The Case for Abolishing Government Schools

A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation, in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body. An education established and controlled by the State, should only exist, if it exist at all, as one among many competing experiments, carried on for the purpose of example and stimulus, to keep the others up to a certain standard of excellence.” John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Chapter 5.

The case for government funding of schooling is very strong. First, there is the argument from opportunity: that children should not be bound in their opportunities to acquire basic skills and knowledge by the capacity or willingness of their parents to pay for their schooling. Then there is the argument from common benefit: we all gain from having a literate and numerate fellow citizenry. The former appeals to our sense of fairness, the second to our (mutual) benefit.

While much rhetoric invokes the former justification, we can be confident that the latter has been the historically more powerful reason for government funding of schools: notably creating better workers (and soldiers). The hope such funding invokes that the schooling of one’s own children can be, in part, paid for by others is justified by said others benefiting from being able to anticipate a certain basic level of literacy and numeracy among those we all interact with. Indeed, this justification has been extended to all other manner of allegedly beneficial skills and understandings that schools are claimed to be able to inculcate usefully in the students placed in their care.

But just because a powerful case can be made for the government funding of schooling, it does not follow that such schooling should be provided by government, that governments should run schools. On the contrary, if our concern is with the quality of the acquisition of skills and knowledge, and providing opportunities to the marginalised, there are powerful arguments against governments running schools.

Public problems

The first is the obvious conflict of interest involved in having the regulator also be the (main) provider of the service being regulated. If the head of a football club announced that they had a great idea: the club Board should take over the football code, set the rules, appoint the umpires and administer the entire sporting code the proposal would be treated with well-deserved derision. This is obviously a completely daft way to run a football, or indeed any sporting, code. The conflict of interest is massive and obvious.

Yet that is precisely how most children are schooled: in schools governed by the politicians and bureaucrats who themselves are responsible for regulating schools. We apparently are expected to take it on trust that they do a good job of regulating themselves, honest.

Any notion that the magic of elections somehow makes the patent, endless, conflict of interest go away is nonsense. That governments are periodically elected may ameliorate the conflict of interest somewhat, but it most emphatically does not abolish it. The much higher growth in enrolments in private rather than government schools indicates that many parents clearly expect more of what they want for their children from private, rather than government, schools—and are (increasingly) willing to pay a premium for the difference. This indicates what a weak reed electing a government to preside over such a powerful and pervasive conflict of interest is.

The shameful history of failure to provide clear, public indicators of student (and thus school) performance in literacy and numeracy comparable in skills achieved from year to year is a manifestation of the conflict of interest in the regulator also being the main provider. A regulator seriously concerned with quality of schooling would ensure such things existed as a matter of course.

This inherent conflict of interest in the dominant provider also being the regulator aggravates the broader problems with public provision. If one wants to understand the notorious problems of government schooling in, for example, the United Kingdom, identifying why British Leyland was a failure is very useful. There has been a general retreat around the globe from government-run production for very good reasons. Schooling is not magically immune from these reasons.

Dynamics of public ownership

In public ownership, those who control the resources—officials and others in the public sector—are not providing the ultimate guarantees, the taxpayer is. Having control without owning the capital at stake provides poor incentives to protect the value of the capital or to use it efficiently. Other motives come into play, however.

With public provision, what will the people controlling the resources want? They will want security of position. Such security of position—property rights in jobs—is a notorious feature of public sector jobs. Those controlling said public capital will also want multiplying responsibilities (in a processes-to-be-completed, rather than accountable-for-outcomes, sense) and thus more status and subordinates. That expanding bureaucratisation, and over-staffing generally, is a feature of public provision is also notorious. Those making the decisions are not providing the final guarantee—the hapless taxpayer is—so there is a much weaker “bottom line”. In the school system, the touting of student retention rates as an indicator of success owes something to its justifying expanding claims on the public purse and the multiplying of subordinates.

Corporate bureaucracies also separate ownership of capital from day-to-day control of its use, so do not fully match who guarantees the capital to who controls its use. But there are stronger constraints in such cases that do not operate in the public sector—the ability to exit as an owner by selling one’s shares, movements in share price, the consequences of profit or loss and the final sanction of bankruptcy.

