cities and towns sprang up, school systems were built to serve them, which resulted in one of the most fragmented sectors imaginable. The U.S. has around 15,000 school systems, with only six schools in the average district. This immense fragmentation means that virtually all of our school systems lack the scale to conduct any meaningful R&D. Ask any school superintendent about the district's R&D budget. He or she will laugh -- or appear puzzled.
If school systems were businesses, only three would have scale sufficient to be included in the Fortune 500 -- and those three would be a long way from the top of the list. Even the few large-scale districts find that pressing operational issues prevent their conducting significant research and development.
This seems like a perfect example of where the federal government could and should step in to fill a breach. Certainly it has the required scale. Certainly such involvement seems appropriate, if the prerequisite for federal action is the inability of local or state entities to act. Federal engagement in innovation in other categories critical to our national well-being provides ample precedent. Consider the $27 billion of R&D money pumped into the National Institutes of Health every year to help bring our citizens one of the finest health-care systems on the globe. How about the $9 billion that went into just one Department of Defense project: the design and development of the Joint Strike Fighter?
So is our federal government contributing to the future of our children by investing in school design on a similar scale? I am sorry to report that it is not. Within the Department of Education is a small entity called the Institute of Education Science that is charged with conducting educational research activities. Unfortunately, the part of its annual appropriation devoted to education research is $260 million: 1% of annual federal spending on health-care research. If the federal government were to spend on education research an amount pro rata to its investment in health-care research, the IES would be receiving 30 times its current funding -- and we would have much better schools to show for it.
So where are our national policy makers? Where are the Bell Labs, Xerox Research Parks, Ford Test Tracks, Strategic Defense Initiatives and NASAs of education? Why is America so slow to arrive at the inevitable conclusion that schools are a national security priority -- and that federal funding of R&D investment in them would serve as, shall we say, Homeland Offense?
Perhaps it's the longstanding view that our schools should be locally governed. But one can adhere to the concept of local control of schools, as I do, and still support national investment in their improvement. Our inaction is something beyond the local-control bias. We are suffering from a decades-long national failure of imagination as to what our schools could become. After 15 years of up-close involvement with public education, I have heard the same refrain all too often: "We know what to do to improve schools. Our problems are just a failure of execution." I don't buy that. I believe that our current school "design" is suffering from educational "metal fatigue," and that we must intentionally seek -- and invest in -- a fundamentally new gestalt.
So what might schools of the future be like? Although our vision may be obscured by our attendance at "old design" schools for most of our formative years, educational visionaries can see, through the mist, the coastlines of these new schools. They see schools in which students are much more engaged in their "job" of learning; schools where teachers are paid like other professionals; schools that are hybrids between our current brick-and-mortar model and home-schooling techniques; schools where the assets of our magical digital age are fully unleashed, not to replace teachers, but rather to work in seamless combination with them. These designers know we can move our schools -- and our educational results -- to another level, just as we moved from the candle to the light bulb, from the prop plane to the jet.
For this to happen quickly and well, however, our national political leadership must fund a whole new level of educational innovation. Great new schools do not just happen. As with every business innovation, they must be thoughtfully developed and designed -- and that takes real resources that are simply not available to local school systems.
Mr. Whittle, author of "Crash Course -- Imagining A Better Future for Public Education" (Riverhead, 2005), is founder and CEO of Edison Schools, the largest private partner of public schools.
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Save Our Schools From Government Monopoly
Federally financed R&D, as recommended by Chris Whittle in his Nov. 4 editorial-page commentary "S.O.S. (Save Our Schools)," may have some merits, but it is not the key to improving the quality of our elementary and secondary schools. As long as elementary and secondary education remains predominantly a government monopoly controlled by the teachers' unions and the educational administrators, no amount of R&D will do much good. That is trying to make water run uphill.
The key to real and lasting improvement is competition, breaking the government monopoly by enabling parents to choose the school they believe is best for their child, whether it is government, parochial, secular non-profit or for-profit. Free-market competition would work its miracles in this area as it has in so many others.
The way to achieve effective competition is to change how government money is distributed. Instead of, as now, subsidizing schools (i.e., producers), subsidize students (i.e., consumers). Instead of pupils being assigned to schools (or parents paying twice for schooling, once in taxes, once in private school tuition), give every parent a voucher, acceptable for full tuition at a government school, and worth a substantial sum at a private school (say, one-half of the government's cost per student), and let parents choose the school they believe best for their child, paying for it with the voucher at a government school, and with the voucher plus resources of their own, if needed, at a private school. Let private schools operate as they do now, with minimum regulation and free entry, whether parochial, nonprofit secular, or for-profit.
The result would be a free-market educational industry that would produce improvements far faster than any amount of federal R&D.
Milton Friedman
Hoover Institution
Stanford, Calif.
(Mr. Friedman is president of the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation, whose mission is to promote parental choice.)
posted by Whitney Tilson at 3:58 PM
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