Bryan Caplan has some fun explaining why public education is a waste by analogy:
You think we have too much education, and I think we’re doing education wrong. In other words, you want less education, and I want better education.
My response is that doing less education is easy, and improving the education system is hard. Here’s an analogy I use in the book: Imagine that your friend comes to you and says, “You know that toenail fungus cream that you’re spending a hundred bucks a month on?” “Yeah.” “Here’s clear proof it doesn’t work, so stop using it,” and you say, “Well, I’m not going to stop using it until you give me a toenail fungus cream that does work.”
Your friend says, “Well, I don’t really know one that works, and there’s a lot of debate about it, and it’s really hard to find one. What I do know is that you should stop wasting a hundred bucks a month.”
To me, that’s a lot of what’s going on with education. We’ve got very clear evidence that we’re wasting a lot, but we don’t have a clear idea as to what would be better. All we know is that the system we have now is grossly dysfunctional, so I don’t think we should keep pouring money into it.
[...]
Cutting waste is easy and transparent. But making things better is really hard and, in order to do it, you’ve got to trust a bunch of people who have already really screwed up, and that sounds imprudent to me.
Seems to me that the obvious solution is to roll things back to what we were doing before, when education did work.
My grandmother taught in a one-room school in Eastern Oregon for several years before she went to college. Working only with a high-school education, which in those days was a significant achievement in itself, she successfully taught up to the eighth grade. All of her students learned to read and write.
Contrast that to today, when we have teachers with degrees in Education that can’t write a coherent sentence in English, let alone a paragraph, and the teacher’s unions in our major cities refuse to support basic skills tests for the teachers that I could have passed in the sixth grade, and I think you can agree that we would probably do a lot better just by rolling back all these “advances” in educational theory and practice…
Texas District 24 LP Candidate Proposal:
State level education funding should pay only for accomplishment. I propose creating an educational endowment for each student, with the money paid out only when that student achieves a specified annual level.
Education funds are currently paid in at the top and are expected to be used properly to educate the students, but often are not. Big inner city public school systems have become a funding source for Democrats, while turning out poorly educated graduates, and leaving dropouts to fend for themselves.
We should change all state level funding to an endowment at the individual student level. The money stays in the student account until each level is met, making poor students much more valuable to educators who can catch them up. For example, bringing a fifteen year old at the sixth grade level up to sophomore level would pay four years of compensation to the successful educator. Unpaid funds should stay in each student account indefinitely, allowing people who finally get their act together as adults to obtain an education.
Opening educational services to the free market will see most students moving through material much faster than at present. This will allow for practical job related instruction, and college level courses, to be included.
Competition among educational providers will make full use of technology, will provide useful training for actual jobs, will deliver far more education for the same money, and will free the taxpayers from the grip of an incredibly corrupt and self-serving educational establishment. The school funding mess cannot be ended simply, but if state level funds were used to set up student endowments, paid out only after educational accomplishment, if would start dramatic change.
In a world of free market provision of educational services, quality and variety will increase and costs will fall. Tax funding might eventually end, with charities providing for poor students, and the cost of education dramatically lower than it has become. The largest source of endless property tax increases could be removed.
State level education funding should pay only for accomplishment. I propose creating an educational endowment for each student, with the money paid out only when that student achieves a specified annual level.
Education funds are currently paid in at the top and are expected to be used properly to educate the students, but often are not. Big inner city public school systems have become a funding source for Democrats, while turning out poorly educated graduates, and leaving dropouts to fend for themselves.
We should change all state level funding to an endowment at the individual student level. The money stays in the student account until each level is met, making poor students much more valuable to educators who can catch them up. For example, bringing a fifteen year old at the sixth grade level up to sophomore level would pay four years of compensation to the successful educator. Unpaid funds should stay in each student account indefinitely, allowing people who finally get their act together as adults to obtain an education.
Opening educational services to the free market will see most students moving through material much faster than at present. This will allow for practical job related instruction, and college level courses, to be included.
Competition among educational providers will make full use of technology, will provide useful training for actual jobs, will deliver far more education for the same money, and will free the taxpayers from the grip of an incredibly corrupt and self-serving educational establishment. The school funding mess cannot be ended simply, but if state level funds were used to set up student endowments, paid out only after educational accomplishment, if would start dramatic change.
In a world of free market provision of educational services, quality and variety will increase and costs will fall. Tax funding might eventually end, with charities providing for poor students, and the cost of education dramatically lower than it has become. The largest source of endless property tax increases could be removed.
They’re called microschools now, Kirk, and they’re cutting edge.