When Schools Fail

The Mandella School of Science and Math, a private school participating in Milwaukee's voucher program, was shut down by a Judge last Thursday. In addition to doing a reportedly lousy job teaching its students, the school is alleged to have surrepticiously filed for $300,000 worth of vouchers for some of its students without telling their parents. The parents in question were already paying tuition for their children, so the school is believed to have been double-billing for these students.

Opponents of choice can be expected to quickly raise up Mandella as an example of everything they believe to be wrong with a free market approach to education. In particular, they will make two assertions: that vouchers and other school choice programs will lead to rampant corruption, and that schools are too important to be allowed to fail. Such claims are nonsense.

Corruption of all sorts is already rampant within the existing public school system. The most recent book to address this issue is Battling Corruption in America's Public Schools by Lydia Segal. I argued in Market Education that the distorted incentive structure of traditional public schools make them substantially more susceptible to corruption than are market systems. More recently, I've found that the evidence from school systems in developing countries supports that view.

The notion that "failure is not an option" in education is equally nonsensical. So long as schools are run by human beings, some schools will fail. Historically, competitive market schools have failed their students far less frequently than have government monopolies. More importantly, markets force failing schools to either improve or go out of existence, whereas government school monopolies keep their failing schools in operation for year after year, inflicting their pedagogical malpractice on generation after generation of children.

Opponents of school choice worry what will happen to children on those occasions when a private school fails and closes mid-year. They should be far more worried about the children that are forced to stay in perennially failing public schools for their entire educational careers. While markets allow parents to quickly transfer their students to a better school as soon as they become dissatisfied with their current selection, government monopolies do not. The results of that monopoly are tragic. According to the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) nearly a quarter of young Americans are functionally illiterate--after as much as twelve years of government schooling at a cost of roughly $100,000 per student.