| David Crisp wonders why the libertarian conservative Rob Natelson wants taxpayers on the hook for the cost of an education at Sidwell for every American student. Price tag: $29k a piece.
It's a good question. One of the things I've often wondered about is why education is one of the areas where libertarians basically give up the ghost on the rest of their theories. They don't rail against government intervention or say that the real driver in cost is government subsidies, they basically just demand that we build an education system that looks a lot like the French health care system -- privately controlled, largely non-profit health care delivery system financed primarily through public insurance (aka vouchers).
Alternately, they even like something closer to Britain's health care system, but with competing networks of hospitals (charter schools).
Anyways, it is all a bit funny.
The strange thing about education, though, is that it is a realm where the fundamental conservative critique is that we pay too much to the workers and we get poor results and the solution is to pay people less. Now, I'm not really sure that either part of this critique is correct, but it is completely baffling. Show me a single corporation on the planet that would conclude that its talent pool for hiring was insufficient and that their proper response is to slash the wages being offered and tell the applicants that they are stupid and I'll show you a firm about to hit really hard times.
Now, it is true that education costs more than it did 50 years ago. But K-12 education is extremely labor intensive. We have teacher to student ratios of probably 25:1 or 30:1. Include other staff -- executive, administrative, athletic, artistic, and support -- and you've got a lot of people working hard for each student. Throw in some particularly high-cost operations like special education (conservatives are pretty good at glossing over this issue) and you need to figure out how to pay for it.
The next piece of this is that people who enter teaching as a profession are not without other options. They come out of school with a B.S. or a B.A. and many public school teachers have advanced degrees, either in education or in a specific field of study.
Although teacher pay may have increased in the last several decades (I honestly don't have inflation-adjusted numbers handy), so has pay in sectors that compete with education, by a lot. If you're a starting college student with some solid math skills and you start evaluating options, which looks more rewarding? Teaching 8th grade math or writing algorithms for Google?
Frankly, given the way that many of our nation's loudest voices (largely from the right) have crapped all over teaching as a profession -- financially and rhetorically -- I'm amazed at the large number of extremely capable people entering the profession (folks like the writers of Intelligent Discontent are the kind of people I'm thinking of).
People choose their jobs for a number of reasons and many of us choose to do work that pays less than what we could earn in other fields because we find the non-monetary rewards to be significant. But teaching and much of other public service hasn't just been degraded financially. Meanwhile, the private sector has been held up as a bizarre pinnacle of brilliance and efficiency (a claim belied by any trip to a Carmike movie theater).
I'm actually pretty supportive of some big think on education policy. Our schools right now work pretty well for kids like me who grow up middle class in a large city in Montana. They don't work so well in other places. But beating up on teachers and their unions is only likely to make the problem worse. Lower pay, less job security, and insults don't improve productivity. They make it worse. |
