Trade increases female education levels
As you all well know we tend to like trade around here. For it was indeed Adam Smith who pointed out that it was the division and specialisation of labour followed by the resultant trade in production that made everyone richer. That said trade is currently leading to the greatest reduction in poverty in the history of our species is also true as globalisation roars on.
However, an intriguing little piece of research shows that trade also increases female education.
The intensification of international exchange throughout Europe came with a progress of mercantile science and practices, which forced merchants to acquire considerable skills in arithmetic, bookkeeping, reading, and writing. In merchant communities women played a special role, since they were often in charge of business operations, especially during their men’s year-lasting travels: therefore, women needed to be literate. Accordingly they received more (and better) education, both formally and informally, as documented by a vast historical literature on abacus schools open to girls and on female epistolary writing. The fact that commerce, contrary to other occupations, did not require physical strength reinforced this pattern.
What the authors are doing is tracking how Italian areas which were plugged into the trading routes and system in medieval times had, and continued to have, greater education rates (and for longer) than those which were not. The effects lasted centuries too.
What interests me here though is not quite just being able to say that trade leads to the desirable outcome of greater female education. There's a rather deeper point. It's a standard mantra of development economics these days that female education is one of the vital things that leads to development. Certainly, those places which educate more girls (and have a smaller gender gap in education) do perform better on all of the usual measures of human advancement. But the thing is I'm not quite sure that this mantra is correct. I think it might be putting the cart before the horse.
I don't doubt that greater female education can lead to greater growth mind. I'm just positing that it's the growth that leads to the greater female education. For two reasons.
1) The aim of this life is to have grandchildren. That's true whether you think biblically or in a Darwinian manner. When there are very high child mortality rates then many children are required to ensure grandchildren. Thus in a poor society much of a woman's life will be spent in pregnancy and child rearing.
2) A poor society is, almost by definition, one that works on human muscle power. It is inevitable that men in general have more of this than women.
If we put the two together we can see (OK, posit) that a richer society will have lower child mortality and also will be less reliant upon human muscle. Thus the incentive to educate girls will rise. They will not need to be wombs on legs in order to ensure grandchildren and also the value of their (educated or not) labour will rise relative to that of men as other forms of energy enter the society.
This is nothing at all to do with whether we should have gender equality in anything at all. Of course we should, 'uman beans are 'uman beans and we've all the same rights. Rather, this is about how to trigger this desirable outcome. And I have a very strong suspicion indeed that the greater education and rights of women come as a result of the beginnings of economic growth, not produce it. Yes, I'm sure there's a feedback going on as well. But the logical policy outcome of this would be that we concentrate less on "gender issues" in development and more on development itself as the gender stuff will largely solve itself given the incentives that development produces. Women's labour becomes more valuable as development proceeds leading to greater education of that potentially more valuable labour.
Hurrah and trebles all round of course. But get the development going first.
Private schools are revolutionising developing world education. If only UNESCO would admit they exist
A so-called ‘fact sheet’ on education in Nigeria published by UNESCO in October 2012 suggests that Nigeria has some of the worst education indicators in the developing world. For example, since 1999, the number of out-of-school children has increased from 7.4 to 10.5 million, which means that Nigeria now has the largest number of out‐of‐school children in the world. Unfortunately, these statistics fail to take into account the thousands of unregistered low cost private schools that exist across Nigeria and the millions of children who attend these schools. Consider, for example, the following findings from a census of private schools in Lagos State carried out by DFID in 2010-2011:
The table shows that the vast majority (88%) of schools in Lagos State are private and they cater for 57% of all enrolments. Most of these schools are owned by individual proprietors and serve low income families. The report therefore concludes that ‘the education landscape in Lagos is dominated by the private sector, with the majority of pupils attending private schools of all types’. Critically, 74% (8,952) of these private schools are unregistered and therefore not included in the official statistics. If the average number of children in these private schools is 114 then this would suggest that over 1,000,000 children in Lagos State alone are not out of school but attending unregistered fee paying private schools.
