Many believe
private schools generally achieve more than public schools. In big cities, as
many as 80 percent of public school parents say they would send their children
to parochial or independent schools if they could afford the tuition.
Scholarships for poor families are heavily oversubscribed as are charter
schools, which are government-funded but run by private boards. Do private
schools deserve their reputations and consumer preference?
In 2007, I tried
to track down all published and unpublished studies of this question and
summarized the findings in the book School Choice: The Findings. Included in the findings
were studies that compared students in private and nearby public schools that
were similar in social class, other demographics, and achievement when the
study began.
The most
important studies considered were “randomized trials” in which children from a
large applicant pool were assigned by lottery to a private school or to the
public school they would normally attend. Particularly valuable in this respect
were studies of my Koret Task Force colleagues: Paul Peterson studied students
lotteried for scholarships to attend private schools of their choice and
contrasted them with children who remained in public schools. Caroline Hoxby
studied similarly selected students accepted to charter schools and those who
remained in their neighborhood public schools.
Since 2007,
research continued to show that, on average, private school students excel in
the academic skills students acquire such as reading comprehension and the
knowledge they gain in such subjects as English, mathematics, and science.
Studies, moreover, show that the higher the percentage of students attending
private schools, including charters, in a locality or state, the higher the
average achievement of all schools.
Studies of
countries show the same pattern: The greater the percentage of students
attending private schools, the higher the country’s overall achievement.
Private schools not only raise the overall average but they set high standards
and promote competition among all schools.
Some of the
comparative U.S. studies of public schools and private schools (including
charters) report on parents’ satisfaction, reputation among nearby citizens,
and the degree to which students were involved in the life of the school and
engaged in volunteer work, such as tutoring other students and helping in
community affairs. Again, private schools excelled.
Particularly
important is the average, annual per-student cost of schools since the United
States typically ranks near the top even though its average student achievement
lags behind most other advanced economies. The research compares public and
private schools (not including in this case charter schools) in the United
States. On average, educating students at private schools cost about half as
much as it does at nearby public schools (though some elite private schools,
particularly residential schools, can spend two or three times as much
per-student as do public schools).
“Creative
Destruction”
Such findings
are hardly restricted to schools. Other things being equal, an amazing variety
of private organizations perform, on average, better than government-run
organizations at lower costs, and they are more satisfying to their staffs and
their customers. These studies examined airlines, banks, bus service, debt
collection, electric utilities, forestry, hospitals, housing, insurance sales
and processing, railroads, refuse collection, savings and loans,
slaughterhouses, water utilities, and weather forecasting.
In the U.S and
other countries, governments are even beginning to privatize prisons, police,
fire protection, and public pensions. Various experiments in privatization and
“contracting out” public services to competing for-profit and non-profit firms
suggest they generally respond swiftly and accurately to contracted objectives
and citizens’ desires. If not, they forfeit their contracts, lose employees,
decline in value, and often close and are replaced by better providers.
As shown in
comparisons of public and private provision of services in many industries,
private competition works well for consumers, allows successful contenders to
thrive, and causes failing organizations to change or close. In private
enterprise such “creative destruction” is both expected and a sign of progress
as innovative firms replace older ones. For example, the market capitalization
value of Microsoft has declined by half in recent years. Meanwhile, Apple (now
first in market value), Amazon, and Google have jumped ahead.
In fact, the
governance and operation of public schools deteriorated in the last century. In
the past, citizens in the immediate locality governed about 115,000 school
districts nationwide, some with only a single school for a few hundred students
or even less. States consolidated these into about 15,000 much larger districts
today. Chicago, for example, has more than 600 public schools, one with more
than 4,000 students. For this reason, today’s public school boards are poorly
informed about the schools under their jurisdiction; probably few big-city
board members could name a fifth of the schools for which they are nominally
responsible.
At the same
time, states and the federal government imposed ever more complications and
sometimes-conflicting regulations on the public schools, which removed much of
local boards’ control over school policy. Moreover, as my Hoover colleague Terry Moe notes, national and local teachers
unions increasingly exerted powerful and constraining forces on boards,
representing their own interests rather than those of students. Because of
union contracts, for example, it is difficult to lengthen the number of days in
the American school year to Asian and European standards, and it is extremely
costly and legally difficult to remove incompetent teachers.
In contrast,
private schools are usually small, and their boards closely inform themselves
about the school’s staff and program, which is made easier since most private
boards have responsibility for only one school. Unlike public schools, private
school teachers, students, and parents know each other well. Unlike large
public schools, they are rarely departmentalized so that teachers know about
the content of subjects of classes other than their own, which enables them to
avoid repetition while reinforcing central ideas across grades and subjects.
Seldom unionized, private schools pay teachers according to their contributions
and performance and remove those that don’t pull their weight.
Unlike public
schools, many parochial and independent schools restrict the curriculum to
mathematics, science, English, a foreign language, history, political science,
art, and music, which best prepares students for college, careers, and
citizenship. In response to market demands, however, some private schools are
known for concentrating on art, music, vocational studies, and other
specializations, which enables like-minded staff and students to pursue their
specialized interests. Avoiding the vast elective miscellany of public high
school coursework, the students share a common academic and psychological
experience.
Private schools
have another important advantage. Parents and students choose them,
unlike public school students that are usually assigned to a single
neighborhood school. Psychological studies show Americans are more enthusiastic
about things they choose for themselves rather than being confined to what
others think best for them.
The Rise of Charter Schools
We can be
encouraged by the rapid growth in the number of generally small charter schools
that began opening in Minnesota 1991. By 2009, 41 states and the District of
Columbia had laws authorizing charter schools. Today, the
total number of charter schools in this country is about 5,000. About 60
percent of charter schools have waiting lists. Still, despite their
attractiveness, states and districts limit the numbers of charter schools and
increasingly impose restrictive, inefficient regulations on them.
Charter boards,
which usually only control one school, usually lack the time and breadth to
carry out all their responsibilities, which include: building acquisition or
leasing, conformity with state and local regulations, teacher contracts, other
legal matters, building services, and holding the staff responsible for
results. The Chicago International Charter School, now with 16 campuses,
responded to this challenge by assuming such responsibilities for itself and a
small central staff while assigning for-profit and non-profit organizations to
carry out a uniform curriculum.
The clear
division of responsibility and work was efficient in allowing each group to
concentrate on its strengths. It also allowed the board objectivity in holding
the competing organizations accountable for achievement results, enrollment,
and parent satisfaction. This model deserves expansion.
The next logical
step in attaining effectiveness and efficiency is for-profit competition, which
has been tried in only one country in the West. In 1993, the Swedish
government, with my advice, required local school district authorities to fund
privately operated schools, including for-profit schools. Like traditional
public schools, the flood of new private schools had to teach an approved
curriculum and admit all applicants regardless of ability, socioeconomic level,
and country of origin.
The rapidly
changed system yielded excellent achievement results and parent satisfaction.
Responding to newly freed markets, for-profit schools grew fastest. By 2008,
ten growing chains of schools operated, one with as many as 30 schools. The
transformed system interjected not only competition among all schools but new
technologies including frequent Internet reporting to parents on students’
progress. Given our long history of successful capitalism, for-profit
competition among schools seems likely to work just as well in capitalistic
America as social democratic Sweden.
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