Let Free Market Work in Education

What will save our public elementary and secondary schools? Competition. Proposition 174, the just-defeated voucher initiative, had serious flaws, but it at least pushed our public schools toward a more competitive environment. The same competitive forces that stimulate our businesses and our universities to excel can stimulate our K-12 schools to deliver a top-notch product.

Both public and private universities compete head-to-head with each other for students, faculty, research grants and private donations. Many states, including California, provide state-funded scholarships for needy students that can be used at both public and private universities.

In our best universities, faculty are compensated on the basis of market forces and individual performance, rather than simply on the basis of credentials and longevity.

Most important of all, no public university exercises monopolistic power over students in a particular geographic district. University students are free and able to vote with their feet. And when they do so, the punitive consequences for the universities they leave behind are severe. America’s colleges and universities are truly the envy of the world. They are an indication of what our public schools could become if we were willing to take greater risks in the area of educational reform.

Perhaps school choice in the form of full-cost vouchers for some of our poorest families might be a start, so their children have a chance to escape a dangerous and hopeless environment. Perhaps we should experiment with smaller urban school districts, or even with separate and competing public-school systems serving the same district.

Perhaps we should provide teachers with substantial financial incentives based on the academic performance of their students. And perhaps we should reward our best public schools by freeing them from repressive public-school laws and allow them to operate under the more flexible regulations that apply to private schools.

The key is that we must aggressively explore new possibilities for educating our children. To protect the status quo in our public schools or to perform only minor tinkering with the system will surely doom our children and our country to a future of inexorable decline.