Private-sector forces create a government success

[Guest post by Jonathan Small]

After having been at the bottom of the barrel, Oklahoma now ranks in the top 10 for bridge conditions, according to the latest data from the Federal Highway Administration. That success is the result not of government, but primarily of private-sector forces. And similar improvements can be generated elsewhere by taking advantage of market forces and the benefits of competition.

In 2004, nearly 1,200 of Oklahoma’s 6,800 highway bridges were considered structurally deficient. Today, only 86 highway bridges are considered structurally deficient, and each is already scheduled for improvements through the Oklahoma Department of Transportation’s eight-year construction plan.

Increased funding was a component of that successful turnaround—but only one component. The more important factor was reliance on private-sector competition to generate improvement.

How? The state’s eight-year road plan has an equal emphasis on performance and outcomes, along with funding. Notably, ODOT uses state funds to pay private entities to perform the work. That’s not a minor detail.

ODOT’s contracts include bonus pay for high-performance and, on the flip side, the agency can and does fire contractors who don’t live up to expectations. Imagine that.

Thus, this is a “government success” built almost entirely on free-market competition and the superior service produced by the private sector. It’s a success that can be duplicated elsewhere.

Each year it is common for education advocates to call for the creation of an eight-year plan for schools. Yet those advocates typically want a plan focused only on increased funding, not increased funding tethered to increased reliance on competition and private-sector providers. But the road-and-bridge plan shows such competition is crucial.

If school funding were increased each year, with parents allowed to use their taxpayer dollars to choose a child’s school (public or private), we would quickly see improvement in education that matches the improvement in state bridges. When pay is tied to educational outcomes for children, providers quickly show they can provide better outcomes—knowing that if they don’t, bad providers will be let go.

Such choice is especially important now as many districts are ignoring the needs of children by telling parents they can go online-only or do without. Notably, in the urban areas where such take-it-or-leave-it edicts are coming from public schools, most private schools are finding a way to safely offer in-person instruction. Those private schools do so because their pay is tied to consumer needs, not bureaucrats’ wants.

There’s a reason Oklahoma’s eight-year plan for roads succeeded when the old Soviet Union’s five-year plans generated only misery. One relies on private-sector forces, while the other trusted government bureaucrats over market forces.

As Oklahomans rightly celebrate our top 10 ranking in roads, they have reason to note our continued low ranking elsewhere, including education, and then ask this question: Why not copy success?

Stark difference in views of children

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt and Lt. Gov. Matt Pinnell are pictured here outside the state Capitol with students and staff from Crossover Preparatory Academy after the State of the State address on February 3, 2020.

[Guest post by Jonathan Small]

In education debates, some people see children whose lives can be immeasurably improved, while others see children only as tools to gain political power. This sad contrast became glaringly apparent during Gov. Kevin Stitt’s recent State of the State speech.

Stitt urged lawmakers to raise the cap on the Oklahoma Equal Opportunity Education Scholarship program in order to “provide additional incentives for donors, resulting in more public-school grants and private-school scholarships.”

In attendance were Alegra Williams and her sons, Sincere and Chaves. When Sincere attended a local public school, he struggled and officials told Williams he had learning disabilities. But when a tax-credit scholarship allowed Sincere to attend Crossover Preparatory Academy, an all-boys private school in north Tulsa, Sincere jumped two-and-a-half reading levels. Crossover officials found he has no learning disabilities. Similarly, Chaves jumped three reading grade levels. Tax-credit scholarships allowed both boys to attend Crossover.

In touting his support for raising the cap on the tax-credit scholarship program, Stitt called on lawmakers to “join me and their mom in applauding” Chaves and Sincere’s “hard work this year.” When he did, the official Twitter account of the Oklahoma Education Association complained that Stitt had “called for a standing ovation of a family that left public schools for a private.”

For the OEA and similar entities, the success of children like Chaves and Sincere cannot be cheered. They view such children’s success only as a loss of political power. The OEA’s action was reminiscent of congressional Democrats’ refusal to applaud record-low unemployment for racial minorities and blue-collar income gains during President Donald Trump’s recent State of the Union address.

Trump, by the way, echoed Stitt and endorsed a federal version of Oklahoma’s Equal Opportunity Education Scholarship Act in his speech, saying the “next step forward in building an inclusive society is making sure that every young American gets a great education and the opportunity to achieve the American dream. Yet, for too long, countless American children have been trapped in failing government schools.”

Supporting tax-credit scholarships and children like Sincere does not mean abandoning efforts to improve traditional public schools. Given that Oklahoma’s educational outcomes remain among the nation’s worst, we cannot afford to ignore those schools. But neither can we afford to squander children’s lives by telling them to expend their limited school years waiting for traditional schools to get their act together.

