- From Free to Choose: A Personal Statement, Chapter 6
Thursday, April 01, 2010
School Choice Advocate
Special Edition: Rose D. Friedman (1910-2009)
Education has always been a major component of the American Dream. In Puritan New England, schools were quickly established, first as an adjunct of the church, later taken over by secular authorities. After the opening of the Erie Canal, the farmers who left the rocky hills of New England for the fertile plains of the Middle West established schools wherever they went, not only primary and secondary schools, but also seminaries and colleges. Many of the immigrants who streamed over the Atlantic in the second half of the nineteenth century had a thirst for education. They eagerly seized the opportunities available to them in large cities where they mostly settled.
At first, schools were private and attendance strictly voluntary. Increasingly, government came to play a larger role, first by contributing to financial support, later by establishing and administering government schools. The first compulsory attendance law was enacted by Massachusetts in 1852, but attendance did not become compulsory in all states until 1918. Government control was primarily local until well into the twentieth century. The neighborhood school, and control by the local school board, was the rule. Then a so-called reform movement got under way, particularly in the big cities, sparked by the wide differences in the ethnic and social composition of different school districts and by the belief that professional educators should play a larger role. That movement gained additional ground in the 1930s along with the general tendency toward both expansion and centralization of government.
We have always been proud, and with good reason, of the widespread availability of schooling to all and the role that public schooling has played in fostering the assimilation of newcomers into our society, preventing fragmentation and divisiveness, and enabling people from different cultural and religious backgrounds to live together in harmony.
Unfortunately, in recent years our educational record has become tarnished. Parents complain about the declining quality of the schooling their children receive. Many are even more disturbed about the dangers to their children's physical well-being. Teachers complain that the atmosphere in which they are required to teach is often not conducive to learning.
Increasing numbers of teachers are fearful about their physical safety, even in the classroom. Taxpayers complain about growing costs. Hardly anyone maintains that our schools are giving the children the tools they need to meet the problems of life. Instead of fostering assimilation and harmony, our schools are increasingly a source of the very fragmentation that they earlier did so much to prevent.
At the elementary and secondary level, the quality of schooling varies tremendously: outstanding in some wealthy suburbs of major metropolises, excellent or reasonably satisfactory in many small towns and rural areas, incredibly bad in the inner cities of major metropolises.
"The education, or rather the uneducation, of black children from low income families is undoubtedly the greatest disaster area in public education and its most devastating failure. This is doubly tragic for it has always been the official ethic of public schooling that it was the poor and the oppressed who were its greatest beneficiaries."1
Public education is, we fear, suffering from the same malady as are so many of the programs discussed in the preceding and subsequent chapters. More than four decades ago Walter Lippmann diagnosed it as "the sickness of an over-governed society," the change from "the older faith ... that the exercise of unlimited power by men with limited minds and self-regarding prejudices is soon oppressive, reactionary, and corrupt ... that the very condition of progress was the limitation of power to the capacity and the virtue of rulers" to the newer faith "that there are no limits to man's capacity to govern others and that, therefore, no limitations ought to be imposed upon government."2
For schooling, this sickness has taken the form of denying many parents control over the kind of schooling their children receive either directly, through choosing and paying for the schools their children attend, or indirectly, through local political activity. Power has instead gravitated to professional educators. The sickness has been aggravated by increasing centralization and bureaucratization of schools, especially in the big cities.
Private market arrangements have played a greater role at the college and university level than at the elementary and secondary level. But this sector has not been immune from the sickness of an overgoverned society. In 1928 fewer students were enrolled in government institutions of higher education than in private institutions; by 1978 close to four times as many were. Direct government financing grew less rapidly than government operation because of tuition charges paid by students, but even so, by 1978 direct government grants accounted for more than half of the total expenditures on higher education by all institutions, government and private.
The increased role of government has had many of the same adverse effects on higher education as on elementary and secondary education. It has fostered an atmosphere that both dedicated teachers and serious students often find inimical to learning.
Elementary and Secondary Education: The Problem
Even in the earliest years of the Republic, not only the cities but almost every town and village and most rural districts had schools. In many states or localities, the maintenance of a "common school" was mandated by law. But the schools were mostly privately financed by fees paid by the parents. Some supplementary finance was generally also available from the local, county, or state government, both to pay fees for children whose parents were regarded as unable to do so and to supplement fees paid by parents. Though schooling was neither compulsory nor free, it was practically universal (slaves, of course, excepted). In his report for 1836, the superintendent of common schools of the State of New York asserted: "Under any view of the subject it is reasonable to believe, that in the common schools, private schools and academies, the number of children actually receiving instruction is equal to the whole number between five and sixteen years of age."3 Conditions doubtless varied from state to state but by all accounts schooling was widely available to (white) children from families at all economic levels.
