Market Education

The Unknown History

Andrew Coulson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138527669
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351506885
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Discontent with public education has been on the rise in recent years, as parents complain that their children are not being taught the basics, that they are not pushed to excel, and that their classrooms are too chaotic to encourage any real learning. The public has begun to reject school bond levies with regularity, frustrated by what it perceives to be mounting education costs unaccompanied by increased achievement or accountability. Coulson explores the educational problems facing parents and shows how these problems can best be addressed. He begins with a discussion of what people want from their school systems, tracing their views of the kinds of knowledge, skills, and values education should impart, and their concerns over discipline, drugs, and violence in public schools. Using this survey of goals and attitudes as a guide, Coulson sets out to compare the school systems of civilizations both ancient and modern, seeking to determine which systems successfully educated generations past and which did not. His historical study ranges from classical Greece and ancient Rome, through the Islamic world of the Middle Ages, to nineteenth-century England and modern America. Drawing on the historical evidence of how these various systems operated, Coulson concludes that free educational markets have consistently done a better job of serving the public's needs than state-run school systems have. He sets out a blueprint for competitive, free-market educational reform that would make schools more flexible, more innovative, and more responsive to the needs of parents and students. He describes how education for low-income children might be funded under a market system, and how the transition from monopolistic public education to market education might be achieved. Coulson's Market Education touches on a wide range of issues, including declines in academic achievement, minority education, the role of public school teachers, and mismanagement and corruption in educational bureaucracies. Coulson examines alternative reform proposals from vouchers and charter schools to national standards for school curricula. This timely and engaging book will appeal to parents, educators, and others concerned with the quality and cost of schooling, and will serve as an excellent resource in college courses on the economics and history of education.

Part I
What We Want

1
Getting Used to Disappointment

In 1841, Horace Mann, the godfather of American public schooling, promised: “Let the Common School be expanded to its capabilities, let it be worked with the efficiency of which it is susceptible, and nine tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete; the long catalogue of human ills would be abridged.”¹

In 1998, the Los Angeles County School Board voted to arm its public school police with shotguns.²

Has public schooling failed?

Few people would be willing to write off the public schools simply because the predictions of a romantic nineteenth-century crusader turned out to be overly optimistic. But how do we decide whether public schooling is a success or a failure? Do public schools need to be reformed or replaced? If so, how and with what? These questions cannot be answered without first having a clear idea of our purposes for schooling. Until we know what we want, it is impossible to say whether or not we are getting it. This chapter is therefore dedicated to pulling together people’s most broadly and deeply held educational goals, and to finding out how well those goals are being met.

What Parents Want for Their Own Children

The Bottom Line

There is significant agreement among parents as to the ultimate ends of schooling. In U.S. polls dating from the early seventies to the present, parents have repeatedly said that they send their children to school mainly to improve their career prospects and help them to lead richer and more satisfying lives.³ The answers have been phrased in many different ways, such as “getting better jobs,” learning to “get along better with people at all levels of society,” “earning more money,” becoming “more knowledgeable,” and being “better prepared for life,” but parents have consistently ranked finding a good job and enjoying a better life as the top priorities.

Comparing the opinions of parents between countries on this issue is more difficult, since few international surveys have specifically asked about people’s fundamental educational goals; but the importance given to preparation for employment is clearly universal. More than 85 percent of citizens polled from a dozen industrialized countries ranked job skills as either “essential” or “very important” on a list of qualities they wanted students to develop.⁴ This placed it second out of eight choices, coming in just behind self-confidence. The more specific the question, and the more directly it refers to the parents’ own children, the clearer the results. A 1990 poll in Great Britain found that almost all parents of teenaged children wanted them to receive more career guidance, and the vast majority also sought increased vocational training for specific jobs.⁵

Much of this emphasis on employment is eminently practical—it is hard to have any kind of life at all without a decent income—but the intrinsic benefits of work cannot be discounted. The sense of satisfaction and achievement that comes from completing a worthy task is indisputable, whether or not it is accompanied by financial gain. One of the greatest hopes parents have is that their children will not only become financially successful, but happy in their work as well.

