Vouchers 3

[Mike Oliker]

Robert,

I take your point.  When something has been run centrally for a long time
the habits and patterns which would welcome a new regime of decentralization
may not be available.  In the case you mentioned, before a new system of
rural transport could evolve, the automobile captured the market.  

It's a hard case: if Thatcher had been serious about rural transport she
needed to nurture it for a while, so it was ready when privatization came.

With education, we have three aces in the hole.  One is the college system
which many Americans have experienced and can serve as a cultural reference
point.  

Two is that 15% of K-12 is already privately delivered, creating a pool of
talent already acculturated to the marketplace (and preferring it enough to
often work there for less money).  

Third is the home schooling movement.  This gives us a pool of people who
have already taken on educating their own children, and might take in a
neighbor's kids.  They currently do it for zero money; if they could get
$10-30 K and still teach in a home setting, it might be very attractive.
This movement also gives us a structure of support programs and teaching
technology which could grow to serve the larger market vouchers would
create.

For rural folks the latter is a big advantage, but so is the fact that their
school districts are already fairly decentralized and small -- Iowa, as I
understand it, consistently produces the highest SAT scores.

Remember: vouchers doesn't envision ending the public school system, but
rather giving it competition.  You might call this marketization rather than
privatization.  

Smart public schools will even end up providing services to the small
private schools, just as they are for home schoolers now. If their
population shrinks, they can rent space to small private schools and evolve
in the direction of a condominium arrangement, which might be the best of
both worlds.

-Mike Oliker

> Message: 4
> Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2005 19:23:32 -0600
> From: Robert Holmes <rholmes62 at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Vouchers 2
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> <Friam at redfish.com>
> Message-ID:
> <857770150510131823j2eedbb50ncb4f60d1e34f5985 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> Having spent too many years in the UK under Generalissimo
> Thatcher, I'm always a bit wary of market solutions. The
> public/private competition that Mike describes might work
> somewhere with a big population but would it work in small
> communities? Would we really get "a lot of tiny schools"? If
> running a school entailed purely variable costs (proportional
> to student numbers), perhaps. But if there's any sort of
> fixed cost associated with setting up a school, I'm not sure
> the logic holds.
>
> This reminds me of the deregulation (i.e. privatisation) of
> public transport in the UK. "Of course rural communities will
> still be served," ran the argument, "the Invisible Hand of
> the market will ensure it." Of course it didn't. Micro-bus
> and train companies did not suddenly materialise to take over
> what had been regional/national government responsibilities.
> Public transport outside metropolitan centres evaporated and
> the car increased its stranglehold on Britain's roads.
>
> Robert
>
> P.S. I know that the implicit top-downess of this post is in
> direct contradiction to the bottom-upness espoused in my post
> of 10 minutes ago but hey, consistency is the hobgoblin of
> tiny minds, yes?
> ====================================================================