Beginning in the 1840s, a campaign developed to replace the diverse and largely private system by a system of so-called free schools, i.e., schools in which parents and others paid the cost indirectly by taxes rather than directly by fees. According to E. G. West, who has studied extensively the development of government's role in schooling, this campaign was not led by dissatisfied parents, but "mainly by teachers and government officials."4 The most famous crusader for free schools was Horace Mann, "the father of American public education," as he is termed in the Encyclopedia Britannica article on his life.5 Mann was the first secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education established in 1837, and for the next twelve years he conducted an energetic campaign for a school system paid for by government and controlled by professional educators. His main arguments were that education was so important that government had a duty to provide education to every child, that schools should be secular and include children of all religious, social, and ethnic backgrounds, and that universal, free schooling would enable children to overcome the handicaps of the poverty of their parents. "In his secretarial reports to the Massachusetts Board of Education, Mann proclaimed repetitively ... that education was a good public investment and increased output."6 Though the arguments were all pitched in terms of the public interest, much of the support of teachers and administrators for the public school movement derived from a narrow self-interest. They expected to enjoy greater certainty of employment, greater assurance that their salaries would be paid, and a greater degree of control if government rather than parents were the immediate paymaster.
"Despite vast difficulties and vigorous opposition ... the main outlines of [the kind of system urged by Mann] were achieved by the middle of the 19th century ... ."7 Ever since, most children have attended government schools. A few have continued to attend so-called private schools, mostly schools operated by the Catholic Church and other religious denominations. The United States was not unique in moving from a mostly private to a mostly governmental system of schools. Indeed, one authority has described "the gradual acceptance of the view that education ought to be a responsibility of the state" as the "most significant" of the general trends of the nineteenth century "that were still influencing education in all western countries in the second half of the 20th century."8 Interestingly enough, this trend began in Prussia in 1808, and in France, under Napoleon, about the same time. Britain was even later than the United States. "[U]nder the spell of laissez faire [it] hesitated a long time before allowing the state to intervene in educational affairs," but finally, in 1870, a system of government schools was established, though elementary education was not made compulsory until 1880, and fees were not generally abolished until 1891.9 In Britain, as in the United States, schooling was almost universal before the government took it over. Professor West has maintained persuasively that the government takeover in Britain, as in the United States, resulted from pressure by teachers, administrators, and well-meaning intellectuals, rather than parents. He concludes that the government takeover reduced the quality and diversity of schooling.10
Education is still another example, like Social Security, of the common element in authoritarian and socialist philosophies. Aristocratic and authoritarian Prussia and Imperial France were the pioneers in state control of education. Socialistically inclined intellectuals in the United States, Britain, and later Republican France were the major supporters of state control in their countries.
The establishment of the school system in the United States as an island of socialism in a free market sea reflected only to a very minor extent the early emergence among intellectuals of a distrust of the market and of voluntary exchange. Mostly, it simply reflected the importance that was attached by the community to the ideal of equality of opportunity. The ability of Horace Mann and his associates to tap that deep sentiment enabled them to succeed in their crusade.
Needless to say, the public school system was not viewed as "socialist" but simply as "American." The most important factor determining how the system operated was its decentralized political structure. The U.S. Constitution narrowly limited the powers of the federal government, so that it played no significant role. The states mostly left control of schools to the local community, the town, the small city, or a subdivision of a large city. Close monitoring of the political authorities running the school system by parents was a partial substitute for competition and assured that any widely shared desires of parents were implemented.
Before the Great Depression the situation was already changing. School districts were consolidated, educational districts enlarged, and more and more power was granted to professional educators. After the depression, when the public joined the intellectuals in an unbridled faith in the virtues of government, and especially of central government, the decline of the one-room school and the local school board became a rout. Power shifted rapidly from the local community to broader entities — the city, the county, the state, and more recently, the federal government.
In 1920 local funds made up 83 percent of all revenues of public schools, federal grants less than 1 percent. By 1940 the local share had fallen to 68 percent. Currently [Editor's Note: Originally published in 1980.] it is less than one half. The state provided most of the rest of the money: 16 percent in 1920, 30 percent in 1940, and currently more than 40 percent. The federal government's share is still small but growing rapidly: from less than two percent in 1940 to roughly eight percent currently.
As professional educators have taken over, control by parents has weakened. In addition, the function assigned to schools has changed. They are still expected to teach the three R's and to transmit common values. In addition, however, schools are now regarded as means of promoting social mobility, racial integration, and other objectives only distantly related to their fundamental task.
In Chapter 4 we referred to the Theory of Bureaucratic Displacement that Dr. Max Gammon had developed after studying the British National Health Service: in his words, in "a bureaucratic system ... increase in expenditure will be matched by fall in production ... Such systems will act rather like 'black holes' in the economic universe, simultaneously sucking in resources, and shrinking in terms of 'emitted' production."11
His theory applies in full force to the effect of the increasing bureaucratization and centralization of the public school system in the United States. In the five years from school year 1971-72 to school year 1976-77, total professional staff in all U.S. public schools went up 8 percent; cost per pupil went up 58 percent in dollars (11 percent after correction for inflation). Input clearly up.
