Commentary; Posted: 3/27/02

Give parents choice in education

Henry Anderson
Guest Columnist

The main problem with teacherís salaries isnít whether they are too high or too low but rather that they arenít set in a free market setting according to the interaction of supply and demand. I donít care if teachers bargain individually or collectively and I think itís perfectly natural for them to look out for their own self-interests.

However, they go to great lengths to insulate themselves from the marketplace and this is wrong. In a free market setting, teachers in high demand areas, such as science, would be able to command a higher price than teachers in low demand areas, even if it means forming a separate bargaining unit.

Also, exceptional teachers or coaches would have the opportunity to command a higher salary in their own specialty. Our current system attempts to avoid market conditions as much as possible.

The question of whether we should provide a free education to students and whether that education should be provided by a state-run monopoly are two separate issues. We provide food stamps to people so that no one has to go hungry, but the food itself is not grown on state run collective farms. In addition, the recipients of the stamps have a wide range of stores to go to, and they are allowed to purchase the types of food they choose.

I would like to see smaller schools with serious competition between them. The schools could be publicly funded but privately run, and the funding would go to the school the parents choose, rather than the current monopoly.

This would allow parents more choices concerning items such as school curriculum and discipline.

If the schools also had the choice of whom they retained as students, it would help in reducing violence and restoring discipline. Schools that had a reputation for harboring troublemakers would soon find themselves losing students to competing schools, because parents of non-troublemakers would send their children to schools with better discipline. Since the funding would follow the students, the school would be forced to deal with the situation.

This brings up the problem of what to do with students who are so disruptive and violence prone that no school will accept them even though it means a loss of funding. If we believe that society has an obligation to provide a free education to its citizens then it follows that the students themselves, since they are also citizens, have an obligation to not deny that education to their fellow students through their disruptive behavior.

If they refuse to do that then they should no longer be entitled to a free education.

Finally, it is fairly common knowledge that public education is dominated by the American Left.

I believe a lot of people who would make good teachers wonít consider the profession because of this. The profession has drifted too far away from the mainstream and no longer is representative of many of the communities they profess to serve.

The best way to restore balance and credibility is to allow parents choice between competing alternatives.

Writer Henry Anderson lives in Forest Lake.

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