Thus the inherent tendency to regulatory failure in schooling due to the pervasive conflict of interest in having the main provider also being the regulator has consequences that are magnified by the effects of government provision. According to a recent Grattan Institute report, an overwhelming majority of Australian teachers (92 per cent) report that improving the quality of their teaching would not lead to any recognition from their school, 83 per cent that evaluation of their work has no impact on their career advancement while a strong majority (63 per cent) that evaluation of their work is largely to fulfil administrative requirements, 61 per cent that evaluation of their work has little impact on how they teach in the classroom and 71 per cent that sustained poor performance would not lead to a teacher’s dismissal. This indicates the lack of serious incentives for improvement (or even basic competence).[i]

Unsurprisingly, low and declining productivity is a regular feature of public provision.[ii] This is particularly notable in schooling, which suffers from recurrent fads but precious little effective innovation. One estimate by Andrew J. Coulson, based on US official statistics, is that US school productivity has about halved since 1971.[iii] A recent study by Andrew Leigh and Chris Ryan estimated that Australian school productivity had declined by 12-13 percent between 1975 and 1998, and by 73 percent between 1964 and 2003. Lack of improvement in outcomes with rising labour costs (due to falling class sizes) means falling productivity. By contrast, general productivity across the Australian economy rose by 34 percent in the period 1975-98, and by 64 percent from 1964-2003.[iv]

To place provision of something in the public sector is to create an organization effectively owned—in the sense of having day-to-day control—to a greater or less degree, by the staff (though not equally by all staff). This is not to say things will therefore be congenial for the staff (particularly those “down the food chain”: academe—where even private institutions have public sector-style incentives—produces some of the most abusive labour markets in the Western world[v]). On the contrary, the lack of a strong “bottom line” gives great scope for battles over resources. The taxpayer guarantee becomes a resource to be exploited, with the formal intention of policy, and the formal ownership by government as the agent of citizens, becomes a shield for that exploitation. The resultant internal fight over the resources available can well be quite intense.

Taxpayer guarantees and funding are exploitable resources: all the more exploitable when the regulator is also the main provider. Hence the importance of allowing parents to choose schools to force some accountability. (Though this works better the more schools control their own arrangements: so advantages private schools, which have rather more such control than government schools.)

The effect of public provision on quality of product will be more mixed: engineer-run organizations may well spend lavishly on engineering quality as part of their sense of professional status. Generally speaking, however, having the regulator as simultaneous provider is antipathetic to quality. Hence shoddy goods and high rates of pollution in command economies, the tendency to poor quality in government schooling and the more-or-less universal tendency for the range and content of public broadcasting to be sacrificed to the conspicuous compassion (such as environmental concern) of its staff (and organised friends).

Indeed, much of the point of public provision is to give maximum control with minimum accountability. This is blindingly obvious in the case of revolutionary socialism, where all power is to be concentrated for the great project of human and social transformation. But there is a large element of this even in democracies, since the pooling of resources inherent in public provision obscures who is paying, and what is really being paid for, which greatly weaken any connection between paying and outcome.

Shielded from consequences

Education suffers strongly from the “removed consequences” problem. If the student screws up, the student bears the consequences. If the teacher screws up, the student bears the consequences. If the principal screws up, the teachers and students bear the consequences. If teacher-trainers, curriculum designers and textbook choosers screw up, the teachers and students bear the consequences. If regulators and administrators screw up, the principal, teachers and students bear the consequences. The more centralised the schooling system, the more it suffers from decision-making which is “removed-from-consequences”. Increasing the layers of decision-making which removes the consequences of their actions from decision-makers is, to put it mildly, unhelpful. It also makes genuine learning within such structures about better practice a highly doubtful happening.

Such pedagogical disasters as the abolition of tech schools, the abandonment of teaching grammar and the mad war against phonics come to mind as being the results of decision-makers removed from the consequences of their actions. It is also why primary schools are notably problematic for the quality of their teaching, since they are the level of schooling most insulated from the consequences of their actions.

Even where testing of student performance is done, the “removed-from-consequences” problem means that it is more likely to be done poorly. American academic John H. Bishop argues—on the basis of cross-jurisdictional studies—that, to be successful, examinations must be discipline based, externally assessed, rank students in terms of multiple levels of achievement and be high stakes in terms of consequences.[vi]

In other words, exams work if they force accountability through effective incentives.

