School Choice and "Creative Destruction"
School choice has many variations the most successful of which is the
charter school movement. There were no such schools prior to 1992 when
the first one opened in St. Paul, Minnesota, a school which still
functions today. That lonely beginning has grown in sixteen short
years to more than 4200 such schools, enrolling more than a million and
a quarter students. While skirmishes with an adamant opposition
continue it is highly unlikely that such a movement, which continues to
expand yearly, will be stopped much less reversed.
One feature
of charter schools, little noted by either advocates or opponents is
that fact that some 500 such schools never got off the ground or were
subsequently closed. Nor, if it is noted, is it recognized as the
positive feature of the movement that it is.
For one thing, 500
not open while 4200 are ongoing means less than one in nine has failed
to make it. This is a commendable, indeed remarkable, success rate.
In the private economy it is sometimes noted that more than half of new
startup business fail within a few years.
Even more importantly,
the ability to close schools that are not sufficiently successful is
perhaps the most noteworthy feature of any school choice program, as it
is wherever free choice is an essential component, such as in the
market system, free enterprise, and capitalism in general. This
built-in feature of ongoing renewal and revival is what is lacking in
monopolies in general and government monopolies in particular, and is
what leads inevitably to their inefficiency at best and general
incompetency at worst.
A prime example: the public school
system. When Horace Mann in Massachusetts in the 1830s and 1840s was
successfully promoting the creation of a public school system one of
his main arguments was that more public schools would mean fewer
prisons. Today we have some 100,000 public schools at the same time we
lead the world with our nonpolitical prison population.
Even
worse, he assured his public of the day that public schools were
essential for the education of the general population. Yet studies
have shown that, in both the United States and Great Britain the
literacy rate was higher in Mann's day that it is today. And it is
also true, for those willing to see, that, whatever positive successes
the public schools may have, and there are some, they have never been
able to educate the great majority of the students.
A century
ago, for example, only 6% of the students advanced as far as high
school. It wasn't until 1950 that half of the students in 5th grade
seven years earlier were still there in 12th grade. Even today it's
estimated that 30% of students drop out prior to graduating from high
school and at least an equivalent percentage graduate without having
the minimal academic skills necessary to function at more than a
rudimentary level. In not just individual schools but in some large
urban districts more than half the students drop out and many others
fail to pass achievement tests.
This is not a common occurrence in charter schools, and there is no evidence to date that it will happen.
The
reason is the built-in corrective feature where free choice is
present. Joseph Schumpeter, in "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy,"
in 1942 labeled this characteristic "Creative Destruction." It is the
main reason free systems ultimately triumph while simultaneously the
main reason such systems are criticized. If individuals are free to
reject a service or product those employed in that process may be
adversely affected. Such change can be painful.
When a charter
or nonpublic school fails, students leave and the staff has to look
elsewhere for employment. In the monopolistic public school system
students can't leave while the staff can use political pressure to
oppose change. And they do. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that
the public school system has 10,000,000 employees. Since none of them
wants to lose their job they pressure politicians to maintain the
system by preserving the monopoly. There is no countervailing power
defending the interests of students and taxpayers.
And you wonder why school reform fails.
David W. Kirkpatrick is a Senior Education Fellow with the U.S. Freedom Foundation and The Buckeye Institute.
