In “Simple Justice,” published today on the excellent Public Discourse website, Notre Dame’s Richard Garnett argues, persuasively to my mind, for public funding of schools outside the public school’s taxpayer-funded near-monopoly, a monopoly supported by the assumption that the public money we have for schooling are “public school resources, rather than public education resources.” This assumption is supported by an extreme (though politically mainstream) view of the separation of Church and state and practical arguments for the needs public schools being so great as to require denying any help to alternatives. As Garnett argues, the former (this is my paraphrase) offers to secular enterprises a constitutional blessing the Constitution doesn’t in fact give them and the latter is as a practical matter dubious, and in any case does not over-ride the requirements of justice.
The question, as he notes, becomes especially pointed or poignant as the school that once educated Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor, Blessed Sacrament School in the Bronx, is closing. If it had not existed when she was a child, she would not be on the Supreme Court. As she told the New York Times:
“You know how important those eight years were? It’s symbolic of what it means for all our families, like my mother, who were dirt-poor. She watched what happened to my cousins in public school and worried if we went there, we might not get out. So she scrimped and saved. It was a road of opportunity for kids with no other alternative.”
February 4th, 2013 | 11:55 am
It is interesting to see how France, with its concept of Laïcité deals with this.
Education is the responsibility and, hence, the right of parents – Article 213 of the Civil Code, read at every wedding provides, “Spouses are responsible together for the material and moral guidance of the family. They shall provide for the education of the children and shall prepare their future.”
The State guarantees public instruction [l'enseignement public] to all. In the case of private schools (faith-based or otherwise) the state pays the salaries of the teachers and librarians (but not the principal or other staff) to deliver the national curriculum. About 20% of pupils attend private schools, almost all of the Church schools.
Under the Jules Ferry Laws, public schools close for a half-day each week, so that parents can provide their children with religious instruction, if they so wish – much to the delight of working parents.
The system is universally accepted by the public.
February 4th, 2013 | 11:58 am
I should have said, “almost all of them Church schools.”
The system is the stabilised result of bitter conflicts between Church and State in the late 19th and early 20th century, that no one wants to re-visit.
February 4th, 2013 | 4:32 pm
I apologize for my cynicism, but the linked article reads at times more like he wants a direct bailout for Catholic schools than a coherent argument. The wall of separation helps us as Christians, because by not accepting federal money, we also can’t be forced to accept federal doctrine over our own. This is not something we should toss away lightly.
Also, if said schools are too expensive to run, it is not the federal governments fault. He would be better served in asking wealthy Catholics to endow them.
February 5th, 2013 | 6:32 am
Dave Dutcher makes an important point. Federal aid may come with “strings attached”.
Still American citizenship, its duties and its benefits, is not for atheists and secularists only. Catholics are included. It is a matter of “simple justice.”
February 5th, 2013 | 11:09 am
I apologize for my cynicism, but the linked article reads at times more like he wants a direct bailout for Catholic schools than a coherent argument. The wall of separation helps us as Christians, because by not accepting federal money, we also can’t be forced to accept federal doctrine over our own. This is not something we should toss away lightly.
Also, if said schools are too expensive to run, it is not the federal governments fault. He would be better served in asking wealthy Catholics to endow them.
Dave Dutcher, educational services are something that can be readily produced and purchased on the open market. They are not ‘public goods’ in the sense that highways or the military are – goods and services which are produced only with the aid of an apparatus of coercion.
That being the case, the provision of primary and secondary schooling is a form of welfare or common provision just as surely as public medical insurance or cash transfers. It has been public policy for 170 years or more to provide a baseline of educational services for youths under 12, a policy gradually extended to cover youths between the ages of 12 and 18. As it was extended, attendance was made formally mandatory, so the policy was transformed to attempt a baseline of consumption as well as provision of these services.
This was done so for a complex of civic, social, and economic reasons. The thing is, the mode of service delivery reflected the mindsets and technologies of the time and have persisted in the absence of public dissatisfaction sufficient to trump general inertia the vested interests in the current structure. It does not need to be this way.
In 1918, public agency was a method of delivering medical services (through municipal hospitals and state sanitoriums), long-term care (through state asylum), and ameliorating general indigence (through…
February 5th, 2013 | 11:10 am
(through state poorhouses). All of these sorts of institutions have disappeared or are much reduced in their census due to changes in the mode of public provision – mainly due to the use of insurance and vouchers redeemable by philanthropic, guild, and commercial enterprise.