The intentions fallacy

None of this is helped by the common view of public policy as being one where intentions + resources => results. If policy is justified by its intentions, then it is easy to add on further “good intentions”. Obligations thereby multiply, but there is little attendant ability to do proper trade-offs or assess effectiveness. Hence student retention rates become a highly congenial indicator of “success” since all those wonderful intentions are clearly “reaching” more students more often. Those at the top of the system congratulating themselves on higher retention rates are not in the classroom dealing with unwilling “round-pegs-in-square-holes” conscripts. The worship of retention rates is a substitute for accountability, a cover for its lack.

Suffering from poor accountability due to a compromised regulator—as well as too many decision-makers removed from the consequences of their actions—dissatisfaction with the results of whatever is the current policy almost inevitably mounts. Lack of funding is the stock excuse for failure, no matter how much funding has risen, making more spending the easy answer. After all, intentions + resources => results.

There is considerable evidence, however, that outcomes in schooling do not flow directly from expenditure. It is a fairly simple-minded form of analysis to that they would, but it is, of course, the perennial claim of defenders of government schooling that the problem is “lack of funding” no matter how much funding has risen for government schooling (it is currently approaching $13,000 per student per year[vii]). Poor incentives create waste and ineffectiveness that ends up looking like inadequate funding but is actually something quite different—something that will neither be changed nor fixed merely by adding more money. On the contrary, the above-cited studies of productivity suggest that increased spending is largely soaked up in waste and ineffectiveness.

Increased spending is also expensive and has limited value as political product differentiation. So, the centralised system produces yet another Grand Scheme to cope with mounting dissatisfaction: another Big Change because, clearly, the Right Ideas Will Fix Everything. This fails to solve the problems, because the real problem is structural, and a dysfunctional structure will continue to be dysfunctional no matter what Great Ideas are currently in vogue. The wave after wave of curriculum and other “reforms” that burden teachers while typically representing little more than the current crop of policymakers—with the current crop of educational fads (which are often just re-cast versions of earlier fads)—thrashing around trying to square the multiplying circles of grand intentions via the latest too-likely-failed-before-they-start “fix”.

In the words of Colin Black, the former headmaster of Camberwell Grammar School,

… the education class’s obsession with change and innovation, the insistent revising and re-revising of curricula, the plethora of critiques of current pedagogical practice, the addictive quest for new and arcane terminology, the eagerness to leap upon the latest bandwagon which so often turns out to be tumbrel. Little wonder is it that teachers are exhausted and perplexed by all they are asked to do.[viii]

So, with the example of British Leyland (or the East German Trabant) before us, and given the specific problems of educational systems, we can hardly be surprised that—to take a notorious example—the highly centralised British school system is often a British Leyland-quality (in some places even a Trabant-quality) government school system.

Who whom

This is not to claim that all private schools are better than all government schools. Anyone with any experience of schools knows any such claim is nonsense. There are better quality government schools and dubious quality private schools. The better quality government schools typically have catchment areas congenial to better education outcomes—parents committed to the education of their children, well-versed in how to organise for the same, embedded in the appropriate networks—coupled with principals sufficiently bloody-minded to deal with the more egregious difficulties of government education. That—given a standard model—the quality of schooling tends to be so strongly affected by the school’s student catchment area also indicates that claims for government schooling as a means of promoting “equality” are nonsense.

Indeed, one can argue that Australia evidences higher levels of social mobility in its schooling compared to the US or the UK not despite, but precisely because, its schooling is much less dominated by government schools than either the US or UK. For example, a study of school lunchrooms in the US found that private schools tended to be more racially integrated in social interactions than government schools, probably because the private schools were not based on residence and had other binding factors.[ix]

Colin Black also has some very trenchant things to say about the effect progressivists have had on schooling:

It is a sad irony that the legacy of the social democratic/progressive consensus is that for so many children born into the lower echelons of society, the state school as a vehicle for social mobility and intellectual development has been rendered impotent.[x]

An effect that the conspicuously compassionate shield their children from as they:

… send their own children to independent schools or to schools open to them only because of their privileged knowledge of how the system works or because they can afford to buy a house in a favoured area.[xi]

In other words, many advocates of government schooling ensure that there own children are as insulated as possible from the typical problems of government schools by sending their children to government schools which are as much like elite private schools as possible (apart from the fees: though effect of a superior school may be capitalised into house prices—itself a continuing asset).

