Anthony West wrote:
Perhaps you're confusing markets with "corporate capitalism" or some
other ideology. Markets are a more basic social creature; most societies
have long had them. Markets begin by noting people are inherently
unequal in complementary ways (farmers have lettuce but no cash; city
folks have cash but no lettuce). By going to the market, you tend to get
the same deal everyone else does. But markets can have both egalitarian
and inegalitarian effects.
Don't mistake "markets" as a synonym for "private profit". All sorts of
entities are in a marketplace. There is a gigantic market for colleges
and universities, very few of which are for profit. Governments compete
with each other too. Philadelphia competes with Lower Merion, and the
two of them together compete with Metropolitan Atlanta.
Complaining about the market is like complaining about the weather (aka
"the atmosphere"). Everybody does it, but nobody wants to try living
entirely without it.
Applying markets to mass education is complicated, but it too has a long
history. Still, schooling has long been seen as a public good. In that
sense, it must be egalitarian: each citizen deserves an equal stake from
society as he or she sets off as a young adult.
Yet the job of schools is also to sort and grade: measuring inequality.
How can they stop doing so? At the very least, there is passing and
failing. Since schools grade pupils, presumably for their own good, then
it's hard to understand why schools should be harmed by a taste of their
own medicine.
I don't think anyone reading what I wrote is confused by
what I meant. here is what I wrote:
in general, the idea behind markets is that not everyone
is equal, and in fact not everyone is supposed to be equal.
the idea of markets is to cast citizens into the role of
unequal competitors; the aim of markets is to preserve that
inequality.
that's the mud being thrown at public education.
make no mistake: what we're talking about here is the
challenge of delivering public education so that it's
available to all, equally, and where one's access to the
best public education does not reduce another's.
as you point out, schooling is indeed a public good, it must
be egalitarian, not a vegetable stand pitting consumers
against one another as unequal competitors for lettuce. and
yet we've seen what happens, for example, when penn
subsidizes a public school and a catchment area is drawn
around it: the mud of a market-driven model (in this case
penn-assisted competition for real estate) is thrown at
public education.
meanwhile solutions for inequities in the system are sought,
and you point to markets as a self-correcting mechanism. but
in your marketplace, where models for delivering public
education compete, where you pit the performance of 'every
for-profit or nonprofit school manager' against 'every
government school manager', and where you define what the
'good stuff' is and what the 'bad stuff' is, you've done
little more than to describe another vegetable stand -- a
vegetable stand that depends upon and preserves the
inequality of competing models.
maybe it's time to start looking at public schools not as
vegetable stands, but as places that prepare us for life --
inside and outside the marketplace.
..................
UNIVERSITY*CITOYEN
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