Knowledge Is Power — But Only When You Have Choices
Apropos of my blog post about charter schools in New Orleans from last week, Katherine Mangu-Ward has an article in Reason today about the Los Angeles Times publication of extensive information on nearly 6,000 Los Angeles public school teachers. This information is something of a hot button issue in Los Angeles right now, with the teacher unions calling for a boycott of the Los Angeles Times and school reformers hoping that any knowledge about which teachers perform well and which do not can lead to better academic outcomes.
Mangu-Ward, however, is skeptical that there will be any revolutionary changes in the school system without an expansion of parental choices to accompany the newly public information:
Even if parents know who the good teachers are—and they often do already—it often doesn’t matter, since kids are randomly assigned. They’re allocated to a district, a school, a schedule, and a classroom, all without any input from students or parents. The biggest decision public school parents get to make about their child’s primary education is where they choose to live. Short of staging a mini-sit in at the guidance counselor’s office (something my parents were known to do from time to time) there’s not much you can do once the die has been cast. And if you’re a parent who doesn’t have the luxury of taking a day off from work to spend fighting the school bureaucracy, your kid is stuck wherever he was randomly assigned, no matter what. Teacher data doesn’t do a lick of good if you don’t have input about which teacher you wind up with.
Instituting a small degree of teacher choice wouldn’t be overwhelmingly difficult. Schools at all levels could opt for the kind of first-come, first-served lottery that large colleges use. It’s not an ideal system, but it’s an improvement. Again, computers these days, they can do amazing stuff. Once a system is in place, this kind of limited choice would be neither time consuming nor expensive. But it would create one outcome that teachers unions will do almost anything to stop: It would quickly become obvious which teachers aren’t desirable. The teachers with the half-empty classrooms would be ripe for firing. And that’s the scenario that makes teachers unions (and to a lesser degree school boards and other education bureaucracies) fear a flood of data, especially if it’s accompanied by even a little choice.
Such a reform would even avoid the common complaint against charters, vouchers, and educational tax credits, that they take money away from the public schools. We can simply introduce competition within the schools themselves. I doubt this will turn a failing school system around, but it should improve the situation at the margin.
Would the sought after teachers be the easy graders who don’t ask much of the students or the good purveyors of knowledge who grade rather unforgivingly? ‘Deisirable’ and ‘good’ are not the same thing, as Socrates once pointed out [I knew that dialogue would come in handy sometime]. I see a mix and it isn’t black and white.
Who wants a tough grader when you are trying to get into a upper tier college? Especially as some colleges are giving less weight to the SAT/ACT.
Comment by Papillon — September 2, 2010 @ 9:07 a.m.
This is specifically about elementary school teachers, so I think this problem is solved in most cases at that level by the parents making the selection. I’m sure some parents just want to see A’s on the report card regardless of actual learning, but I think they are far outnumbered by parents who want to see their children work for a decent education.
This certainly becomes a problem at higher levels with students making more decisions for themselves and opting for the path of least resistance. Grade inflation is a huge problem at both the high school and collegiate levels, but nonetheless, our college system, which has the most choice by far of all our educational systems, remains one of the best in the world. Clearly there are ways for colleges to differentiate between those professors who just hand out A’s like party favors and those who earn good student reviews through good teaching.
Comment by John Payne — September 2, 2010 @ 11:23 a.m.
I put five children through public and parochial schools. But I had no idea–besides rumor–of which teachers in the next grade up were good or bad. That is why we hire principals. The idea that schools can act like the free market for corn or cotton is one of the dumbest ideas conservatives have come up with. I have always thought it was ultimately designed to pay off catholic voters who vote republican: “we are not going to stop abortion, but we will find some way to pay for your parochial schools”
Comment by dempster holland — September 4, 2010 @ 5:01 p.m.
Of course you and most other parents don’t know about teacher quality under the current system; collecting that information is costly and has next to no benefit because there is no choice. This is a classic example of what economists call rational ignorance. If the government provided automobiles and assigned people to them by random lottery, no one would research which car was the best because that knowledge would have no impact on the car they received. However, people do typically research and test drive cars before buying them because they can use that information in the market to determine which car they buy. The same would be true of education if people were allowed to choose which teachers instructed their children.
Comment by John Payne — September 5, 2010 @ 9:56 p.m.