You make use of UPS, or DHL, or FedEx and you realize that the demand for these sorts of services is no longer so constrained that there is any need for a public agency to assure universal (much less general or pervasive) service. The U.S. Postal Service is a failing institution.
Which brings us to local schools. Other than a few natural monopolies, it is difficult to locate a sphere of endeavour where monopolistic provision to captive markets compares favorably in cost and quality to what competing private enterprises can offer. Defenders of public schools (e.g. Diane Ravitch) do not put together a coherent argument as to why this general feature of social life should not be manifest in the sphere of education. We have public schools because it is in the pecuniary interest of their employees to remain public employees and because various stakeholders wish to engage in asinine social engineering projects on the public dime.
As long as the provisioning of primary and secondary education is not so poorly structured that we develop rapid inflation driven by public subsidy (which is what has happened in higher education and happened for a time in medical services) and as long as there are transparent and public metrics of performance for schools, we will be better off with private education financed by vouchers.
February 5th, 2013 | 11:22 am
By the way, even if you maintained public schools (which are unaccountably popular), you do not need to assess a jiziya on dissidents who decline to use them. It could be public policy to return to parents their household’s contribution to the variable cost of running the district schools should they opt out. The formula would be as follows:
([(b - p)/t] x L) / c
b = total district expenditure
p = expenditures on physical plant
t = sum of property taxes collected by the district
L = household’s school tax liability
c = # of children between 5 and 18 in the household.
You would receive a rebate of this value for each child you withdraw.
Please not that parents with children in school are cross-subsidized by the rest of the households in the community. The cross-subsidy would still be directed to the district schools and parents who withdraw their children would still be contributing to the fixed costs of running the district school. They would just be compensated (and receive some relief) for reducing the variable costs of running those schools.
February 5th, 2013 | 11:29 am
Dave Dutcher makes an important point. Federal aid may come with “strings attached”.
It is doubtful that educational services incorporate economies of scale which would make advisable any sort of national organization. The only reason to have federal aid is that per capita production and income in some states is a good deal lower than national means, which in turn injures their tax base, which in turn injures their ability to maintain quality public works and pay competitive salaries to their civil servants. That problem can be addressed through general revenue sharing. Cut a check to Mississippi; no need to second guess local preferences about how to allocate revenues across expenditures.
February 5th, 2013 | 4:55 pm
Art Deco:
The problem is that you are assuming privatization will always be a net benefit. I’m worried that we will instead see the rise of fraudulent or poor-quality schools solely to suck down voucher money. Think the equivalents of Rent-A-Center, check cashing stores, credit cards that charge 25%+ APR or those online distance schools that charge ridiculous fees for substandard vocational or liberal arts education.
I think people have too much faith in the market restraining its predatory impulses towards the working class. Yes, it works fine for the top, but in many ways it could get even worse for those on the bottom.
February 6th, 2013 | 3:28 am
Art Deco
But the state does have an interest in education.
Jules ferry, the creator of the modern French education system, imitated in much of Europe and elsewhere, was simply more candid than most, when he insisted that its object was to cast the nation’s youth in the same mould and to stamp them, like the coinage, with the image of the republic.
February 6th, 2013 | 6:13 pm
Horace Mann and John Dewey, the architects of public schooling in the US certainly agree that the State has a interest in education…
Horace Mann: “We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.”
John Dewey : “The teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true Kingdom of God.”
February 7th, 2013 | 3:52 pm
Michael PS
I am not sure what your point is. I have little doubt the teachers’ unions, the state education department, the superintendent’s office, the administrators at your local school and (above all) teacher training faculties have ‘interests’. The question is whether elected officials and the public provide them with a conduit to put their agendas into effects. You do not need public agencies in order to provide education; you likely need nothing resembling contemporary schools of education to train teachers (see Thos. Sowell on this point).
Dave Dutcher:
Again, if you are concerned about quality control, make use of mandatory regents’ examinations to establish the performance metrics of each school. The ideal measure would be one of year-to-year improvement controlling for the psychometric profile of the school in question. Publish the results and close the 1-2% at the very bottom each year.
Joe Carter:
You hired Joshua Gonnerman as an intern, didn’t you?
February 8th, 2013 | 3:27 am
Art Deco
The state’s interest is what Jules Ferry described, ” to cast the nation’s youth in the same mould and to stamp them, like the coinage, with the image of the republic.”
February 8th, 2013 | 9:16 am
That is not ‘the state’s interest’. That is the interest of a selection of people who wish to make use of state institutions for their purposes. The rest of us can and should prevent them from so doing.
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