Further research carried out by DfID in Kwara State also estimated that there could be a possible 417,600 private enrolments, compared with the official school census from 2010/2011 which only recorded 157,327 children in private schools. This would add another 260,000 children who are not out of school but attending unregistered fee paying private schools. There are thirty six states in Nigeria and my guess is that if similar research was carried out in each state then the total number of out of school children would be dramatically reduced to a fraction of UNESCO’s original figure of 10.5 million - which is clearly bogus and in no way, shape or form reflects the reality on the ground.
So what could possibly explain such an extraordinary level of incompetence on behalf of UNESCO? First, UNESCO benefits from exaggerating the extent of the so called global education crisis because they are the international agency tasked with solving the problem. Without an education crisis and UNESCO would quickly become redundant. Second, by widely exaggerating the number of out of school children, this also allows UNESCO to point the finger at Western donors for failing to meet their funding commitments. This also helps to deflect attention away from the enormous problems facing government education sectors across the developing world including rampant corruption, teacher absenteeism and an almost unbelievably low level of learning - problems which UNESCO have failed to address over the previous half century.
Finally, UNESCO’s legendary anti-capitalist bias used to manifest itself in direct hostility to all forms of private sector involvement in education. Today, their opposition is much more civilised – they simply turn a blind eye to the remarkable growth of private schools for the poor across the developing world and instead continue to preach to the world in blissful ignorance and in a complete state of self-denial.
Brute force open-access
The fact that governments intervene in one area gives them an excuse to intervene in another. The demand that all car passengers, including those in the rear seats, should be compelled to wear seat-belts was justified by the observation that taxpayers supported the National Health Service, so if a passenger was injured in an accident, it would be a cost on us all. Laws banning smoking, and this week's proposal to put a tax on sugary drinks, are other examples that use the same justification.
Now the universities minister David Willetts is causing a stir in academe with his plans to force through open access. At present, academics do their research and try to get it printed in various academic journals. The more prestigious the journal, the more the paper is scrutinised through peer review, so getting printed in a good journal is some indication of quality. It is a costly process, and the leading journals can be quite expensive for libraries to buy, but at least the research that does get published is reasonably reliable.
However, Willetts takes the view that, since since we have a taxpayer-funded university system and a taxpayer-funded set of research councils, anything the academics produce rightly belongs to the public and should be made immediately and freely available – what is called 'open access'. The universities will not have to pay to get articles processed, and their libraries will not have to pay for the expensive journals, but they will have to pay to make the research available.
So it is quite probable that many of today's journals, and the learned societies that sponsor them, will simply disappear – which may help explain why a dozen of them have written to the government to complain about the idea.
Many academics have already opted for an open access policy (a policy practiced by the Adam Smith Institute too), since they want to get their work and ideas out to a wide audience. But often, papers are put online without proper editing – because the authors are not professional editors – which means that mistakes creep in (something that can be potentially dangerous in, say, medical or engineering research papers online). And the research goes up without proper peer review that might expose fundamental errors.
Academics will find that it is their university colleagues, not anonymous expert peers in the field from all over the world, who decide what goes online – but university jealousies can be very bitter. If there is no effective peer review, it will be hard to know which research is reckoned to be reliable and which is not. All papers that go public will have to be treated as potentially suspect. Mind you, in economics, some of us came to that conclusion many years ago. Perhaps David Willetts would be better employed making sure that research projects were a proper use of taxpayers' money, rather than bullying his university employees about how they present it.
70 years on, it's time to dismantle the welfare state
This week sees the 70th anniversary of the Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services, commonly known as the Beveridge Report, which is often credited as the underpinning of the welfare state in the UK (and several other countries which emulated the UK approach). To some extent this is an exaggeration as several aspects of the welfare state existed before 1942, especially in the area of education. Thus Beveridge represents a major expansion of an already existing shift away from private and philanthropic welfare and towards state provision.
