Apparently it's that time of year again, the time of year when politicians acknowledge that the public education system is getting worse (or remaining stagnantly bad at best) and start making efforts and promises to "fix it" or "get it right this time."
The Atlantic yesterday had an
article summarizing this latest effort from the Obama administration. What is the newest issue affecting our public schools that if we can just change this will make things a lot better?
Today, President Obama wades in to a controversy that threatens to split one of the Democratic Party's most generous source of donations and activists, the teacher unions, from the whole. The dispute is about teacher performance, narrowly, and about government's distribution of common goods more generally.
Obama wants more accountability for teachers.
This idea is not bad in and of itself. Teachers should have always been held accountable for the performance of their students and be evaluated by that performance among other things. However, this is only a small piece of the larger problem with public education in general, which The Atlantic describes just a few sentences later without even realizing it.
Part of the problem is that nothing seems to work: not charter schools, not tying teachers to student performance, not throwing money at schools, not even curricula reform. There are blips -- a voucher program works here, a charter school works there. Nothing seems to work everywhere.
This summarizes the exact problem with public education. Top-down one size fits all solutions for everyone. As is nearly always necessary in a situation like this, I must quote Hayek:
The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate "given" resources — if "given" is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these "data." It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.
The "Knowledge Problem" that Hayek spoke of here is the exact problem with our current public education system. No matter how well intentioned or how hard someone tries, a single person or group of people in Washington can not possibly know the best system of education for students in downtown L.A., El Paso, Bismark, Anchorage, Little Rock, etc... All of these areas of the country have large differences in their social and economic make up. How can one type of education system possibly be the best solution for all of them?
Maybe charter schools are the best solution for L.A., but Anchorage would benefit from school vouchers, while all Little Rock needs is more funding for new textbooks. If we allow local communities and individuals to make their own decisions on education we should see better results. Not because they are any smarter or more well intentioned than the politicians in Washington, but purely because they are not as far removed from the individual needs of the students in that community.
Now if only we can get the politicians to admit their own lack of knowledge we might be able to make some progress.
