Competition, Public Sector Style

The Washington Post writes that, contrary to what some had predicted, competition from charter schools hasn't visibly pushed public schools to improve. When you think about it, it isn't all that surprising given the ways in which this differs from ordinary "competition."

For one, while funding is tied to enrollment, the amount of funding tied to each student floats on the legislative breezes. More importantly, it's not clear how much incentive administrators actually have to compete even if their operating budgets do shrink somewhat. The school mentioned in the article dropped from 491 to only 178 students over the course of four years… but you can bet the principal's still taking home the same salary. Hell, he's probably glad to have less crowded hallways and fewer kids to deal with. And unlike many private firms, losing more than 60 percent of his "clients" doesn't put him in danger of having to shut down.. though maybe if enrollment dipped below a hundred we'd start to see the beads of sweat. Since teachers retire younger, on average, than other professionals, even flak from them can be deflected, since budget trimming can be handled (in part) by cutting back on new hires, instead of handing out pink slips. So how many administrators are going to go to the trouble of making real changes in the way things are done, just to be rewarded with a heavier workload?

Comments

[Russ]

Julian, you make it sound like the prinicpal's job is to produce certain numbers. The school's funding has dropped by almost 50%, not proportionate to the drop in attendance, but maybe the school was underfunded in the first place.

If you're going to take numbers out of the article to make a point, it would have also been helpful to point out that the school-in-question's test scores are higher than the nearby charter school's. Perhaps the numbers the principal is being asked to meet are these numbers.

I'm all for school choice, but that does bring in to play the vagaries of marketing. Public schools have always had to compete, the difference with the charter schools is there are two competing styles of "bureaucracy" (for lack of a better word) within the same public school system.

"Improvement" could mean happier parents or it could mean smarter students. One doesn't necessarily imply the other.

[digamma]

"'Improvement' could mean happier parents or it could mean smarter students. One doesn't necessarily imply the other."

It's very true. In my opinion, however, parental choice is the least-worst way to determine which school a child attends.

[Anonymous]

Russ-
The relative scores are neither here nor there, because it seems that the students who are having the most trouble are the ones whose parents are most likely to have been eager to move them out (and vice versa). The score trend within each school is probably more meaningful. And ceteris paribus, I'm willing to take parental satisfaction as a proxy for school quality, even if, as you note, it's not a perfect proxy.

Also, D.C. public schools have among the highest per-pupil funding in the nation (see Casey Lartigue's policy analysis on the Cato website) so it's unlikely that the problem is primarily one of money.

[Douglas Fletcher]

All that article shows is how massively ass-backwards the DC government is, and that the whole school choice things needs to bust wide open so that no one has to go to those crappy DC schools if they don't want to.

[fyodor]

I'm not interested in following the details of this issue, but I know enough to know the importance of incentives. Too often, privitization debates get bogged down by meaningless comparisons of the perceived differences between private and public institutions. At the same time, too often so-called privitization is incomplete, just giving formerly public responsibilities to private firms but without allowing market forces to work. Isn't this what happened with Enron? Private firms are not inherently any better than public institutions if the incentives aren't there to make them better!

[P.A. Inker]

Excellent point, Fyodor! "Private firms are not inherently any better than public institutions if the incentives aren't there to make them better!"

In this regard, market institutions are but a reflection of the command-and-control institutions that fetter them. For the free market to truly shine, it needs to be wholly independent of such command and control -- accepting neither handouts, nor bribes, nor favors, nor asking for any either.

Unfortunately, the choking, parasitic vine is in too tightly a symbiotic entwinement with the producing tree.