It is salutary to note the timing - in 1942 Britain was in the midst of the greatest expansion of state activity it has ever witnessed. Government reached into and controlled nearly every aspect of socio-economic activity, allocating and planning resources, prices and labour to a minute degree. This philosophy, which proved highly successful for fighting a total war, was retained in peace time and employed as a mechanism for providing goods and services which had hitherto been privately provided. Many industries were nationalised and those areas of the economy which were left 'private' were heavily controlled. It was this state of affairs which promoted Hayek to publish The Road to Serfdom in 1943.
Without tracing the history of the past 70 years, it is clear that whilst some aspects of the World War II legacy have been rolled back - for instance the denationalisation of many industries during the 1980s - much of the philosophy of the Beveridge Report remains essentially intact. Whilst the nature of the welfare state has evolved, the mechanisms for provision are broadly identical to those introduced in 1945. For instance, the NHS remains a 'free-at-the-point-of-delivery' system in contrast to the Netherlands which dropped this approach and switched to a 'Bismarckian' one (nonetheless retaining the third-party payer problems inherent in all major health systems including the US one).
Readers of this website will hopefully already be convinced that the Beveridge inspired welfare state has been an unmitigated disaster for the provision of welfare in the UK, so I won't rehearse the arguments and the evidence. For those wanting a good introduction, James Bartholomew's classic The Welfare State We're In is a sensible place to start. Suffice to say, and despite the pernicious prejudice of many statists, Classical Liberals like myself care deeply for the plight of the poor, sick and needy. However, instead of clinging to failed and bankrupt systems which do far more harm than good to both recipients of welfare and society as a whole and especially to those at the bottom of society, we seek a different approach. Of course, those opposed to the status quo adopt a variety of positions: from those who argue for different modes of provision (school vouchers for instance); to those who desire a much smaller welfare state which only offers aid to the very poorest in society; to those who wish to do away with state welfare altogether
On the one hand, it is quite clear that opponents of the welfare state have - for the most part - utterly failed to convince the majority of the case for radical reform and retrenchment. Some tentative steps have been made in the field of school and higher education reform but healthcare, pensions and social protection remain largely untouched and any genuine and far-reaching attempts to do so would be political suicide. The forces of vested interests so clearly described in Public Choice Theory indicate why this is so - nonetheless the only means to overcome the barrier of vested interests is via the dissemination of ideas and ideological support so we must continue this effort. Moreover, recent years have seen the resurgence of the regulatory and license state - an activity which grew popular with the denationalisations of the 1980s and has been compounded with the recent Banking Crisis into a widespread belief that markets cannot function properly without state intervention. Many of these interventions are logically underpinned by the existence of state welfare provision; e.g. alcoholism is creating a burden on the NHS so should be prevented. Strike at the welfare state and we strike at the root of this approach as well.
On the other hand, we must continue to propose sensible mechanisms for moving from the status quo and towards private provision. As I have argued before, this is probably best done piecemeal. Given that opposition to the welfare state spans a spectrum of opinion, it is also sensible to move from reform of provision towards much greater privatisation and then ask the question of whether we need any state provision of welfare at all. One major area to target would be universality. This was one of the key principles of Beveridge and is one of the most unnecessary and expensive aspects of welfare provision - witness pensioners donating their winter fuel payments to charity. Universality was also introduced in order to engender support for the welfare state amongst the better off, remove it and that plank may also disappear.
Reformers must be careful, however. I would argue that the creation of so-called 'internal markets' and use of private providers in such areas as PPI and the NHS may actually be harmful to the cause of privatisation. Government is a poor customer and its size means it prefers to deal with large, equally bureaucratic companies such as Capita and Serco rather than SMEs - this assists large companies in dominating market sectors and leads to monopolistic outcomes. Bad privatisations such as the railways lead to the discrediting of privatisation in general. Failures discredit attempts to privatise properly as the many PPI scandals and the G4S scandal show. Pseudo-markets are likely to lead to exploitation of consumers by entrenched market-occupants protected by state regulation and intervention - witness the energy market or banking.
