The free education dilemma
A friend of mine, a committed Christian, sent me this story about how taxpayer dollars are being used to teach kids in Louisiana all sorts of wacky things. America's 'voucher schools' – rather like Britain's new Academies and Free Schools – manage themselves, though the cost of the education they provide is subsidised by taxpayers. The aim is to give parents choice and the benefits of real competition between independent school providers, while making sure that every child has access to education, no matter how rich or poor their parents might be.
A noble ambition. But what happens if schools teach creationism, say? Or for that matter, promote Islamic fundamentalism? Denmark, which has had the same sort of private-provision/public-finance model for decades, used to have so-called 'Red' schools, which promoted socialist thinking. Are such things a legitimate use of taxpayer cash, however much the parents in question might actively seek out schools teaching such stuff?
It's an interesting problem. The libertarian view would be that the state shouldn't be involved in education at all. Education departments in Britain and America, certainly – and probably in most other countries – have not added at all to the quality of education, nor to children's access to it, say libertarians. Most kids got a good education long before the state got involved. Parents in Africa on just a few dollars a day make sacrifices to send their kids to 'penny schools' and consider it a good investment – as Professor James Tooley has documented in great detail.
At the other end of the spectrum, look at the disaster of state-financed and state-produced education. It was this model, in the postwar years, that brought us the so-called 'progressive' approach that was so ashamed of what it produced that it did not even publish examination scores – so parents had no way of knowing what state schools were actually doing for their children, if anything. They were expected just to pay up through taxation and let the 'experts' get on with whatever they were doing to their kids. And later, in Britain, we had the utter inanities of the National Curriculum, in which the country's history and culture barely got a look in.
The idea of voucher and quasi-voucher schemes is precisely to break down that kind of state monopoly in eduction. It's reckoned that you cannot do everything at once: so let's free up the supply of schooling first, while still maintaining the guarantee of state support so that nobody is left out. It is actually that model, first introduced in Britain by Mrs Thatcher's government, that brought us the National Curriculum just mentioned. The view was that if taxpayers' money is being used, then the authorities have a right to make sure that it is spent properly. Unfortunately, when you leave it to state providers and state-employed education experts to decide what a 'proper' education is, well, you get a very silly answer.
So should we just leave it for parents to decide? This is probably the leading market-economics answer. Even if the state is paying, so the reasoning goes, parents will tend to make sensible choices for their children, whom they want to succeed. They are not going to choose schools that paddle their kids into some intellectual backwater. And so, like any other competitive market, you will get standards being bid up, and the quality of schooling will improve.
Except that actually, many parents would indeed like their children to be paddled up the backwater. Some fundamentalist families may not wish to see their female offspring learn too much. Others may deeply believe the creationist paradigm and want their children to share it. Some might believe that the Western values that give them the choice of what to learn are fundamentally wicked, and that their children should learn to hate them.
So should the state insist that taxpayers' money should not be spent on such things? To override the wishes of parents is to say that some state 'experts' should decide. And we know where that leads us. So it is not an easy question. On balance, I would say yes, parents should decide; I have faith that the overwhelming majority will make sensible decisions for their children. Better choices, on balance, than the professional state educationalists have made over the last half century.
A vision of the liberal ideal in education
To date, many of the arguments for increasing parental choice in education and allowing a diversity of provision have focused on a number of practical arguments such as the need to improve the performance of failing government schools, the need for additional school places and the general desire to ensure that all children can benefit from the best schools available, irrespective of income or location. These arguments originate from the “what matters, is what works” school of politics where ideological principles are no longer relevant.
However, while this evidence, results or outcomes-based approach can be very persuasive, it may not be sufficient if the proposed reforms are to win widespread support amongst both politicians and the general public. According to Nobel Laureate James Buchanan, evidence of “what works” must be supplemented with a vision of the liberal ideal that attempts to capture the minds of people.
