From: leonard@mimsy.umd.edu (Leonard Dickens)
Newsgroups: alt.politics.libertarian
Subject: Re: Questions about the TEN POINT PARTY PROGRAM.
Date: 28 Sep 92 19:11:41 GMT
Organization: Deep Thirteen, Gizmonics Institute

Charles Isbell writes:
>thant@void.esd.sgi.com (Thant Tessman) writes:
>|If too many
>|people want to go to a certain school, then obviously that school
>|is doing well, and the people running that school will consequently 
>|have the money to expand or open another school.  
>
>I dunno, MIT (say) never did this.

Top ranked private schools are kind of like top ranked restaurants: in
addition to trying to optimize their profitability, they also try to
optimize their snob appeal by exclusivity; opening lots of restaurants
with differing chefs at each one obviously dilutes the degree to which
you can claim you are the best because you have the best chef... the
same holds with big name researchers.  Restaurants that are successful
but do not want to branch out tend to raise prices a lot; but they
also attract imitators.

Nonetheless, other chain and franchise restaurants do branch out
regularly as they succeed.  These may not have quite the quality, nor
near the atmosphere or snob appeal of a five-star exclusive, but they
feed a hell of a lot more people.

I take it the analogy is not lost on you, so I shall not dwell on it.

>|In this way well-
>|run educational programs are expanded upon and badly-run ones are 
>|weeded out.  It is exactly the mechanism by which education will
>|constantly be improving itself.
>
>I really don't see any reason for this to happen one way or the other.
>Unless you address the problem of where the kids who want to leave
>some school and go to a "better" one go while they're waiting, it seems
>to me that they'll just stay where they are and nothing will happen.

Obviously they will stay where they are, and for that year, they will
be frustrated.  Meanwhile, though, things may be happening!  For
instance, their parents may be down at the PTA railing about how
Exclusivity High teaches calculus and has a dress code, and gets
regular 1600 SATs... this may help to change the local system so that
eventually, the local students don't want to leave any more.

Or, maybe the students will study harder because they know that
Exclusivity High requires straight A's for a year to get in.

Or maybe the students will start a petition to fire Joe Incompetent as
trigonometry teacher.  Or maybe the *school* will do it anyway,
because none of the students want to take trig from him, and all of
the students who have left recently are mentioning him as a bad
example here at Mediocre High.

>Good schools are made up of many things, including competent faculty.
>If a good school is to "expand" it must find some faculty which are
>going to have to come from somewhere.  If they're already out there
>why aren't the other schools "good"?  

Sure, they are out there.  I fancy myself a good teacher, and I even
like teenagers.  But I can earn $30K starting easily in the private
sector.  I am not interested in being paid $15K to teach 7 classes per
day of 30 uninterested students each.  That is a hell of a lot of
work; if anyone doubts it, they should try it.

One of the first things that would be tried under a voucher system
would be to recruit top quality students to pay top dollar for top
quality teachers.  I think that teacher salaries in general would
rise.

>Is it the students?  
>The parents?  In either case, vouchers aren't going to deal with *that*
>problem.

Part of the problem is hopelessness.  Why study hard when you know you
will be going to miserable schools until you are finally let out into
the street with barely a elementary school education at the age of
eighteen?  I think the hope of being able to transfer to a better
school at some point in the future might energize some students to keep
studying when they would otherwise give up.

And the same goes for parents.  If your kid is listening to gunfire
every other day in school, how can you fault her for slipping in
algebra?  And how can you tell her to keep studying, when you know she
is going to get worse and worse teachers the further she gets?

And even teachers could use hope.  What incentive do they currently
have to think up innovative new ways to teach?  

>Honestly, I just don't see what vouchers can do.  It seems to me that
>the real reform that's necessary can happen either with or without
>them.

In a sense, you are correct.  The point of vouchers is really choice,
and that can be done without vouchers.  We could choose to pay our
teachers more.  We could choose to group students of similar
education, motivation, and intelligence.  We could choose to ban guns
so that students could not so easily kill each other.  We could choose
to seek out and fire incompetent teachers.  We could choose to ban
corporal punishment in the schools.  Or we could make it mandatory.
We could choose to implement dress codes in our schools.  We could
segregate our schools, by race, sex, or sexual preference.  We could
choose for our schools to be multicultural.

Will we?  Which, if any, of these prescriptions is correct?  The
strength of the voucher idea is that it implements choice at the level
where it matters: the individual student.  "Choice" at the societal
level always seems to leave out the 49% in the minority.

-Leonard
Xref: sparky alt.politics.libertarian:517 alt.society.anarchy:322