This process reached its peak in the elite schools for the children of top cadres in Leninist countries. There are vast differences in living in a Leninist tyranny compared to a liberal capitalist democracy, but rather less difference in the patterns of thought and behaviour of progressivist apparatchiks.

Not that better results can necessarily be attributed to the schools blessed with stronger catchments. The other market response to school and teaching problems is private tutoring. How much a school’s academic results arise from the efforts of the school itself, and how much the investment by parents in tutoring for their children, can be a very moot point. The existence of a vigorous market in private tutoring also shows what a nonsense the “equality” argument for government schools is (and how much control over people’s lives an expansive commitment to equality requires: which is, of course, much of its appeal).

There are no significant economies of scale in schooling—hence research regularly finding that the individual characteristics of the school, notably the performance of the principal, are crucial to the success or failure of a school.[xii] The bureaucratisation and the property-rights-in-jobs of government schooling makes it harder to attract quality principals and, along with the poor accountability, harder for them to have positive effects.

Governments running schools means that there is considerable waste of resources and a general downward pressure on the quality of education from having a compromised regulator, with students from marginal backgrounds typically being most at risk. In the US, education reformer (and lifelong liberal Democrat) E. D. Hirsch Jnr (the author of Cultural Literacy), puts the case that it is the worst off who most need attention to the quality of what children are taught at school:

Cultural literacy constitutes the only sure avenue of opportunity for disadvantaged children, the only reliable way of combating the social determinism that now condemns them to remain in the same social and educational condition as their parents. That children from poor and illiterate homes tend to remain poor and illiterate is an unacceptable failure of our schools, one which has occurred not because our teachers are inept but chiefly because they are compelled to teach a fragmented curriculum based on faulty educational theories.[xiii]

What is striking about Hirsch is that his work is based on sound science examining how children actually learn and retain knowledge. This is rarely, if ever, true of the radical/progressive pedagogy ensconced in teacher-training and curriculum design establishments, which is more likely to be based on what feels good to its adherents. After Massachusetts reformed its curriculum to a far more content-based structure—based on Hirsch’s work—it experienced continuing improvement in the quality of its students’ results, an effect that has been replicated elsewhere.[xiv] Similarly, some of the most striking recent work on what makes good teachers has been done by Teach for America[xv] a service-oriented charity[xvi], not governments who spend billions on schools.

It is possible for good research to motivate public policy but it is striking, as one looks around the world, how little that is true of government school systems. They are usually captured by quite different ideas—ideas that do not, despite their pretensions, help disadvantaged or other marginal students.

Socialisation of belief

So, if government-provided schooling is a bad idea—and a bad idea specifically in terms of the justifications for government funding of increasing opportunities for the marginalised and general levels of literacy and numeracy—why are governments the dominant provider of schooling services around the planet?

For the same reason government’s most important competitor in the providing of schooling services are religious bodies: to ensure socialisation in preferred beliefs of future citizens. For belief is very difficult to verify independently as an outcome, hence the insistence on control of inputs and process.[xvii] The opposition to private schools is generally very much about eliminating rival belief sets in education. (This is, after all, why totalitarian regimes ban private schooling.)

But, if the point is controlling inputs and process, then clearly getting inputs and process “right” is the issue. This feeds the endless concern for process by those at the top of government schools system and the endless series of curriculum and other policy fads. Control by those at the top of the system is “why they are there”, so getting their control “right” is clearly the answer to every problem. Find the Right Ideas and they can just decree success! They are hardly likely to consider that their control is not the solution but the problem.

If socialisation in belief is the point of having government schools (as distinct from government funding of schooling), then the question becomes who has control of the curriculum, teacher training and teacher supervision: who really controls the inputs and process of socialisation of belief?

Economist Mancur Olson argued that resource-capturing networks could arise within public provision.[xviii] Such networks need not be corrupt in the conventional sense: they can also be networks of common belief. We are all inclined to see likeminded people as inherently “sound”. If our sense of identity, our sense of virtue, is based on expressed attitudes, the tendency to conformist networking among individuals will be particularly powerful, including in selection processes. Indeed, it becomes the “ticket” with which to channel resources to “people like us”. All this produces cascade effects, where presumptions become narrower, and thus more intense, since they receive much supportive feedback and little internal questioning. Such self-reinforcing cognitive conformity demonstrably retards the quality of decision-making. It is as problematic for pedagogy as it is for decision-making generally.[xix] Such cognitive conformity is more likely the less classroom reality its practitioners have to deal with. Hence the tendency of teacher-training in particular (and curriculum design and textbook choice) to be continually captured by self-referential pedagogical theory removed from social and classroom practicalities but terribly impressed with its own virtue and conspicuous compassion.