Consider, for example, the suffragettes who were campaigning for the right to vote at the start of the twentieth century. Their case for reform was not based on any evidence which showed that extending the right to vote to women would guarantee a better election result than the existing voting system. In fact, many opponents of the reforms (mostly men, but not exclusively) warned of the perverse consequences and the chaos that would follow if women were allowed to vote on the important and complicated matters of national government. Instead the suffragette movement were campaigning for a fundamental freedom and a basic human right – the freedom and right of women to vote. A voting system based upon universal franchise was therefore deemed to be superior to one which was based upon a restricted franchise, irrespective of the results or outcomes of subsequent elections. In this example the evidence-based approach was clearly of limited use and, in fact, it could be argued that those who attempted to appeal to evidence had completely misunderstood the nature of the problem and the key issues at stake.
This same line of reasoning could also be applied to the current debate in education. An education system in which all parents have the freedom to choose would be deemed to be superior to the current system which continues to restrict these freedoms. Any appeal to evidence or what works would therefore be dismissed as irrelevant. Buchanan refers to the repeal of the corn laws in the 19th century as a successful example of when evidence was supplemented with a vision of the liberal ideal to help gain support for proposed reforms. If we were to heed his advice then a national campaign for the repeal of the school laws, which restrict freedom in education is now required.
A campaign for freedom in education would be based on the principle that it is parents and not politicians who are ultimately responsible for their children’s education - a responsibility which can only be carried out if parents are free to choose the nature, form and content of education which their children receive. Parental choice or freedom in education therefore is not desirable simply because it may help to improve the efficiency of failing government schools. Nor is parental choice in education simply the latest policy reform that will go out of fashion in a few years’ time. Instead, it is important for the same reasons that religious freedom or freedom of the press are important - because they are both recognised as basic human rights or fundamental freedoms, which deserve to be respected and protected at all costs.
A vision of the liberal ideal in education would therefore recognise that the responsibility for educating children cannot be transferred to others; nor can it be side-lined or placed behind other considerations. Instead, it is the key principle upon which the whole education system is based. This means that governments must not in any way restrict, undermine or distort this important relationship between parent and child and the natural growth and development of education. As a result, it will not be the role of politicians to dictate which schools children should or should not attend or how much parents should invest in their children’s education. This will, once again, be the responsibility of parents. Nor will it be the role of politicians to dictate who can and cannot set up and manage a school.
The liberty to teach and the freedom to educate must be respected and it will ultimately be parents who decide if a new school will flourish or not.
While politicians have previously argued that education was far too important to be left to ignorant parents and the chaos of the market, they must now be prepared to admit that education is far too important to be left to politicians. Politicians must have the humility to recognise that their own personal views on what works on education are completely irrelevant. After all, what does any politician know about the detailed and very specific circumstances of each and every pupil and parent across the UK?
Therefore, a future education sector where the rights and responsibilities of parents are both respected and protected will not be planned or directed by central government, nor will it be used to achieve any “national” objectives. Instead, it will consist of a variety of different national and international private, independent, autonomous, for-profit and not for-profit institutions, each with their own specific missions. The needs and desires of parents (and not politicians or governments) will be supreme and the government will be restricted to establishing a regulatory framework that will encourage a variety of different institutions to compete and flourish on a level playing field.
According to Buchanan a vision of the liberal ideal would also be based upon our desire to be free from the coercive power of others, combined with the absence of a desire to exert power over others. Another Nobel Laureate, Milton Friedman, helps to explain:
Willingness to permit free speech to people with whom one agrees is hardly evidence of devotion to the principle of free speech; the relevant test is willingness to permit free speech to people with whom one thoroughly disagrees. Similarly, the relevant test of the belief in individual freedom is the willingness to oppose state intervention even when it is designed to prevent individual activity of a kind one thoroughly dislikes.
Therefore, this provides a useful test to all those who continue to view parental choice or increasing diversity in the provision of education as an unnecessary evil. Do they have the discipline to place their personal views to one side and recognise that the rights and responsibilities of individual parents must always come first? If they do, then they should be willing to oppose the existing government restrictions which prevent profit-making companies from managing state-funded schools, despite the fact that they may not want their children to attend such a school. From this perspective, a vision of the liberal ideal should be seen as much less self-obsessed and instead much more compassionate towards the private beliefs and the opinions of those who are directly responsible for children’s education – their parents.
