Don’t Make US Public Schools More Like Harvard. By Matthew Yglesias

If conservatives were serious about their critique of elite universities, they would rethink their approach to reform for K-12 education.

January 7, 2024 at 1:00 PM UTC

Matthew Yglesias is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A co-founder of and former columnist for Vox, he writes the Slow Boring blog and newsletter. He is author of “One Billion Americans.”

Conservatives angered by the state of US higher education ought to take a moment to reconsider their approach to the rest of America’s educational system, which is currently dominated by a push for what they call “universal school choice.”

Under such a program, more commonly known as a voucher system, parents of K-12 children would receive a subsidy to attend the school of their choice, with schools able to call their own shots in terms of admissions policy, outside fundraising and curriculum design. The theory is that market competition, as in so many other areas, will produce good results. The reality is that this proposal would make primary and secondary education work the way US higher education already works — which is, to repeat, a system that conservatives don’t like, in part for good reasons.

After all, one might ask, if conservatives don’t like the way Harvard, Penn and MIT are run, why don’t they just launch their own schools to compete?

The reason, of course, is that it’s extraordinarily difficult to reach a higher rung on the prestige ladder, because so much of higher education is about selection and peer effects. The top schools do dedicate significant resources to educating their students. But what makes them elite isn’t the quality of the outputs — the value of their education is never put to any kind of rigorous evaluation — but the quality of the inputs.

Put another way: The smartest kids go to the most prestigious schools. Other smart people want to attend those schools to bask in the institutional prestige, to secure the networking opportunities, and just because getting in is proof that you’re smart. This means, in turn, that universities mostly compete against each for the most desirable applicants.

Some of that takes the form of notorious overspending on campus amenities. But much of it speaks directly to conservatives’ criticisms of contemporary college life. A few years back, US business leaders surveyed by Bloomberg recommended The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt as the best book of the year. It’s genuinely excellent. But why are young minds being coddled on campus? Not because the market is failing, but because the market is succeeding — by giving customers what they want.

Grade inflation, groupthink and indulgence of campus activists are all part of a customer-service university. The current scrutiny by wealthy donors and state legislatures will surely force some recalibration, but the fundamental drivers remain in place: As long as colleges are competing to be maximally attractive to the smartest high school students, their policies will be driven by the desires of bright teenagers (and, to an extent, their parents). This is not necessarily a formula for prioritizing actual education.

None of this is to argue that all is well in America’s public school systems. But precisely because they are public, there is a chance to make them try and serve the public interest.

My 8-year-old would, I am sure, prefer to have his teachers spend less time drilling him on reading and math. But in Washington, teachers’ salaries are determined in part based on their students’ demonstrated learning gains. Getting school systems to focus on actual results was driven by politics, not the market, and was championed by Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, not to mention a whole cohort of moderate mayors, including in DC.

Some of these initiatives didn’t work or proved overhyped. Yet there have also been many under-heralded success stories.

Last spring, for example, Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes released the latest results of its evaluation of charter school performance. It found that while there is significant school-to-school variation, on whole the charter sector outperforms traditional public schools, and by a growing margin.

The difference between charter schools and a voucher system is that charters aren’t allowed to pick their own students. When more kids want to enroll in a school than the school can accommodate, the school uses a lottery to decide who gets the slots.

This has two consequences. One is that, because schools can’t just compete to get the best inputs, they try to do a better job of educating students. This is market forces at work — but harnessed by regulation to serve a social goal rather than simply sorting. The other consequence is that it is possible to compare learning outcomes for kids who win the lottery to those of kids who don’t, which is an ideal experimental design for assessing school quality.

And studies such as Stanford’s find that while some charter schools underperform traditional public schools, a larger group overperforms. Even better, schools affiliated with so-called “charter management organizations” — essentially charter-school chains that attempt to open more campuses over time — outperform the average charter school, suggesting that pathways are in place to bring these improvements to larger scale. Last but not least, this improving charter-school paradigm suggests that market forces can deliver results.

The politics of supporting performance pay for teachers, as well as high-quality charter schools that improve educational outcomes, is difficult. But it’s better than the current progressive approach of treating public schools as a kind of jobs program for teachers. And it’s preferable to the kind of unregulated system of school choice favored by conservatives — the results of which, in higher education at least, they claim to hate.