Matt Yglesias has an interesting take on Schools and Competition. In reaction to the classic Milton Friedmanite celebration of unfettered laissez-faire markerts, he endorses a key point in the analysis of W. Bentley MacLeod and Miguel Urquiola:
if schools cannot select students based upon their ability, then a free market is indeed efficient and encourages entry by high productivity schools. However, if schools are allowed to select on ability, then competition leads to stratification by parental income, increased transmission of income inequality, and reduced student effort—in some cases lowering the accumulation of skill.
Yglesias then lauds charter school lotteries as an example of a student selection process which is not founded on student ability, and so yields a representative student population. Yet this supposition is not borne by the available evidence: the recent Separate and Unequal report of the UFT found, for example, that New York City charter school lotteries are drawing many fewer free lunch students living in poverty, English Language Learners and students with special needs than the district schools serving the same community.
There are two important issues here that Yglesias fails to recognize. First, every system of school choice tried in American education — be it public school choice, charter schools or vouchers – has attracted highly motivated parents who are more involved in their children’s education to the schools of choice. Left unregulated and uncorrected, this concentration of motivated parents leads to a stratification of schools. Second, lottery results do not necessarily reflect the community from which applicants are drawn; rather, they reflect the pool of applicants, which can be quite different. When charter schools market themselves to the families of higher achieving students, their pool of applicants and student population reflect this recruitment pattern. A decision as simple as producing only English language recruitment materials skews the school’s applicant pool away from English Language Learners. Again, these marketing practices lead to the stratification of schools.
None of this is insuperable. While anathema to the laissez-faire market ideologues, a robust system of regulation and oversight could correct for the tendency to stratify schools, and produce a truly representative student population. In our study, we proposed precisely such a system. The only obstacle is one of political will, and of groups like the New York Charter School Association and the NYC Charter School Center which would rather continue with the much easier task of educating higher achieving students.