For those politicians concerned with the “vote motive”, the fact that most parents are also voters might imply that reforms that increase parents’ freedom to choose in education have a good chance of gaining electoral support if the case for reform is communicated and presented in the correct way. The time may also be right to launch a campaign for freedom in education because a vision which is based upon liberty and democracy is currently a common denominator of both the Conservative and Liberal Democratic Party. There can be nothing more liberal and democratic than extending the right to choose to all parents, irrespective of their income or location. The following advice from Bastiat should therefore appeal to both parties:
Away, then, with quacks and organizers! Away with their rings, chains, hooks, and pincers! Away with their artificial systems! Away with the whims of governmental administrators, their socialized projects, their centralization, their tariffs, their government schools, their state religions, their free credit, their bank monopolies, their regulations, their restrictions, their equalization by taxation, and their pious moralizations!
And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty.
Forget competitive exam boards, we should abolish O-Levels altogether
Michael Gove’s proposal to abolish competing exam boards for his new O-levels has sparked an important debate within the free-market movement. On the one hand, Liz Truss MP leads the approving side, while Dale Bassett of Reform, James Croft of the Centre for Market Reform of Education, and I, have all cautioned against the dangers of establishing subject-by-subject exam board monopolies.
Liz Truss’ main response to our criticism has been that competitive exam boards represent a “pseudo market” where government determines content, and that we have misunderstood the proposed structure: it is to be a franchise system rather than a monopoly. Similarly, she cites successful genuine free market qualifications like that of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA), who don’t have competing exam boards within their structure.
However, a franchising system is nothing more than a temporary monopoly. There may well be fierce competition for each contract, but it can only serve to restrict the hitherto limited number of competitors even further, as some fail to land contracts and go out of business. This sort of limited competition is also even more conducive to succumbing to the pressures of lobbyists and thus grade inflation as the ‘buying’ is done by a single body rather than by each individual school. As James Croft has pointed out, centralisation also concentrates risk, making it less likely for qualifications to gain and sustain confidence in their standards. Overall, the points made against monopolies still stand.
Nevertheless, the real problem is the persistence of a state-run and state-designed qualification. Comparing CIMA and O-levels is to compare apples to oranges: one is private, and one is not. Where politicians have control, centralisation must be avoided at all costs. The proposed abolition of the National Curriculum suggests that schools will no longer be bound to use O-levels, and will have more freedom to choose from an abundance of existing and potential alternative qualifications. But O-levels’ very existence as a state-run and state-sponsored qualification will necessarily crowd out the competition, leaving it in a dominant position.
Instead, perhaps both sides of the debate could agree to abolish O-levels (and A-levels) altogether. Superior private alternatives already exist, and would welcome the prospect of a more level playing field without government distortions. Even better, existing institutions’ experience of setting exams and designing syllabuses should be used, perhaps by encouraging the currently competing exam board companies to set up their own, entirely separate qualifications. This increased competition could also produce a variety of qualifications that meet employers’ and universities’ demands by including them in syllabus-setting processes. Rather than debating the design of a government qualification, we must be truly radical and propose its abolition.
Michael Gove's exam board monopoly is a step backwards
Michael Gove's proposals for education are certainly an upheaval, but scrapping competing exam boards for the new O-levels may be a big mistake. The reasoning behind the proposal, espoused by supporters like Liz Truss MP, is that competition causes a 'race to the bottom', with teachers and schools self-interestedly choosing the easiest qualifications for any given subject in order to boost their rankings in the league tables. The argument goes that this has been one of the chief causes of 'dumbing down' in school qualifications.
Irrespective of whether this is true or not, it doesn't necessarily mean that we should throw the competition baby out with the bathwater. As Dale Bassett of Reform points out, competition has generated some excellent curricula in response to the demand for higher quality, like International GCSEs, the International Baccalaureate (vested interest: I took it), and the Cambridge Pre-U. It is not clear how far the new proposals will limit the ability of schools to deviate from the GCSE/O-Level path in order to choose these alternatives, though the scrapping of the National Curriculum suggests that school freedom will be extended rather than curtailed.
