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Lifesaving competition

In her first Edspresso article, Nancy Salvato quoted former teacher Ruth Holmes Cameron:

You know competition is not for children.  It’s not for human beings. It’s not for public education.

We are the first to agree that education is absolutely critical for the survival of this nation; that children who do not receive sufficient education are woefully equipped to be contributing members of society; that lack of a good education can doom an individual to a life of poverty and misery.  But there is something even more critical to an individual’s well-being than education.  So let’s talk about food.  

If we are to take the first two sentences of Cameron’s quote seriously, we must then seek to compare them to anything related to the health and condition of human beings.  However, education is merely extremely important, while food is critical.  So if the state, and only the state, is to be trusted with educating a child, the state should certainly also be responsible for feeding that child. 

But unfortunately, history (particularly in the 20th century) is littered with disastrous examples of state-monopolized efforts to feed the people.  Just a few:

• 1921-1923: Under Soviet rule, 1.5 million to 2 million people, most of them Ukrainians, died of starvation and accompanying epidemics. 
• 1932-1933: Stalin decided Ukrainians hadn’t had enough yet, leading to another seven million dead. 
• 1959-1961: Mao Zedong’s "Great Leap Forward" claimed the lives of as many as 40 million in Communist China. 
• While estimates vary widely (600,000 to 3.5 million), most people agree that the 1990s were lethal for North Korea. 

In particular, these remarks kind of sum up the nature of state-sponsored famine:

In recent years, North Korean leaders have announced a series of economic reforms, but (Marcus Noland, senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C.) said he doesn’t believe they will go far enough to pull the country out of the crisis. The situation, he said, is deeply rooted in the structure of the nation’s agricultural and economic system and will not be easy to resolve.

Noland said he believes North Korea has to abandon its national goal of agricultural self-sufficiency and adopt a course of industrializing to produce goods for export. Money from those exported goods could then be used to import the food North Korea needs.

North Korea’s northerly latitude and high population compared with its amount of arable land mean it isn’t the most ideal place to grow a lot of food. When combined with its comparatively literate and skilled population available to work in industrial settings, the way seems clear, Noland said.

The nation’s leadership stands in the way, however. With power concentrated in the hands of Kim Jong Il, the army, and a small number of people around Kim Jong Il, Noland said he didn’t see the nation changing course anytime soon.

Further, with China, South Korea, and Japan worried about the nation’s stability, Noland believes North Korea will receive enough food and other aid to forestall a serious challenge to the nation’s leadership.

In other words, the key to North Korea’s survival lies in the market.  But as long as North Korea keeps doing what it’s doing (i.e. a state-run monopoly), it will keep getting what it’s getting.  

Summary: at best, state-monopolized agricultural and economic systems work badly.  When people aren’t starving to death, they are merely poor.  As Bulgaria’s former president put it, communism tends to produce "equality in poverty".  

Now let’s go back to Cameron’s statement:

You know competition is not for children.  It’s not for human beings. It’s not for public education.

With all that communist tragedy as a backdrop, we would suggest that the third sentence of that quote really shouldn’t be attached to the first two.  While competition’s compatibility with public education might be worthy of debate, its compatibility with humanity really isn’t debatable at all.  As Glenn Reynolds pointed out in his new book, much of the 20th century was spent demonstrating that trying to shut down market forces in lieu of state-run enterprises was not only much less efficient but much more lethal. 

This certainly isn’t to suggest that those opposing school choice are communists or wannabe dictators.  We have no question that they only want to produce the best possible system of education, or at least guarantee a minimal level of education, for as many children as possible.  So do we.  Which is why we trust parents more than the state, given government’s track record of producing mediocrity for all. 

Having considered all this, let’s now go here:

Nervous parents packed a South Los Angeles church Thursday hoping that they would win the lottery.

The jackpot: a spot for their child at one of Green Dot Public Schools’ new charter campuses.

Several hundred parents and students came out to Victory Baptist Church and waited through the evening to see if they would get into one of the five charter campuses that will open in the fall in South Los Angeles.

Green Dot Public Schools founder Steve Barr praised those who came out.

"You are all revolutionaries," he said. "The whole city is watching tonight."

Our hats are off to the folks at Green Dot for working to extend educational opportunities to the inner city.  But here’s what we find almost heartbreaking about the situation: why should anybody be made to hope–almost beg–for rescue from a dysfunctional school?  Yet this is the product of the government monopoly in education.  Much as such ironclad control of economics led to equality in poverty, our state-run education system has led to equality in mediocrity. 

Suppose that, instead of begging for a good education for their children, these parents were begging for bread for their children.  Can you imagine the headlines?  There would be unbelievable shame, a national outcry, demands for investigations.  It would be unthinkable.  In fact, it is unthinkable–because American market forces have unleashed an agricultural system that is more than capable of feeding both itself and a number of Third World countries.  After all, we associate poverty abroad with starvation, but when we think of poverty in the United States, we think of obesity. 

Lots of people are railing against "privatization" of education (where the devil is in the details*), or are clamoring to "save public education" (as if public education was somehow innocent in all this).  But nobody is calling for government to take over U.S. farms in order to feed the masses, for obvious reasons: the market can handle it, and far better than the government ever could.  The markets figured out how to feed our children.  So why shouldn’t they be able to work out how to educate them as well? 

*One last thought about "privatization".  We’re not necessarily interesting in farming out the running of schools to private companies.  And this might be the dream of libertarians everywhere, but we certainly aren’t interested in merely cutting taxes to almost nothing, shutting down public school districts and leaving the markets to dictate the rest.  When it comes to education, all we want is for parents to have as many options as possible to select the best educational opportunity possible
for their children.  In other words, we’re interested in what works.  And frankly, the government hammerlock that currently exists in K-12 education doesn’t.