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- Motown Bronco - 08-03-2003 10:38 AM
Reading through the many posts and articles about schools lately, I thought I'd point out my thoughts regarding the state of education and (lack-of) competitive environment.
Given a child's K-12 education is one of the most important components of raising a kid, I'd tend to think that a healthy choice of eduction alternatives - based on subject matter, environment, etc. - would be optimal. An educational monopoly ("one size fits all") is inconsistant with a society of individuals with different needs, situations, and aspirations.
Public schools have the luxury of taxing childless folks and businesses to pay for operation, regardless of performance and services rendered. Due to this subsidy, government-run schools have an economic advantage on private schools. Through a subsidy to a public school system that requires attendance, there are far fewer alternatives to the public school than there would be otherwise. This has lowered choice.
Indeed, if one has a fundamental (no pun intended) problem with a local public school, the only options are homeschooling or religious or otherwise expensive private academies. Homeschooling requires a parent at home, which some families cannot do because of financial difficulties. So by its very design, public schools seek to monopolize on education by both pushing out competitors and making it as financially painful as possible for dissenters to opt out of the system. This pain is mild or meaningless to the wealthy, but for middle class and poor parents, it is a wall that leaves no choice but to yell and scream at uninterested education bureaucrats and the school board.
Moreover, how easy is it to set up a school? To hire teachers? To rent out a building? To maintain any monopoly requires the aid of the state, and it's not any different with public schools. I would be very surprised to find out that there aren't numerous regulations and other roadblocks to forming a private school, as well as rules on classroom size and shape, who you can hire, and a litany of other procedural rules which constrain the ability of schooling alternatives (or just schools in general) to open and compete. Any regulatory impediments to new school formation are a direct reduction of choice, a denial of competitive options for the education of children. Competition is good in all things but education, so it seems in its current state. The antitrust people clam up in shameful silence when the government educational monopoly is brought up. In general, I'm not opposed to natural monopolies. I am usually opposed to monopolies maintained by government fiat.