So the environmentalism currently rampant in government schooling is precisely the analogue of the ostensible role of religion in religious schools: just as were preceding enthusiasms such as “anti-racism” and multiculturalism. If government provision of schools is about the socialisation of belief, then the radical/progressivist pedagogy typical of teacher-trainers—and filtering into curriculum design and textbook choice—is simply fulfilling the logic of government provision of schooling, given that those who really “own” public provision are those who directly control its attributes.[xx]

In a 1998 essay in that continuing source of good sense and information, City Journal, Heather Macdonald detailed the damage done by what she calls the “Anything But Knowledge” radical/progressive pedagogy in teacher training (and, by implication curriculum design and textbook choice) based on romanticisation of children, and of the process, rather than the content, of learning.[xxi] Not only do such approaches follow the logic of government running schools, they also sell low-cost virtue to their adherents. Given a choice between the inherent humility—with all the work involved—in transmitting the achievements of the past, or the grand moral arrogance of fighting the “oppressive structures” of society while releasing the “inner abilities” of children, without having to go to the bother of mastering the legacies of the past, it is clear which is going to be inherently more attractive. Particularly if reinforced by possession of the institutional high ground of funding and advancement.

MacDonald provides us with a revealing vignette from a teacher-training educator:

A … presenter burst out with a more direct explanation for his chilling indifference to student incompetence: "I’m not going to spend my life doing error diagnosis! I’m not going to spend my weekend on that!" Correcting papers used to be part of the necessary drudgery of a teacher’s job. No more, with the advent of enlightened views about "self-expression" and "writing with intentionality."

Given the grand sense of moral purpose involved in radical/progressive pedagogy, it is well to remember that talking about “the glories of Western civilisation”, of “wisdom from the past”, will be taken by many progressivist educators to be an attack on their very sense of identity. To celebrate achievements from the past is to celebrate the products of other people, people with very different ideas and perspectives. It completely undermines the notion that one is a member of a heroic generation which has broken free of the fetters of the past. The “fetishizing” of change that Frank Furedi has denounced[xxii] may be part of the general modernist delusion that the new is always better, while the past is always redundant,[xxiii] but it gets much of its emotional power from how useful it is for various status games and how liberating it is from too much actual effort.

These status games turn up all over the place. The son of an engineer friend of mine was recently counselled by his school career’s counsellor against being a “tradie” on the grounds that he could make “a greater contribution to society” elsewhere. Apart from the fact that a good tradesman can make lots of money, is engaged in very useful activity and has a range of career paths (including highly paid project managers on major construction projects), the simple ignorant snobbery involved (what happened to the dignity of labour?) is clearly all about status.

Still, it is striking how uninterested in what actually helps marginal students so many adherents of radical/progressivist pedagogy are. Hirsch, for example, has endured much abuse from the teacher-training establishment. That he built on careful research into the actual processes of learning made things, if anything, worse.

MacDonald has a nice illustrative case of this obliviousness among teacher-training educators:

David Schaafsma, one of Columbia’s more politicized teachers, told his English Methods class of visiting a quiet third-grade class in the Bronx; explaining: “It terrifies me when kids are really, really still. They’ve got to move.” It never occurs to these apostles of the Free Self that for many inner-city children, reaching a state of calm attention is a wonderful achievement.

Teachers at the chalkface (to use an archaic term in this age of whiteboards) can have a different perspective:

“At some point, the students go into the job market, and they’re not being judged ‘holistically,’” protested a black teacher, responding to the invocation of the state’s ‘holistic’ model for grading writing. Another teacher bemoaned the Board of Ed’s failure to provide guidance on teaching grammar. “My kids are graduating without skills,” he lamented.