Knowledge

For their goals to be met, parents also agree that students must acquire the right balance of knowledge, skills, and values. When asked to rate the importance of a wide range of fields studied in elementary schools and high schools, most parents, regardless of nationality, place mathematics and their native language at the top of the scale.⁶

This emphasis makes the results of recent tests all the more disturbing. According to an international study released in December 1995, “one out of five Americans surveyed did not understand the directions on an aspirin bottle; almost a quarter could not work out a newspaper weather chart.”⁷ While the United States had a disproportionate number of underachievers, roughly a fifth of the populations of all seven countries participating in the study were found to be barely literate—unable, for instance, to read and grasp a bus schedule.⁸ Even a significant number of people with high levels of schooling performed at the lowest levels of literacy. At virtually the same time that these international results were released, calculators were banned in England on two national mathematics tests after serious weaknesses were found in students’ understanding of basic arithmetic. Only one eleven-year-old in four was able to calculate 15 percent of 80.⁹ While the poor performance of the United States on cross-national mathematics tests is well known—and is discussed later in this book—U.S. students perform poorly even by American standards. A recent nationwide assessment of math skills found that “only 14 percent of eighth graders scored at the seventh-grade level or above.”¹⁰

Beyond the core studies of math and native language, the importance different families give to the various school subjects varies widely. Belgian and Finnish parents, for instance, place a very high priority on their children learning a foreign language, while those in the United States and the United Kingdom give it significantly less importance.¹¹ Such differences exist not only between countries, but within them as well. It is not uncommon for polls conducted at the state or city level to show almost as much variation in parents’ priorities as international surveys do.

Despite the different weights parents give to different subjects, the fact remains that the vast majority want their children exposed to a broad range of interconnected knowledge from the sciences, humanities, and arts. When asked what courses college-bound students should take, a majority of Americans list mathematics, English, history/U.S. government, science, business, and a foreign language. Many parents also add geography, health/physical education, vocational training, art, and music. Vocational and business training are given significantly higher rankings when the question is asked regarding students not bound for college, but the other subjects still elicit strong support.¹² In summary, most parents want their children to understand the way things are, how they got that way, and how they have been described by the world’s great writers. But are children really learning these facts and ideas?

When U.S. education secretary Richard Riley released the results of a national history test in the fall of 1995, he felt obliged to quote from the ballad “Wonderful World,” saying: “It’s clear, as the song says, students don’t know much about history.”¹³ Remarkably, the majority of twelfth-graders failed to even reach the “basic” level of achievement, the test’s lowest ranking. Only one student in ten was found to be “proficient.” Maris Vinovskis, a professor of history at the University of Michigan, admitted that “[t]he results are deeply disturbing. I was shocked, really.... We are facing a real crisis.”¹⁴ Students fared better on the national geography test, but even these results were not particularly encouraging. Almost one high-school senior in three lacked a “basic” understanding of geography, and only a quarter were considered “proficient.” Only 10 percent of seniors correctly picked Canada as the United States’ largest trading partner in a multiple-choice question, a result unlikely to please parents on either side of the border.¹⁵

Skills

Most parents hope that, in addition to becoming knowledgeable, their children will develop the skills necessary for success in life and work. As reflected in the popular “back to basics” movement, mastery in reading, writing, and arithmetic is widely viewed as an absolute necessity. Fully 96 percent of Americans believe that more emphasis should be put on teaching tougher, more challenging basic courses in reading, writing, math, and science.¹⁶ This focus on elementary skills is sometimes interpreted as being at odds with more advanced learning, but when parents are asked to explain their stressing of the basics they most often point out that these skills are prerequisites to virtually all advanced studies. A Minneapolis father, for instance, explained:

It seems to me that when I went to school, we started with the basics, with the basic building blocks. You didn’t start writing compositions until you had all the grammar down.… Now, it’s more like they get plopped down right in the middle and are told “Write us a story and if the spelling isn’t right, we’ll take care of that later.” … It’s backward.¹⁷

Parents also show their appreciation for more sophisticated skills when presented with a list of options and asked to rate their importance. A majority of parents I have talked with consider knowing how to research a topic and how to logically form opinions to be either important or very important skills. Parents do value these and other advanced studies—they simply want their children to be able to read and write proficiently before they are moved along to more complex assignments.