The number of students went down 4 percent; the number of schools went down 4 percent. And we suspect that few readers will demur from the proposition that the quality of schooling went down even more drastically than the quantity. That is certainly the story told by the declining grades recorded on standardized examinations. Output clearly down.
Is the decline in output per unit of input due to increasingly bureaucratic and centralized organization? As some evidence, the number of school districts went down by 17 percent in the seven year period from 1970-71 to 1977-78 — continuing the longer term trend to greater centralization. As to bureaucratization, for a somewhat earlier five-year period for which data are available (1968-69 to 1973-74), when the number of students went up 1 percent, the total professional staff went up 15 percent, and teachers 14 percent, but supervisors went up 44 percent.12
The problem in schooling is not mere size, not simply that school districts have become larger, and that, on the average, each school has more students. After all, in industry, size has often proved a source of greater efficiency, lower cost, and improved quality. Industrial development in the United States gained a great deal from the introduction of mass production, from what economists call the "economies of scale." Why should schooling be different?
It isn't. The difference is not between schooling and other activities but between arrangements under which the consumer is free to choose and arrangements under which the producer is in the saddle so the consumer has little to say. If the consumer is free to choose, an enterprise can grow in size only if it produces an item that the consumer prefers because of either its quality or its price. And size alone will not enable any enterprise to impose a product on the consumer that the consumer does not consider is worth its price. The large size of General Motors has not prevented it from flourishing. The large size of W. T. Grant & Co. did not save it from bankruptcy. When the consumer is free to choose, size will survive only if it is efficient.
In political arrangements size generally does affect consumers' freedom to choose. In small communities the individual citizen feels that he has, and indeed does have, more control over what the political authorities do than in large communities. He may not have the same freedom to choose that he has in deciding whether to buy something or not, but at least he has a considerable opportunity to affect what happens. In addition, when there are many small communities, the individual can choose where to live. Of course, that is a complex choice, involving many elements. Nonetheless, it does mean that local governments must provide their citizens with services they regard as worth the taxes they pay or either be replaced or suffer a loss of taxpayers.
The situation is very different when power is in the hands of a central government. The individual citizen feels that he has, and indeed does have, little control over the distant and impersonal political authorities. The possibility of moving to another community, though it may still be present, is far more limited.
In schooling, the parent and child are the consumers, the teacher and school administrator the producers. Centralization in schooling has meant larger size units, a reduction in the ability of consumers to choose, and an increase in the power of producers. Teachers, administrators, and union officials are no different from the rest of us. They may be parents, too, sincerely desiring a fine school system. However, their interests as teachers, as administrators, as union officials are different from their interests as parents and from the interests of the parents whose children they teach. Their interests may be served by greater centralization and bureaucratization even if the interests of the parents are not — indeed, one way in which those interests are served is precisely by reducing the power of parents.
The same phenomenon is present whenever government bureaucracy takes over at the expense of consumer choice: whether in the post office, in garbage collection, or in the many examples in other chapters.
In schooling, those of us who are in the upper-income classes retain our freedom to choose. We can send our children to private schools, in effect paying twice for their schooling — once in taxes to support the public school system, once in school fees. Or we can choose where to live on the basis of the quality of the public school system. Excellent public schools tend to be concentrated in the wealthier suburbs of the larger cities, where parental control remains very real.13
The situation is worst in the inner cities of the larger metropolises—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston. The people who live in these areas can pay twice for their children's schooling only with great difficulty — though a surprising number do so by sending their children to parochial schools. They cannot afford to move to the areas with good public schools. Their only recourse is to try to influence the political authorities who are in charge of the public schools, usually a difficult if not hopeless task, and one for which they are not well qualified. The residents of the inner cities are probably more disadvantaged in respect of the level of schooling they can get for their children than in any other area of life with the possible exception of crime protection — another "service" that is provided by government.
The tragedy, and irony, is that a system dedicated to enabling all children to acquire a common language and the values of U.S. citizenship, to giving all children equal educational opportunity, should in practice exacerbate the stratification of society and provide highly unequal educational opportunity. Expenditures on schooling per pupil are often as high in the inner cities as in even the wealthy suburbs, but the quality of schooling is vastly lower. In the suburbs almost all of the money goes for education; in the inner cities much of it must go to preserving discipline, preventing vandalism, or repairing its effects. The atmosphere in some inner city schools is more like that of a prison than of a place of learning. The parents in the suburbs are getting far more value for their tax dollars than the parents in the inner cities.
Note: Parts of this chapter, excerpted from Free to Choose: A Personal Statement, were reprinted with the permission of Harcourt Brace & Co. Sections that dealt with higher education were excluded for the purpose of this volume, and subsequently the conclusion and endnotes were modified to reflect this exclusion.
