I sometimes have a hard time believing how different my Swedish Montessori school experience was compared to what I got here in America.
I didn’t have to sit at a desk listening to a lecture for an hour. I went wherever I wanted in the classroom at almost any time. My teachers told me what I had to get done by a certain time frame and said, “Do it.” I’d have three to four hour periods at a time to work on whatever I wished. No one was going to force me to study math on Tuesday instead of grammar.
My school taught self-government. But that’s only one of many different types of approaches by Swedish “friskolor” (free schools). These for-profit schools are commodities that thrive or fall depending on how effectively they educate kids.
Ironically, the United States doesn’t care much for this model. It’s instead dominated by a heavily-centralized public system in which monopoly has replaced competition. And students are the ones being hurt. America’s education system placed only 17th in the world according to last year’s report by education firm Pearson. By contrast, nations like South Korea and Finland are among the top-ranking. American students aren’t dumber or less ambitious. They simply have no legitimate choices over their own education.
When I came to America, freedom in my learning experience vanished. I was going to learn what the school wanted me to learn in a super-contrived and telegraphed manner. There was no room for my old habits of taking responsibility to acquire knowledge on my own. I had to instead sit through dull lectures by ghastly inadequate teachers.
I didn’t learn much.
But that’s apparently besides the point in America. No matter how poorly public schools perform here, there’s always a safety-net to fall back on: the government. This safety-net is funded by your tax dollars. And since you’re not paying individual schools directly, you don’t get the luxury of deciding which schools receive your money.
South Korean teacher Kim Ki-hoon has a nifty solution. Virtually a rock star, he treats his job like a product and spends only three of his 60 working hours lecturing according to the Wall Street Journal. The rest of the time, he turns his services into commodities, selling recordings of his lectures online, answering student requests online, and so on.
He doesn’t work diligently out of mere charity but because doing so earns him $4 million a year. Unlike in America’s public schools, South Korean teachers are evaluated by performance, not tenure. More importantly, students choose which teacher to sign up for. If Kim wastes his students’ time, he’s done for and should reconsider his career path.
In South Korea, teachers and administrators have strong incentives to meet the needs of the parents and students to whom they provide their services. That incentive doesn’t exist when schools automatically receive a “feel-good” paycheck.
Worse, public schools are monopolized by unions who dictate choices for students. Teachers are rewarded for seniority, not results. A buffoon could be teaching students so long as he or she has tenure. Never mind if this buffoon is outwitted by a baboon.
Through lobbying and campaign finance, unions gain political clout and inoculate themselves from competition with private organizations. The Cato Institute reported last year that between 1989 and 2010, teachers’ unions contributed $56 million to campaign finance. That’s more than the contributions of Chevron, Exxon Mobil, the NRA, and Lockheed Martin combined.
And if that’s not enough, union members insist on higher pay even when it’s not warranted. If they don’t get what they want, they go on strike. Last year, the Chicago Teachers Union denied 350,000 students their educations. That strike lasted over a week.
What students desperately need is a competitive, market-based model that lets both parents and students choose the appropriate system for them. While some of us might clamor for private schools to outright replace all public schools, the likelihood of this happening is nonexistent.
Milton Friedman has already offered a more feasible solution: vouchers. Vouchers allow parents to decide which schools their children go to, and whether that be a public or private institution is up to them. Parents would still be taxpayers contributing to public funds. The difference is that neither the government nor unions would dictate where parents send their kids. Only schools deserving of funds would be left standing.
It’s time to give students and parents the agency they need. Because what it all comes down to is choice. Let schools duke it out and prove to the students who’s more worthy of their time.