Even if everyone suddenly saw sense and decided to tear down the features of the welfare state, it would still take many years of consistent reform to return to private provision in order to build up the necessary markets and charitable endowments which the original government interventions so comprehensively destroyed. There would also have to be sweeping reforms in other areas: radical reform of planning laws to allow housing to become more affordable, large scale tax cuts and endowments funded by sell-offs of state property and - perhaps most critically - a return to sound money to allow people to save sufficiently for their futures instead of being impoverished by government inflationism. The welfare state has taken 70 years to build into its present appalling and oppressive form and it may well take 70 years or more to repair the damage, even if that were the general consensus. Still, there is no time like the present...
Ten reasons to be cheerful, part 9: Education
It is claimed in some circles that educational standards are falling, that it is being dumbed down, and that our successors will be less educated than ourselves. I disagree: I think education will be better.
9. Education
Education used to be only for an elite; now it is for the many. Across the world more and more children are being brought into education. Many of the world's top academic institutions are now found in the Far East, in countries that were recently poor. The education offered in such places is of a standard that leads on to research and eventually to Nobel prizes, while at a lower level children are in school instead of in the fields.
In the UK since 1950 we have seen higher education spread from covering one in twenty of the population to nearly one in two. Obviously the average standard is lower with more people given the opportunity, but the top 5% are no less well educated than were the previous top 5% when they alone had that chance.
Aristotle defined a university as a log with a teacher at one end and a student at the other, and it is true that almost everyone can benefit from education. It enhances and enriches life as well as opening doors to more of its opportunities. And this is not just for an elite.
One reason for my optimism that education will be better is that I think we are rapidly coming out of the notion that education should be about social engineering rather than about learning. When schooling was treated as a vehicle to promote equality, standards suffered. If universities are forced to take less able students to promote equality, standards will inevitably fall. I see many signs in the UK that people now want their children to receive a good education rather than one used to promote social equality.
Education is about striving and attainment, about being stretched and having one's talents and abilities developed to the full. When parents are given a choice, they choose schools which succeed in doing that, and part of my optimism comes from a belief that more of them will have that choice and will make it.
Another good portent, especially on the world scale, is the spread of computer-aided learning, including distant learning. This provides access by poor countries to some of the world's best teaching conducted over the internet. Even in developed countries, the development of machine intelligence could bring the ultimate one-for-one teacher-student ratio of Aristotle's log.
A solution to the exams dilemma
James Croft, author of our superb report on profit-making free schools, is now head honcho of the Centre for Market Reform of Education, and has today released a paper that raises serious questions about the government's plans to replace GCSEs. The recommendations are refreshingly innovative, harnessing the innovative properties of the market to try to solve some of the problems that the government's plans are aimed at addressing:
Michael Gove is one of those reforming politicians who galvanises support by polarising opinion. In the media frenzy surrounding the announcement of the government’s reforms to Key Stage 4 (KS4) qualifications yesterday, it is unsurprising that there wasn’t much place for intelligent comment offering qualified support to his proposals. While recognising the concerns that the Minister seeks to address, there are good reasons why even those who share his concerns about the utility of GCSEs, and what should be done with the curriculum to address them, should feel some unease about his proposals. Fortunately, there is a market-based solution that fits squarely within the Coalition parameters, which would be feasible if the Conservatives were to be more conservative and the Liberal Democrats more liberal. […]
You can read the rest of this blog post on The Centre for Market Reform of Education website.
When Qualifications Fail: Reforming 14-19 Assessment, the Centre’s first discussion paper, by James Croft and Anton Howes, is published today.
