From: isbell@ai.mit.edu (Charles L Isbell)
Newsgroups: alt.politics.libertarian
Subject: Re: Questions about the TEN POINT PARTY PROGRAM.
Date: 29 Sep 92 03:23:18 GMT
	<qa1euo8@zola.esd.sgi.com> <ISBELL.92Sep25211132@panther.ai.mit.edu>
	<60698@mimsy.umd.edu>
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
In-reply-to: leonard@mimsy.umd.edu's message of 28 Sep 92 19:11:41 GMT

leonard@mimsy.umd.edu (Leonard Dickens) writes:
|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.

I'm tempted to make a joke about McDonald's as school system, but I
won't. 

|>|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.

Why doesn't that happen now?

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

Hmmmmmmm.  Given the competition for MIT, Harvard, Stanford or
whatever, I'm not sure why that doesn't happen now.

|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.

I dunno.  There are always complaints about teachers now.

The missing mechanism in all this, of course, is the Free Market(tm).
I do not take this as a magic bullet that will automagically explain
why all these things that can be done now, but aren't will happen
under the voucher system.

Perhaps the McDonald's analogy has merit:  with the taste of our
citizens, I'm not so sure that giving them "choice" (which I think
they already have for many of the important things in schools) will
improve our system (that is the goal?).

|>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.

Will the vouchers suddenly make them "interested students"?  If so,
how?  If not, how will we attract new teachers?

|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.

Where willthe money come from?  Will youhave to charge students more
money?  Does the voucher, then, help the folx who seem to suffer most
from our current system?

|>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.

I dunno.  I'll ask.

|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?

Is our problem more systemic than the really bad schools with gunfire?
Who is the real target of the vouchers?  Whom will it help most?
least?

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

Love for the students?

|>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.

I see this argument, but it sort of begs the question:  does it
*really* in the way that matters, in the real world, empower the
people who are least empowered?  If it helps the kids who already have
access to good schools, private or public, but does little for the
others, what's the point?

--
Peace.
   "I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and
    democracy - but that could change."
                -- Vice President Dan Quayle
                                   -\--/-
    Don't just adopt opinions     |  \/  |       Some of you are homeboys
          develop them.           |  /\  | but only I am The Homeboy From hell
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