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, students have an even poorer grasp of advanced thinking skills than they do of the basics. British academics complain loudly that even students entering the best universities “can’t do algebra and don’t understand [mathematics].” Professors at Leeds and Cambridge complain that students’ higher-level skills have been declining in recent years and that entering freshmen “do not have a firm grasp of the conceptual base of mathematics—the centrality of proof.”¹⁸ But once again it is the United States leading the charge of the dull brigade. When American students were tested against children in China, Taiwan, and Japan on conceptual and visualization skills, they performed abysmally, falling further behind their Asian counterparts the longer they spent in school.¹⁹ In the national tests of mathematics, history, and geography discussed thus far, all of which are part of the U.S. National Assessment of Educational Progress (or NAEP), only a tiny fraction of American students reach the “advanced” level of competence. Across grades and across subjects, few students demonstrate a true understanding and mastery of the subject matter they are supposed to have learned.

After academic training, such as it is, the development of social skills is often next in importance for parents. One mother even gave this as her primary concern, saying: “Academics and the interaction with other children, that’s why I send him [her son] to school. In fact, if it weren’t for the social aspects, I’d probably teach him at home.”²⁰ Even parents who do choose to home-school their children value the teaching of interpersonal skills. Home-schoolers often arrange group activities among themselves to teach their children to get along and work with others.

Beyond these common priorities, the importance families accord to different skills varies significantly. For some, the nurturing of musical and artistic skills is profoundly important. These parents often seek additional training for their children outside of the traditional classroom, sending them to piano or dance instructors. Others stress athletics, coaching their children themselves or participating in local sports leagues. Still others put the emphasis on logical thinking, or creativity—and the list goes on.

Values

In the case of values and religion, as in the areas of knowledge and skills, there is some overlap between the goals of different families. Courtesy, love of learning, diligence, and—with at least one historical exception²¹ —honesty, are all universally prized. But even these basic qualities are not accorded equal importance. Many parents stress love of learning as the central value they wish schools to instill in their children, while others give it only secondary consideration. A poll of two thousand German citizens found similar disparities when it asked respondents to choose the most important aim of education from the following list: Obedience/Submission, Order/Diligence, or Independence/Free will. Answers to this question varied greatly depending upon the age and level of education of the respondents.²² Those over sixty and those with a low level of education ranked Order/Diligence and Independence/Free will approximately equally. Highly educated respondents and those under thirty years of age favored Independence/free will by a margin of more than three to one. Few parents named Obedience/Submission as their choice, but here the difference between subgroups was as high as five to one. Similar variations exist between nations as well, with almost nine tenths of American and Portuguese citizens polled ranking instruction in good citizenship as essential or very important, while fewer than six in ten French and Swiss respondents agreed.²³

For sheer contentiousness, it is hard to find any schooling issue on a par with religion. Differences in dogma among various sects and faiths, and conflicts between religious and secular groups, have led to fierce battles over the content of public instruction around the world. In the United States, the kettle has been boiling for a century and a half. Just in the last eighty years, U.S. public schools have seen the struggle between proponents of evolutionary theory and the biblical creation story swing full circle. In the early 1920s, all reference to the theory of evolution had been expunged from the textbooks of Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and Kentucky.²⁴ By the end of the decade, after the famous Scopes “monkey” trial in which a teacher was prosecuted for and found guilty of teaching evolution, anti-evolution bills had been introduced in thirty-seven states.²⁵ Naturally, supporters of evolutionary theory cried foul. Today, the converse is true, with evangelical Christians mightily disgruntled over the exclusion of their beliefs on the origin of man from their children’s classes. Recently, Tennessee legislators proposed a bill that would turn back the clock to the 1930s, by requiring the firing of any teacher who taught evolution as a fact.²⁶ The battle wages on.

Even when parents share the same religious beliefs, they do not always see eye to eye on the role of religion in the schools. For some parents, academics and religion are entirely separate issues, the first being mainly the responsibility of the school, and the second, that of the home. Others see the religious and scholarly education of their children as inseparable, insisting that t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Market Education
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. What We Want
• Part II. What’s Been Tried
• Part III. What Works
• Conclusion: Achieving Educational Excellence
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author