Megan McArdle asks: why is education so special that it should be provided by the state, rather than bought in the marketplace?
One answer could be that education is chosen by one person (the parent) but
endured received by another (the child). And we know from the work of Joel Waldfogel that it's inefficient for one person to choose gifts for another; gift-giving at Christmas, he estimates (pdf), destroys up to one-third of the value of gifts. And if people are bad at choosing Christmas presents for each other, isn't it at least possible that they'll be bad at choosing education for others? Sure, the stakes are higher which should focus the mind. But equally, the quality of education is less easily observable.
So, it's possible that if parents can choose education, they'll choose badly.
Worse still, the parents most likely to choose badly are those who raise their kids badly anyway. Choice in education would then exacerbate inequality, by condemning children from bad homes to bad schooling too. The test of policy in this regard shouldn't merely be: what works for the child from an average-to-good home? She'll do OK anyway. Rather, it should be: what works for the Chesney Browns who lack such support?
In this context, this recent paper (pdf) by Steve Bradley and Jim Taylor provides a pleasant surprise. The increased choice in UK education created by the 1988 Education Reform Act, they estimate, did raise standards.
Better still, the effect was bigger upon schools with the largest proportion of poor kids - those eligible for free school meals.
This is good. But not great, for three reasons:
1. The mechanism through which schools with poor kids improved might have been a one-off effect; the threat of closure forced them to buck up their ideas. It's not clear that choice would lead to continuous improvements.
2. The improvement in standards is small. Bradley and Taylor estimate that competition, plus the Excellence in Cities programme and the introduction of specialist schools put together explain less than one-third of the improvement in GCSE scores between 1992 and 2006.
3. The boost to poor kids' grades from competition - a rise in the proportion getting five or more good GSCEs of around five percentage points - is only a small fraction of their overall disadvantage. Only 28.7 % of boys eligible for free school meals got five good GSCEs in 2005, compared to 56.2% of boys not eligible.
Now, one might react to this by saying that competition and choice have not yet gone far enough. But isn't another possible response that school reform can only eliminate a small proportion of the disadvantage suffered by kids from poor homes? The idea that schools can create genuine equality of opportunity is a myth - and perhaps a dangerous myth.