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My school district spends ~$7000 per student. I'd say I got a pretty good education. Vouchers would not have to be ridiculously high to provide a quality educat

by tsally 17y ago

My school district spends ~$7000 per student. I'd say I got a pretty good education. Vouchers would not have to be ridiculously high to provide a quality education as you imply. Not everyone is going to get a gold-plated education, but the minimum could be far higher than it currently is at the same price. So you are basically ignoring the market failure I point out then? Take your pick of any celebrity clothing line to see first hand evidence of this market failure. It seems like you just don't like profit-seeking entities. I love profit seeking entities, but different contexts require different definitions of profit. Your average business person lacks an investment in society and in the long term that is necessary to define profit in education. EDIT: Anyway... I've entertained the idea of education being delivered as a private good for long enough. Truly it's my belief that it's a public good, but I'm forced to argue as if it were a private one in order to make any progress. I'll read your next reply, but cramming education into the context of a private good has worn me out.

natrius 17y ago
The vast majority of the benefits of an education accrue to the person who gets the education. That makes it a private good in the economic sense, but that doesn't necessarily mean it should be provided privately. I had already replied to the "teaching to the test" issue in the thread you linked to. Public schools already do this, yet somehow that's what we should fear private schools doing? From the very beginning, I've stated that these schools should be certified by the government in some form, so if you're satisfied with the public schools the government deems acceptable, I don't see why you'd have an issue with similar private schools. I don't understand how you can think you're doing poor people a favor by forcing them to attend their crappy neighborhood schools instead of giving them choices.
- tsally 17y ago
  Ugh, I had to reply. :-p First, that's an incorrect (or at least not complete) definition of a private good. A private good is rivalrous OR excludable. Education is non-excludable because raising the education level of economic actors benefits society, which benefits even the uneducated. Two reasons education is (largely) nonrival: (1) we can have more than one student in a classroom and/or host classes online and (2) there are not a finite number of diplomas a highschool can issue, they cannot be permanently consumed. Therefore, education is a public good. You'll be tempted to nitpick about the nonrival part. After all, diplomas can't be consumed but seats in a classroom can. However given enough seats and enough qualified teachers, education truly is nonrival. This would be a meaningless statement (after all, who cares about situations with unlimited resources) except that making education nonrival is actually fairly cheap compared to the benefit received by society. And because education is a public good it should be provided by the government, just like national defense. Private education disgusts me almost as much as the idea of private militias. But that's neither here nor there in the context of our current discussion. I don't understand how you can think you're doing poor people a favor by forcing them to attend their crappy neighborhood schools instead of giving them choices. They wont have choice. They are contained by geography in a public system. They are constrained by money in a private system. If they go to a poor school they go to an ineffective school, regardless of whether it is public/private. I fail to see why you think schools on average will have more money in a private system. I've already pointed out that free market forces are operating on the public system.
  - natrius 17y ago
    By that logic, pizza is a public good. When I eat pizza, I become a much more pleasant person in my interactions with others, which benefits society. Most things that are good for an individual benefit society as a whole. It's a matter of degree. Education benefits individuals far more than it benefits society, which leads me to place it in the excludable column. Your justification for non-rivalrous is circular. Since education is valuable to society, we should be willing to pay enough for it to be non-rivalrous. I don't think that's a valid argument. It's irrelevant to my point anyway. The whole point of vouchers is to reduce the constraint of money on one's educational choices. Poor people will still have limited choices, but they'll have more than one, which is a significant improvement. I don't think a privatized school system would necessarily have more money in it. (It likely would at the higher end, but not at the lower end.) The benefit doesn't come from money; it comes from competition for that money. Money gets wasted on ineffective programs and teachers in public schools because there's little incentive to improve effectiveness. We're talking about an industry in which merit pay is a controversial topic! When there is a fairly direct relationship between the quality of education imparted and the monetary rewards received by teachers and principals, it seems pretty likely that performance will improve. Good discussion.

by tsally 17y ago

natrius 17y ago

The vast majority of the benefits of an education accrue to the person who gets the education. That makes it a private good in the economic sense, but that doesn't necessarily mean it should be provided privately. I had already replied to the "teaching to the test" issue in the thread you linked to. Public schools already do this, yet somehow that's what we should fear private schools doing? From the very beginning, I've stated that these schools should be certified by the government in some form, so if you're satisfied with the public schools the government deems acceptable, I don't see why you'd have an issue with similar private schools. I don't understand how you can think you're doing poor people a favor by forcing them to attend their crappy neighborhood schools instead of giving them choices.

tsally 17y ago
Ugh, I had to reply. :-p First, that's an incorrect (or at least not complete) definition of a private good. A private good is rivalrous OR excludable. Education is non-excludable because raising the education level of economic actors benefits society, which benefits even the uneducated. Two reasons education is (largely) nonrival: (1) we can have more than one student in a classroom and/or host classes online and (2) there are not a finite number of diplomas a highschool can issue, they cannot be permanently consumed. Therefore, education is a public good. You'll be tempted to nitpick about the nonrival part. After all, diplomas can't be consumed but seats in a classroom can. However given enough seats and enough qualified teachers, education truly is nonrival. This would be a meaningless statement (after all, who cares about situations with unlimited resources) except that making education nonrival is actually fairly cheap compared to the benefit received by society. And because education is a public good it should be provided by the government, just like national defense. Private education disgusts me almost as much as the idea of private militias. But that's neither here nor there in the context of our current discussion. I don't understand how you can think you're doing poor people a favor by forcing them to attend their crappy neighborhood schools instead of giving them choices. They wont have choice. They are contained by geography in a public system. They are constrained by money in a private system. If they go to a poor school they go to an ineffective school, regardless of whether it is public/private. I fail to see why you think schools on average will have more money in a private system. I've already pointed out that free market forces are operating on the public system.
- natrius 17y ago
  By that logic, pizza is a public good. When I eat pizza, I become a much more pleasant person in my interactions with others, which benefits society. Most things that are good for an individual benefit society as a whole. It's a matter of degree. Education benefits individuals far more than it benefits society, which leads me to place it in the excludable column. Your justification for non-rivalrous is circular. Since education is valuable to society, we should be willing to pay enough for it to be non-rivalrous. I don't think that's a valid argument. It's irrelevant to my point anyway. The whole point of vouchers is to reduce the constraint of money on one's educational choices. Poor people will still have limited choices, but they'll have more than one, which is a significant improvement. I don't think a privatized school system would necessarily have more money in it. (It likely would at the higher end, but not at the lower end.) The benefit doesn't come from money; it comes from competition for that money. Money gets wasted on ineffective programs and teachers in public schools because there's little incentive to improve effectiveness. We're talking about an industry in which merit pay is a controversial topic! When there is a fairly direct relationship between the quality of education imparted and the monetary rewards received by teachers and principals, it seems pretty likely that performance will improve. Good discussion.