BuckeyeBlog

Yesterday I had the pleasure of being a guest on the Brian Wilson radio show in Toledo. During the segment we spoke about the current state of school choice in Ohio, problems with informing parents about their options, and the accountability argument that continues to be fought between supporters and opponents. Later in the program, Brian interviewed Governor Strickland and asked for his opinion about giving parents the right to choose the school best suited to their child’s needs. The Governor’s response was truly Orwellian (around 9 minutes into the segment): “I think private schools are fine, but I don’t believe the public should be expected to pay for a private education when the public has no oversight as to how those resources would be spent or utilized.”

The Governor’s argument here is very much what Orwell referred to as “newspeak“, and in particular an attempt to reduce a concept to a simple dichotomy that does not allow for any gray areas of meaning. According to Strickland there is only public and private, and apparently any institution that is not completely controlled and operated by the state (or a local) government is a private entity that cannot be trusted with public funds.

There are two significant flaws with this logic. The first is that there is in fact a significant middle ground between public and private, and the line continues to be blurred. In the academic literature, and increasingly in the real world of policymaking, the old top-down models of government have been replaced by public-private partnerships, network governance, and the reinventing government model popularized by Osborne and Gaebler. The state should focus on what it does best, steering policy, and work with the private and nonprofit sectors that can focus on rowing, or actually handling the day-to-day implementation of policy. In short, these new conceptions for governing highlight the significant gray area between public and private institutions. The Governor’s dichotomy is a false one, and anachronistic at that.

The second flaw with the Governor’s argument is that private schools do face public oversight. Far from enjoying total autonomy from the state as Strickland suggests, private schools are subject to a fair amount of state regulation. A new report from the Friedman Foundation studied the regulatory environment for private schools in every state, and Ohio received a C-. The report card for Ohio makes it clear that the “no oversight” argument is simply wrong.

Ultimately, what I think all of this points to is the danger of believing that the public interest can only be served by government-run institutions. To be sure, there are some areas where public-private partnerships work better than others and it is a debate worth having about its applicability to K-12 education. But the reflexively anti-private school arguments of choice opponents are nothing more than sophistry and do nothing to further the debate we ought to be having.

Tags: School Choice

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 2:09 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.