Why Marginal Revolution University won't work
Alex and Tyler have announced their new Marginal Revolution University. And I'm afraid that I have to say that I don't think it will work.
I should be careful to distinguish what I mean by "work" of course. They're very good teachers and I'm sure that those who take the courses will learn a great deal. This is one definition of a deliberate act of education working and by that definition of course it will work.
However, when we think of a new method of doing something entering the market we mean more than it just being the marginal (sorry) addition to that market. What we're really interested in is whether this new method can sweep away the old. Can restructure that part of the economy completely to all our benefit. And by that standard I think it's doomed to failure.
Not because it might not educate people better. Current universities are built still upon the limitations of medieval book production technologies. The whole idea of a lecture, one person shouting at a crowd, comes from the idea that books were simply, pre-Gutenberg, too expensive for all to have a copy. Thus they must be read out to the students. This is clearly no longer true but 600 years later we're still working within those past technological constraints. I think it's therefore fair to say that within higher education there's some resistance to change.
What we really want to know is whether online courses can replace, not just augment, the current university system. And I don't think any set of online courses is ever going to get the chance. They won't be accredited, it won't matter how many you have you'll never be awarded the piece of paper which is a degree. For those who have the power to award such degrees now know very well that they will be swept away if that does happen. Thus we'll have a great deal of institutional reluctance to allowing that to happen.
This is what I think is one of our major economic problems at present. There's all sorts of shouting about how we all have to be innovative: even the EU parrots the catchphrases. But that's only half of the story. We also need the destruction of the old ways to make way for the new and all too much of our economic and political life is in the preservation of those comfy sinecures the old ways present.
Another way to put this is that almost all innovation and productivity gains come from entry into and exit from markets. We've all the cheeleaders for the entry part but no one seems to be making the exit happen: far from it, huge amounts of energy seem to be being spent on preventing exit.
I hope of course that Alex and Tyler do succeed. As they point out, their first course takes half the time for all of the same material as that traditional university technology. Think how much we would all save if a first degree took 18 months not three years (for the English that is). Think how much more if it were not done on campus. But the great problem is going to be those who currently make a living from a slow campus degree: and unfortunately they're also the same people who determine what a degree is.
The coming qualifications revolution
A new generation of qualifications has recently emerged in the global IT sector, which operate very differently from our traditional GCSE’s and A Levels. For example, Microsoft Learning is now a global leader in IT qualifications and they offer a wide range of Microsoft Certifications which provide individuals with technical expertise and prove their ability to design and build innovative solutions across multiple technologies. Due to the rapid rate of change in this sector, new Microsoft qualifications are continuously being introduced and existing qualifications revised. Some certifications are retired when Microsoft ends its support for the related technology and others must be updated every three years by taking a refresh exam. This generates additional income for the company, enables students to keep up to date on the latest developments in the field and ensures that potential employers have confidence that someone who holds a Microsoft Certification is current and engaged with Microsoft technologies. In short the value and the relevance of the qualification are maintained over time.
The branding of these new qualifications is also significant because the quality and reputation of the qualification is now inextricably linked with the quality and reputation of the parent company. Therefore any criticism of the Microsoft Certification will have a negative impact on the corporate image of Microsoft itself, which places pressure on the company to continuously maintain and improve the quality of its qualifications by investing in research and development and experimenting with new and better ways of delivery. Further pressure comes from existing and any future competitors from around the world which may introduce a superior alternative at any time. Again, all of these pressures help to maintain the value and the relevance of the qualification.
Because the government uses examination results as a key measure of a schools performance, schools respond by teaching to the test and by choosing the exam board which has the highest pass rate, i.e the easiest exams. You therefore end up with a race to the bottom with each private exam company competing to provide the easiest exams. Children continue to get better exam results, schools continue to climb the league table and the government can boast of helping to improve standards across the board. And when people begin to highlight the blatantly obvious, that despite increasing grades, children appear to be less educated than half a century ago, the private companies which provide the curriculum and the exams can simply hide behind the cover of the government and its generic GCSE qualification, which now attract most of the criticism. As a result the branding of the company remains intact, while the value of the GCSE continues to decline, until it becomes worthless.