Radical/progressive pedagogy’s alleged attention to “social context” is in fact a radical inattention to actual social contexts:

My kids need the rote; they can’t do half of six or four divided by two." Samantha is using the most unholy of unholies to teach her children to read—a basal reader, derided by the education establishment as spirit-killing. But the reader gives her specific skill sets to work on—above all, phonics and grammar. “My kids don’t hear the correct sound of words at home, such as ‘th’ or the ending of words, so teaching reading is harder.[…]

In fact, the strict environment that Samantha plans is the best thing that could happen to her pupils. It is perhaps the only place they will meet order and civility. Samantha’s children are “surrounded by violence,” she says. Many are not interested in learning, because at home, “everyone is dissing everybody, or staying up late to get high. My kids are so emotionally beat up, they don’t even know when they’re out of their seats.” A structured classroom is their only hope to learn the rules that the rest of society lives by. To eliminate structure for kids who have none in their lives is to guarantee failure.

But teacher-training is removed from the consequences of what it does: particularly if mainly servicing a government school system of compromised accountability and private schools operating under a compromised regulator.

The arrogance inherent in expecting people from other cultures to reflect, embody and celebrate their culture—but feeling one is too knowing and morally superior to do that for one’s own culture—is not exactly a reality-based perspective. But it is a very status-driven one: one asserting status against fellow members of one’s own culture, where the status game really counts, one deeply congenial to the interests that radical/progressivist pedagogy actually serves. For it is typical of the radical pedagogy mindset that it takes culture as a fault line, but does so without any strong sense of actual human experience and consequences: invoking a common humanity yet turning it into empty formula. That it contests claims of cultural superiority, yet abandons any strong sense of cultural achievement. Its adherents therefore typically have a deeply attenuated sense of the achievements of their own culture. Hence their empty concept (and poor record) of achievement in education: for if you cannot recognise genuine achievement you cannot replicate and expand it. Defining virtue against success inevitably leads to a lot of failure.

Liberating teachers

It is a grave mistake to think that teachers are the core problem. Whatever issues there can be—and indeed are—about the content and quality of teaching and teachers, the fundamental causes are what put particular people with particular ideas in particular situations facing particular incentives. One of the fundamental aims of better schooling structures must be to liberate students, and teachers, from the effects of poor teaching. Teachers need to be liberated from having to deal with the effects of previous mistaken or ineffectual teaching on their students and from poor teaching’s deleterious effect on the standing of their profession. They also need to be liberated from the constant wave of policy fads from theorists and decision-makers much removed from classroom realities. Individual students can use the techniques set out in Mark Lopez’s Little Black School Book (Volumes 1 and 2) to deal with a poor teacher or mistaken teaching, but it is only by improving accountability that any more general success can be achieved. A teaching profession whose members are accountable for what they provide—and are seen to be such—is in a much better position to command professional respect, and the income premium that goes with it.

It is also not helpful for the status of teachers to have a dominant buyer of their services (the government school system). That teacher unions want unaccountable bulk (so more members) rather than accountable quality aggravates the effects. Indeed, the union campaigns for smaller class sizes (thus maximising union membership) have absorbed extra expenditure on teachers’ salaries such that teachers have lost ground against other professionals.[xxiv] All this is not a sound basis to end up with an environment that is a good working experience, as can be seen from the level of flight from the teaching profession.

It is poor teachers who gain the most benefit from lack of accountability. This then reinforces teacher unions gaining the most benefit from minimising their members’ genuine accountability for their teaching, which accounts for the often deleterious effect that teacher unions have on schooling and school policy: part of the drive to maximise the number of members exploiting the taxpayer guarantee to maximum extent useful for the union. Teacher unionists being activists in left-of-centre political parties is a prime means by which these gains are sought to be harvested, with shared membership in the club of the virtuous—of the conspicuously compassionate—the prime device to signal, select and motivate for this common purpose.

That a monopoly provider with no external assessment is the recipe for completely shielding teachers from any accountability easily explains the preferred education policies of teacher unions of hostility to private provision and external exams. This accords with wider problems with public sector unionisation and consequent political activism: evidence in the US suggests higher rates of unionisation of the public sector is associated with higher levels of state debt and poorer quality of state management.[xxv]

A problem that plagues both teachers and students is that of toxic kids: students who seriously disrupt classes, gravely impeding the learning of other students. (Usually they are the product of toxic parents.) Toxic kids can destroy a school, as parents pull out their children. Three terms without an expulsion can be enough to launch a school on a downhill spiral. By sending their child to a private school, parents are purchasing the seat next to their child’s—they are purchasing the expectation that seat will be occupied by someone who will encourage their child’s learning rather than sabotage it.[xxvi] Indeed, private schools offer scholarships in part for that very “next seat” effect. (Middle class opposition to school voucher schemes are often based on keeping “undesirable” kids out of their local schools.) Hence also being a better government school in part requires a sufficiently bloody-minded principal who will go through the hoops required to keep the compact with parents that their child’s learning will not be so sabotaged.