But beyond competing curricula, a plethora of different and competing exam boards within a particular qualification gives us the opportunity to discriminate more effectively when figuring out individual kids' ability and knowledge. For example, English from Exam Board X may be superior to English from Exam Board Y, but despite the fact the 'buyers' of exam boards are schools and teachers, they have had to conform to government-sanctioned rankings and league tables that treat competing qualifications as equivalent. Employers and universities have suffered from the illusion that this lack of distinction makes too.
The proposals to limit exam board competition to monopolies for every subject (or duopolies between O-levels and CSEs) would therefore exacerbate the problem by limiting healthy academic discrimination even further. With only one exam board to be lobbied for each subject, we would face a system where every self-interested education minister could easily ‘dumb down’ the system even further, no matter how much an overhaul could raise standards in the immediate short term.
Free-marketeer MPs like Liz Truss should be more wary of the dangers of this proposed exam board monopoly. Rather than abolishing competition, the real solution to grade inflation may lie in more accurate and discriminating government league tables, or even their replacement with a competing system of tables by universities, employers, and other private groups. The abolition of the National Curriculum may well free schools from the shackles of clumsy government league tables too, but we will have to wait and see for more detailed proposals.
The cost of ‘fair access' will be higher fees
Last time I posted here, I attacked Professor Les Ebdon’s plan to poison the well of British higher education by subjugating the admission criteria of our best universities to ‘progressive’ political priorities.
However, before and after that article I’ve found that ‘merciless meritocracy’ is insufficient to sway some of my progressively-minded student friends. Equalising university access chances between high-achievers and the rest is ‘fair’. So entrenched is their opposition to selective and private education, or even the ‘internal market’ of parent choice, that the argument that it is schools that have failed similarly go nowhere.
So we who support the continued excellence of our top-flight universities need a new argument. One less vested in meritocratic principle not shared by our opponents, and grounded in something that both sides understand. Something like money, for example.
The case is fairly simple. Since Tony Blair engorged it, higher education in this country has become very expensive for the government to provide. As a result, governments have had to introduce fees, which have not been popular with students. Yet the fees for enfranchised domestic students have been held down by the much higher fees charged to international students.
International students are one of the financial keystones of UK higher education, worth “billions” of pounds per annum. The Guardian figures from 2009 show that foreign students were facing fees of up to £20,000 a year.
International students are willing to pay such fees, for now, because the UK’s best universities rank amongst the best on earth. With access criteria designed to ensure global competitiveness and attract the best and brightest from around the world, universities like Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College et al are maintaining their global position despite the slump in the UK’s relative performance in secondary education exams.
However, if we start channelling less capable students into these institutions in the name of ‘fairness’, what do we think will happen?
For a start, the universities will have to expend ever more time and resources bringing their entry-level students up to the standards required for rigorous undergraduate study. It is also probable that the standards of attainment by graduates will fall as people who weren’t ready pass through the system.
Sure, in domestic terms the government can undoubtedly nobble these results: we will doubtless start seeing ‘value added’ degrees to maintain the illusion of attainment if the likes of Ebdon have their way. But in international terms, our comparative results will slump.
Much more directly than secondary education results, this will matter. If our universities are not internationally competitive, they won’t attract the same quality or volume of international students. The cost in global connexions and revenue could be astronomical.
Once the universities lose this lucrative source of funding, the only ways to make up the shortfall will be higher fees for students or higher taxes on the general population. Poorer students will find themselves taking on more debt for degrees whose value is decaying.
All in the name of ‘fair access’.
In memoriam: John Marks
Everyone at the Adam Smith Institute is saddened to learn of the death of John Marks, the veteran campaigner for transparency and higher standards in the state school system.
Today it is hard to remember – well, perhaps not so hard – that in the 1960s and 1970s state school teachers consistently refused to make their examination results public. They argued that examination results were only a part of what makes a well-rounded citizen, that parents would not understand what the results meant, and that 'league tables' of school examination performance would stigmatise those performing most poorly.