Thankfully, a new generation of specialist qualifications may soon begin to appear in more traditional subjects across the curriculum, as a variety of world class companies and organisations begin to offer their own branded certificates, in the subject areas in which they specialise. For example, Pfizer could provide qualifications in the sciences, Khan Academy on maths, Pearson on English, Adobe on web design, Virgin on entrepreneurship, Google on utilising the internet, National Geographic on geography, the British Museum on history, the Economist on economics, Fitness First on sport, Jamie Oliver on home economics, Office Angels on how to get a job, Marks and Spencer on customer service and Greenpeace on the environment. The list is endless.
This unbundling of the school into different subject areas helps to redefine the school as a mechanism that provides students with an assortment of services instead of delivering an indivisible package of education. We can then start to disentangle the components of that package and customise them to fit specific student needs and abilities. Choice, variety and specialisation will therefore begin to increase within each school, and each school will now be in a position to offer their students a variety of different courses and qualifications. With the use of online technology this increasing variety and customisation of children’s education is now much more affordable and this will also encourage a new blended style of learning that combines the classroom with an online experience.
This unbundling of the school will certainly appeal to those parents who live in areas where there is a lack of alternative schools to choose from or who may not want to disrupt their children’s education by transferring them to a different school. Instead, if they are not satisfied with their child’s progress in a particular subject then they will now have the opportunity to choose between a variety of different educational programmes and qualifications within the same school. Therefore the goal for customised, unbundled school reform is not to develop a new model of what a good school should look like but to create a flexible system that enables schools and a variety of specialist content providers to meet a variety of needs in increasingly effective and targeted ways.
The end result is that children would not simply graduate after 11 years of schooling with a single certificate which lists the subjects studied and the corresponding A-F grade. Instead they would graduate with a portfolio of branded qualifications which have real meaning in the outside world and which provide useful information concerning the knowledge and skills acquired by each student. However, unlike traditional qualifications these branded qualifications will not hold their value for ever but will expire after a certain period of time unless a refresh exam is taken. This is the only way to guarantee that the qualification holds its value and remains relevant over time, thereby protecting the brand image of both the qualification and the parent company.
Girls surpass boys at A Level: how surprising is that?
OK, perhaps I shouldn't use a distaff side Johnson as a source of fact but this did rather strike me:
It’s A-level results day! If this year is anything like previous years, people will aerate about two things: grade inflation, and girls doing better than boys. Naturally, I disapprove of grade inflation except when it benefits my own children (at the time of writing I don’t know my daughter’s grades…) but when it comes to girls’ success as a cohort, I exult openly.
As a general rule one of the things that we know about education is that girls do better under a system of continuous assessment and boys under a system of competitive examination. This is of course not necessarily true of any one individual: but it is on average across any particular age cohort of children. If you want the girls to do better than the boys then skew the testing system to course work. Want the boys to appear to do better then forget the homework and see what they can regurgitate in two three hour periods in the summertime.
That we really do know that this is true comes from the way that a few years back the system of examinations in Enlgand and Wales was deliberately changed to reflect this very point. GCSEs, A Levels, are now more based upon coursework than they used to be. The actual exams themselves now have less importance in the system than they used to. The stated objective of this change was to lessen the skew in favour of boys that a purely examination based system entailed.
So it is possible to exult about the girls outdoing the boys these days if that's what you want to do. For it would be an example of a government policy, a very rare one indeed, actually achieving the goal originally set out. The educationalists wished to reduce the achievement gap between boys and girls. They did so.
Hurrah.
However, do note how they achieved their goal. Not by improving education in any manner. They did it by changing the scoring method.
Maybe not so hurrah, eh?
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.