Like the Soviet Union’s old “five year plans,” the “turnaround” efforts of many local districts lead only to calls for more multi-year improvement programs. In the meantime, all 13 years of a child’s K-12 experience fly by and those youth are robbed of a quality education.

Even if the OEA doesn’t understand this, Governor Stitt and President Trump realize we are talking about children’s lives and Oklahoma’s future. For both to be brighter, Oklahoma lawmakers must side with Stitt and Trump, not the OEA.

Government schools: Sowing the seeds of our destruction

"Several years ago, the Independent Institute honored Andy Garcia at our unforgettable Gala for Liberty," Mary Theroux writes.

There was not a dry eye in the house (including his) as Andy Garcia recounted his memories of leaving his home, Cuba, at the age of 5. 

Once the Castros had seized power, they passed a law giving the State full rights over all children. As I had been taught by my true-believing Marxist Development Economics professors at Stanford, this is how you build the “New Man” that makes Socialism the ideal society. 

Cuban parents not wanting their children to be raw material for Marxist experiments, instead made the ultimate sacrifice and turned their children over to the Catholic church’s Peter Pan project, under which their children were flown to live in freedom with families in the United States—not knowing if they would ever see their children again, and many of whom did not. 

After Andy Garcia’s mother reported to his father that she had seen Andy (at the age of 5) marching and singing the Internationale, his family joined the exodus. Fortunately, Andy’s father was able to later also leave Cuba, and the family was reunited in Florida.

Read the whole thing here.

Why schools don't deliver

The post office is a disappointment not because its managers and employees are stupid, but rather because Congress runs it. In the December issue of Perspective, Greg Forster discusses the parallels between mail delivery and education delivery.

Are public schools like Soviet-era department stores?

Some in the public education community are displeased with the comment this week by Donald Trump, Jr. (courtesy of his speechwriter F.H. Buckley) that public schools are "like Soviet-era department stores that are run for the benefit of the clerks and not the customers."

But Mr. Trump is hardly the first person to make this sort of observation. Milton Friedman once described America’s public school system as “an island of socialism in a free-market sea.” Kevin Williamson, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism, says “the public schools constitute one of the most popular instantiations of socialism in American life.” Indeed, he says, “in the United States, we have an education system that already is socialized to a greater extent than Lenin managed for Soviet agriculture.”

And it’s not just free-market economists and authors. Twenty-seven years ago today, American Federation for Teachers president Albert Shanker issued this wake-up call:

It’s time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybody’s role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It’s no surprise that our school system doesn’t improve: It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy. … 

We’ve been running our schools as planned economies for so long that the notion of using incentives to drive schools to change may strike some people as too radical—even though that’s the way we do it in every other sector of society. But no law of nature says public schools have to be run like state-owned factories or bureaucracies. If the Soviet Union can begin to accept the importance of incentives to productivity, it is time for people in public education to do the same.

Many schools are failing to provide a quality education for at least some of their students and Oklahomans want alternatives. But as Williamson points out, “the public schools are not a random or inexplicable failure. They are a classical socialist failure, with massively misallocated resources, an ensconced bureaucratic class, and a needlessly impoverished client class.”

Defenders of the status quo can shriek at the mention of socialism and recommend business as usual (more taxes and spending, no reform). But it might be wiser to listen to constructive criticism and take it to heart. For as Mr. Shanker himself said, “business as usual in the public education system is going to put us out of business.”

[Cross-posted at OCPA]

Are teacher unions really the main problem?

"Gov. Christie may be correct that the teachers unions are the single most toxic element among the special interests that feed off the government school system," author Bruce N. Shortt writes in a letter to the editor published today in The Wall Street Journal.

The question that ought to be asked, however, is whether we need effective educational reform or just another round of tinkering with the government schools. If the U.S. had a system of failing, unionized Soviet-style collective farms instead of a free agricultural sector, would a recommendation that we get tough with the agricultural unions be regarded as a serious policy suggestion? While the agricultural unions might pose a problem, the real issue would obviously be the socialist agricultural model. So it is, too, with education. True educational improvement won’t come until we abandon the statist “education-by-government” model. The model is the mistake, and the solution is a complete separation of school and state.

Oklahoma’s education system: Another reminder that socialism doesn’t work

Socialism's finest: the Trabant 

[This article by economist Gary Wolfram appeared in the May 2001 issue of Perspective, published by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs. Dr. Wolfram (Ph.D., University of California Berkeley) is Munson Professor of Political Economy at Hillsdale College and a former member of the Michigan State Board of Education.]

In 1955 Milton Friedman wrote an article discussing the role of government in education, in which he made the salient point that there is a fundamental difference between arguing that government should provide education and that government should produce education. His position was that production of education through government schools could not be justified, even if there were reasons for government to subsidize education. This is where he introduced his proposal for providing vouchers for students to use for education that would be produced through the market system that produces most other goods and services.