The government schooling system aims to provide schooling for everyone (and, with the worship of retention rates, ‘everyone’ is defined as broadly as can be got away with). This—along with the inherent process-over-outcome bureaucratisation involved in government provision—makes the toxic kid problem a serious issue for government schools. A system of universal private schooling would make the issue more open and the (now unencumbered) regulator much more likely to develop mechanisms to directly deal with the issue, rather than continuing to play the current—largely ineffectual and hidden—game of “pass the parcel”. Particularly if there were a range of different types of schools and ways of schooling, so students were more likely to find somewhere that suits them.

Contested spaces

Simpleminded equating of what one might expect with what actually goes on in schools is not wise. My observation has been, for example, that posters warning about the need to stop bullying of gay students are, if anything, more likely to appear in the staff areas of Catholic schools than government ones.

Issues about treatment of differences (cultural, sexual, racial, whatever) within schools are going to be an issue however schooling is arranged. Cultural conflicts and tensions cannot be somehow waved away. But attempting to turn schools into socialisation agents with very specific common aims—to turn them into bastions for one side in cultural conflicts, typically under the banner of schooling needing to be a common experience facing whatever is the current set of social “challenges”—is precisely the sort of ambition that just feeds dysfunctional school structures. The road to dysfunctional schools is paved with grand social intentions: under their cover the inherent problems of governments running schools are hidden, wished away or buried in the alleged “greater good” (such as “promoting social cohesion”).

For the true delusion is thinking that there is some policy that can “fix” government schooling. Government schools systems around the world have varieties of the same problems: their problems are systemic and cannot be fixed (merely ameliorated) within the model of government schooling. Things can be made better or worse, but the problems of government schooling are inherent in public provision and having regulator-run schools. That latter includes problems—via the mechanism of a compromised regulator—that also affect private schooling. Evidence suggests, for example, that charter schools (government-funded schools outside the normal government school system) perform better in jurisdictions with more effective regulation.[xxvii] The true delusion is in believing those inherent, structural problems can be made to go away while keeping government-run schools. Can, by some policy magic, fixed, surmounted or eliminated. Seeking the nth version of “if we just had right idea Y and spent X more money in Z ways, government schooling will be fixed” is public policy fantasy.

But it is a fantasy with a lot of institutional support behind it. It is a major barrier to reform that the interests served by having the government-run schools are articulate, well-organised and deeply-entrenched—and well understand how important government provision is for their ideological ambitions, ambitions which often frame their own sense of identity. But their interests are not those of the wider society, nor of the children in their care. The madness of a participating club running its football code is surely not a difficult analogy to convey. Especially as it can be pointed out that, far from the government running schools giving “the voters” the final say, by creating a (compromised) regulator who is also a provider, it actually reduces effective accountability: hence the flight to private schools. A flight that—as the work of James Tooley studying the vibrant private schooling in the developing world has revealed—is even stronger in many of the poorest places on the planet where the stakes are highest.[xxviii]

If one accepts the case for government funding of schools on grounds of opportunity and quality of education then, far from supporting government provision of schooling, the aims of such funding would be far better fulfilled if governments ran no schools at all. Indeed, by eliminating wasteful and unnecessary school “management” bureaucracies, and greatly improving incentives (for example, via payment by results—these being judged against expected results given the profile of the school’s student intake—and higher payments for “at risk” or otherwise problematic students), the effective funding of students could be significantly increased.

The logic of the government running schools for any other purpose than inculcating approved belief is at war with the logic of government funding of schooling and is so inherently. It is only by grasping that basic antipathy—and operating with clear-sighted understanding of its reality—that the schooling of our children can be put on a sound basis.

Michael “Lorenzo” Warby has taught thousands of school students in hundreds of primary and secondary schools as a principal of a business that puts on medieval and ancient days for schools.

[xxviii] James Tooley, The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves, Cato Institute, 2009. A useful post on his work is at aidwatchers.com/2010/02/paying/.