Whatever small grain of truth there might have been in these claims, the net result was that taxpayers were pouring millions into a school system, with no way of finding out what if anything their money was buying. And parents had absolutely no information on which to judge the quality of their school. When John Marks and colleagues initiated a private survey to gather school examination results, many schools – and indeed entire education authorities – refused to send him any results.
Eventually Margaret Thatcher's administration accepted the need for transparency in school performance measures, and published the 'league tables' – exposing the so-called 'hidden garden' of education and leading to a huge focus on standards, in particular the exposure of bad schools and bad teachers who were ruining the prospects of generations of young people.
A physics teacher at North London Polytechnic, he also exposed the political corruption of the higher education sector, where independent-minded teachers were being sidelined and worn down for standing up to the perversion of the curriculum, and the widespread denial of free speech and debate, that was occurring as a result of the domination of Marxist students, teachers and administrators.
A private schools revolution in Bihar, India
Recent research carried out by the India Institute and Newcastle University's E.G. West Centre in the Indian city of Patna has produced some remarkable findings. The report, The Private School Revolution In Bihar, India, launched this week in New Delhi, and shows that government statistics are currently excluding three quarters of the schools in the city and 68% of school children. This means that 238,767 school children out of a total of 333,776 were missing from the official data.
Instead of the official 350 schools, the research located a total of 1,574 schools with 78% identified as private unaided, 21% government and 1% private aided. Therefore, approximately 65% of school children in Patna were attending private unaided schools, with just 34% attending government schools. According to Professor Tooley, "when plotting the location of 1,182 private schools and 111 government schools using GIS technology, we found that there existed hardly a road or a street in Patna without a private school”.
Based on the monthly fees being charged at each private school, the research also found that 69% of private unaided schools were low cost, 22% were affordable and only 9% higher cost. In other words, the vast majority of private unaided schools found in the city of Patna were low cost, charging fees of less £4 per month.
These findings have two important implications. First, if these findings reflect the real state of education across India and developing world, then the so called ‘global education crisis’ is much less of a crisis than previously thought. Instead, the widespread under-reporting of the number of children in school may now be a deliberate policy of developing country governments to help attract more international aid.
Second, Article 18 of the 2009 Right to Education Act in India requires that all unrecognised schools in the country be closed down within three years of the Act coming into force. For the city of Patna this would involve forcing two thirds of the city’s children out of school and onto the street – all because of government legislation which is supposed to be increasing school enrolments and not dramatically reducing it.
Thankfully, it would appear that the Bihar Education Minister P.K. Shahi has already read the report. Last Saturday he declared that “I can assure that the government will not implement the Right to Education Act in Bihar and will not force private schools to follow rules under it.” I suppose the people of Bihar should be grateful to their Education Minister for not shutting down the majority of their schools. However, this does make me wonder – do politicians around the world have any kind of positive impact on the education which children receive, or are they all bent on disrupting and distorting its natural growth and development?
I'm excited about Raspberry Pi
Today sees the launch of the Raspberry Pi, a fully-functional computer the size of a credit card selling for about £22. It’s a brilliantly stripped-down device, with a mobile phone charger power socket, a modest (but functional) amount of memory, a few USB ports and a video output that works with most televisions. It comes bundled with Linux and some software that teaches you the basics of computer programming.
It’s an exciting product. Funded entirely by the project’s developers on a non-profit basis, it’s being aimed at schoolchildren, and the first 10,000 built will be shipping to schools. It’ll be great to see how that goes. I don’t know if learning computer programming in school is going to make many students love it – it’s hard to find good IT teachers and, in my experience, having something forced on you at school is a recipe for hating it. But even still, lots of kids will be able to teach themselves on these, either at home or outside normal class time, and that’s great.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the real benefit of the Raspberry Pi device, though, is the rest of the world. Once production of the Raspberry Pi ramps up to meet demand for it, millions of people will suddenly be within reach of owning a computer, instead of having to rely on internet cafes. That means they can spend much more time on them, learning exactly the sort of computer skills that are easily sold across the internet. Adding wifi to the device through a standard wifi dongle would mean that businesses could sell wifi access in poor neighbourhoods.