Twenty-five years later, in 1980, he wrote that public schools were suffering from the malady of “an over-governed society.” In this article he pointed out the failures of K-12 education in the United States, and described the system as “an island of socialism in a free-market sea.” He argued that Dr. Max Gammon’s theory of bureaucratic displacement—that is, in a bureaucratic system increases in expenditure will be matched by falling production—“applies in full force to the effect of the increasing bureaucratization and centralization of the public school system in the United States.”

It is now more than 20 years later and we have allowed our education system to continue as a socialist system, when it has been obvious to us and the rest of the world that such a system is fundamentally flawed. The collapse of eastern European socialism was inevitable. It is only through consumer choice and a system where producers are rewarded for making efficient use of resources (and punished for making inefficient use of resources) that our standard of living will increase. The result of holding tight to the socialist model for production of education has been similar to the results the Soviets had with their production system—poor quality of product and shortages. The collapse of our educational system is just as inevitable as was the Soviet system.

Peter Brimelow has written of five classic symptoms of socialism: (1) politicized allocation of resources, (2) proliferating bureaucratic overhead, (3) chronic mismatching of supply and demand, (4) susceptibility to top-down panaceas, usually requiring more input, and (5) qualitative and quantitative collapse. The average reader will immediately be aware that this describes the state of K-12 education in Oklahoma and the rest of the United States as we enter the 21st century. Let’s take a closer look.

What if grocery stores were like public schools?

My colleague Trent England welcomes you to the public groceries system.

OCPA economist looks at teacher shortages

In Oklahoma's public education system, Wendy Warcholik writes in the Tulsa World, "the consumer is certainly not empowered to effectively solve the shortage problem, especially when it is beneficial for the establishment to make policy decisions that create these so-called shortages. The only real solution is to break up the monopoly by expanding school-choice opportunities."

Some reforms make us feel good -- even if they don't work

Poor, starving children in Africa are not actually helped by our finishing all of the food on our plates, Jay Greene reminds us. Likewise, our futile efforts to fix public schools that don't want to be fixed aren't actually helping the students in those schools.

'The state’s education monopoly increases prices and destroys choice'

Here's an excerpt from Ron Paul's new book, The School Revolution: A New Answer for Our Broken Education System.

'A sad story of public schools that are totally dysfunctional'

Mwangi S. Kimenyi, a senior fellow at the liberal Brookings Institution, is writing about Kenya -- but education reformers will be quick to spot the many similarities to America's education system.

If only someone could have predicted this

It turns out that schools respond to competition.

Nor is tenure prevalent in the oil patch

An Associated Press story in today's Oklahoman informs us that one North Dakota oil town's prosperity isn't reaching public-school teachers.

That's because public-school teachers aren't part of the free-enterprise system.

Unionized monopolies are running out of ideas

Teacher-union excesses 'more a symptom than a cause'

Our school-performance woes are not the union's fault, Andrew Coulson writes over at HuffPo. "It is the natural result of operating K-12 education as a fully state-funded monopoly."

[I]t is not an attack on government to observe that government is bad at running schools, anymore than it's an attack on shovels to note that they make lousy Web browsers. No single tool can do every job. Nor is it an attack on the ideals of public education to say that state monopolies are an ineffective way to pursue them. That's a confusion of ends and means. Public education is a not a particular pile of bricks or stack of regulations, it is a set of goals: universal access, preparation for participation in public life as well as success in private life, building harmony and understanding among communities.

If the true allegiance of reformist Democrats is to those ultimate ideals, then they should have no problem acknowledging that government monopolies are ill-suited to advancing them, and that teachers-union excesses are more a symptom than a cause of our monopoly-induced woes. Finding the best policies for advancing our educational ideals then becomes a practical, tractable problem. The participation of reformist Democrats in solving it will be a tremendous boon to the children they seek to help.

Free markets make our lives better

It's time to bring them to education.

'How is a bad radio station like our public-school system?'

Freakonomics has the answer.

'Our school system is like the Trabant'

"When government runs things," John Stossel explains, "consumers suffer."

Socialism's finest

Maybe he should turn his attention to reforming the U.S. Postal Service

"Ten years into his record-breaking philanthropic push for school reform, Bill Gates is sober—and willing to admit some missteps," The Wall Street Journal's Jason L. Riley reports. "The reality is that the Gates Foundation met the same resistance that other sizeable philanthropic efforts have encountered while trying to transform dysfunctional urban school systems run by powerful labor unions and a top-down government monopoly provider." Says Mr. Gates:

It's hard to improve public education—that's clear. As Warren Buffett would say, if you're picking stocks, you wouldn't pick this one.