The "private education as privilege of wealth" fallacy
Political ·Tuesday February 15, 2011 @ 19:28 EST (link)
Question:
I suppose if one wanted to eliminate public education (which I know you do) and return to the days when education was mostly a privilege of wealth, then allowing "market forces" to dictate teacher pay would be an excellent first step. But I fail to see how reducing the pay and benefits of teachers is supposed to attract better teachers and improve education for most.
Answer:
Massive benefits and immunity from any sort of metrics, let alone discipline, sure haven't helped. Here's how the market gets you better teachers: the ones that suck get paid less or get fired, or their schools, being unresponsive to parents' demands for better education for their children, get reduced business or none (and the bad teachers then still lose their jobs).
Also your problem with "return to the days when education was a privilege of wealth" is that costs are far less now. Suppose government massively subsidized televisions, and then someone proposed they stop: while there was a time that a television was a "privilege of wealth", that time would not return given the technological developments between then and now. Or, in other words, let the nature of the education market be represented by Syear={si}, 0 < i ≤ n; you want to claim that changing s1298 (the data point reflecting that teacher pay is extorted by force) in S2011 ("education in 2011") to s1298 from S1500 ("education in 1500") will make S2011 precisely the same as S1500, disregarding the fact that there have been many other changes and innovations since then. For example, almost any highschool graduate should be competent to teach basic science (public schools are so bad that this isn't always the case), and thus vast supply over the small number of teachers competent to teach what we consider basic science today (much of which wasn't even known then) decreases the cost a great deal. There is also much more in-depth information available practically for free via the Internet. This changes the calculation a great deal.
See also my back of the envelope private school cost breakdown. Continuing to pay public school prices ($10k and up) for poor-quality monopolistic education is ridiculous.