The tragedy of the modern age is how much talent is being wasted in subsistence farming work, with little access to the benefits of the ongoing technological revolution. People across Africa have used cheap mobile phones to develop sophisticated banking and credit systems that have helped to spur investment and remittance transfers from relatives in rich countries. The Raspberry Pi may just be a way of unlocking some of that human capital and unleashing a second, human revolution.
Wicked web
Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive
The tangled web that has become university funding in the UK is already throwing up early evidence of what a fraud the whole thing will prove to be.
In last week’s Times Higher Education, an article purports that students would be foolish to repay their loans early, even after the government’s scrapping of early-repayment penalties. It quotes Tim Leunig of CentreForum and a lecturer at the London School of Economics as saying graduates should think twice about paying off their debts early because most will never repay the full amount within 30 years, after which time arrears are written off.
He’s quoted as saying “Every penny of their early repayment is a gift to the government.” A gift to the government!!! That heavenly body showering us all with free goodies? What he really means is that failing to repay is a good kick in the ass to every hardworking taxpayer now stumping up the cash.
Putting yet another boot into the taxpayer is Liam Burns, president of the National Union of Students who’s quoted as saying “Ministers must come clean on student finance that those on low and middle income are not duped into chipping away at their outstanding debt.” Duped!!! Doesn’t he mean reneging on a promise?
So the government whips up a scheme for which it has no plans to fully collect unpaid debt, a teacher of our young advises against doing so and a student leader fans the flame of irresponsibility.
How morally bankrupt our body politic has become.
It's secondary education that needs to get real, Mr Ebdon
If one phrase were needed to sum up all that is wrong with the choice of Les Ebdon as ‘Fair Access’ Czar of British universities, it must be this:
“I don’t think universities can just say: ‘Oh well it is because they are doing the wrong GCSEs’… Universities have to deal with the world as it is rather than the world as we would want.”
What he means is that universities should not be allowed to maintain high standards and insist on schools meeting them. Instead, universities should supplicate themselves to whatever mania is sweeping the teacher training colleges at the time.
Ironically, Ebdon’s policies mark the latest in the public education sector’s long march away from anything resembling ‘the real world’.
As I wrote in June, this sort of thinking is the result of the ‘progressive’ education establishment’s attempt to combine its love for fashionable theories with the terrible results when those theories are field tested.
Instead of adopting more effective teaching methods, to which much of the teaching profession has developed a certain ideological antipathy, state educators realised that they had another option: move the goalposts that marked success.
This started with the concept of ‘value added’ results. In essence, where schools had to deal with ‘disadvantaged’ groups such as ethnic minorities, immigrants or the poor, educators demanded that grades and league table positions reflect how well they thought they had done, given the poor materials to hand. Instead of seeing these children as challenges, they sought excuses.
But all these illusory achievements count for little when universal standards are applied, as in university applications. Because no matter how hard state educators insist that one child’s Cs are equivalent to another’s As because the first child is black or poor, in the ‘real world’ so beloved of Professor Ebdon a C is still a C and an A is still an A. Grade inflation notwithstanding, of course.
Once again, instead of renouncing failing methods ‘progressive’ educators are instead trying to lower the bar. It is our world class universities that must adapt ‘to the real world’, not our many unsatisfactory secondary schools.
Yet even if you crowbar these children into universities, they still aren’t properly equipped for the experience. Some universities already have to dedicate time in first year to equipping students with the sort of basic skills they should have developed during their A Levels.
These students will be accruing tens of thousands of pounds of debt to acquire second- or third-rate qualifications, all the while denying a place to a more capable student and weakening the strength and international competitiveness of British higher education.
Yet how far can this fantasy be sustained? What happens when these students hit the employment market and find that the illusory value-added grades they’ve been given by lazy educators aren’t actually worth the same as qualifications acquired through impartial assessment and intellectual rigour?
Will the next generation of Ebdons insist on ‘value-added’ degrees, and that employers must deal with the world ‘as it really is, not as they would wish it to be’? Will employers be forbidden from ‘discriminating’ against such qualifications?
It sounds totally outlandish. But following the logic of Ebdon’s appointment, it no longer sounds impossible.
