Competition is good for schools

Mitchell school Superintendent Joe Graves addresses school choice, but fell a little short in this op-ed:

It is not often that anyone outside of that state pays much attention to a referendum election in Utah, but last week’s was different.

Last week, Utah voters went to the polls to vote on the country’s first comprehensive statewide voucher program. If at this point you are quickly making the decision to abandon this article, keep in mind that Utah’s decision has serious implications for America’s entire system of K-12 education, public and private.

What those implications are revolve around the wider idea of school choice, a topic first broached, rather extraordinarily, by John Stuart Mill in 1838 in his essay, "On Liberty."

Mill’s position was clear and forceful: "An education established and controlled by the state should only exist, if it exist at all, as one among many competing experiments, carried on for the purpose of example and stimulus, to keep the others up to a certain standard of excellence."

What is most extraordinary about it, at least to me, is that he voiced this opinion when public education was still a rarity. It is as if someone both predicted traffic jams and offered a solution to them the year before Ford came out with the Model T. Still, Mill’s notion about the need for competition in the educational marketplace would still be mouldering in the grave with his more corporeal remains had it not been for Milton Friedman, who has pushed for both voucher systems and other forms of market competition in schools since the 1960s, formalizing it in a PBS series and his 1979 book, "Free to Choose."

The first anniversary of Friedman’s death, incidentally, is three days hence.

So shall we assume that Friedman’s day is over, that if even a conservative state like Utah can’t pass statewide vouchers (it went down handily with a 62 percent majority vote against), that the whole notion of market competition in the American system of education can now be buried with him?

No. In fact, not even the most Pollyanna paramour of the NEA could argue that with a straight face. Vouchers may be or may not ever take hold in America but the idea that schools should have to compete is now a well-accepted idea in this country. Though there have been the occasional attempts to stamp out private schools (Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 1925 for example), they have been with us since the founding of the country and, thanks to inter-denominational Christian bickering in the 19th century, and establishment clause Supreme Court decisions in the second half of the 20th century, they are not only a staple of American education, they are in many places a growing one.

The latter factor also played a part, though it was not the entire cause, of the rise of home schooling in America, an export we are now sending to many other countries of the world. In addition to competing with private schools and home-based education systems (though this is sometimes a misnomer for many "home" schoolers actually send their children to non-accredited private schools, which is not a criticism but rather a clarification of terms), public schools in most states, including South Dakota for more than a decade now, also compete with each other through open enrollment. Friedman’s ideas may have not reached the final summit but they have certainly made camp at the base of the precipice.

So what does a public educator make of all this? In my baser moments, would I like to see all competition in education go away? I suppose, but in that I’m no different than anyone else in business. To quote another even more deceased economist, Adam Smith, business people typically have "a mean rapacity (and) monopolizing spirit." He continued: "People of the same trade seldom meet together without concocting a conspiracy against the public."

Upon more reasoned and enlightened reflection, however, I have to admit that competition in education is good for both the students and the field in general. We monitor our market share, for example, quite carefully. How many children within the Mitchell School District are home schooled? This number at first increased, then decreased, and now holds fairly steady in the mid-30s. How many attend the accredited private schools, John Paul II and Mitchell Christian? Of this number, how many are enrolling from outside the district? The enrollment numbers at both schools are fairly steady, with at least some of the students enrolling from outside our borders.

So what, then, of open enrollment? Of the varying forms of competition among schools, this has perhaps the most variability. When it began in the 1990s, the number of students open enrolling out of and in to Mitchell did not exceed a score. As recently as 2003, that number was 109. In 2006-2007, it had risen to 161, with 78 leaving Mitchell and 83 coming in. Which is interesting, of course, but it’s really little more than the veneer.

To get to the real guts of the matter, to increase the competitiveness of your educational institution, you need to get beyond those simple numbers to the reasons for people home schooling or private schooling or open enrolling. In other words, you have to do market research and then use that information to improve your school. It is what Mitchell endeavors to do when it tries to collect this data in a systematic, formalized process.

All of which leads me to the inexorable conclusion that competition does generally improve even as it torments. And schools are no exception. Apparently for Smith, Mill and Friedman, death is no impediment to being right.