Is the Public School System Government Overreach?

“Public schools should not be in a monopoly position; they should have to compete with private schools” – Milton Friedman, Nobel prize winner in economics.

When we think of private schools, we often think of them as a luxury affordable only to those of the most affluent in society. This stigma often raises the question of whether a school system can operate successfully when largely composed of private institutions, a question that is answered rather prematurely. It would make education polarising, classist, perhaps even class-exclusive. A closer examination of the mechanics at work in the American education system and certain economic certainties proves a significant amount of this skepticism to be folly, but that is not to say that an abolition of public schools and taking a chainsaw to the department of education (like certain members of this administration have suggested) is necessarily the optimal route either.

When making the assumption that private schools will remain as exclusive as they are today under a more libertarian approach to education, the anti-competitive nature of the current market has been overlooked. The explanation as to why private schools are the way that they are is actually a result of public schools and the inescapable taxes which are a consequence of them; it is not those who are willing to pay a tuition for private schools who send their children there, it is those who are willing to pay a tuition as well as paying their property taxes (which largely go towards public education). Essentially, the cost of public education is an unavoidable burden on the amount of money a family would be willing to spend on their children’s otherwise private education, therefore acting as anti-competitive. Rather than bridging the gap between classes, it is uniting the working middle classes, letting only the wealthiest in society broaden their lead through the use of elite private schools. Friedman is not campaigning for the abolition of public schools, but rather an option to refuse paying for them in lieu of private schools.

There is, however, a very strong counter-argument to this – an argument which contradicts Friedman’s potentially optimistic libertarian worldview. If the issue in this country is not one of population overgrowth, but rather one of population collapse (as warned by underperforming fertility rate trends), then it should be the objective of the government to enable young parents to start families. This entails assistance with house prices, grocery prices, and education prices. Friedman would argue that – by freeing up market space through limiting public schools and introducing a more competitive education market – private schools would adapt to have more cost-effective options which may still prove to outperform public schools. However, the burden of paying for the new private school would either be sudden or paid with interest to a bank, and in either scenario, the price burden would be entirely thrust upon parents, many of whom would be discouraged from having children in the first place due to the financial cost of educating them. In this regard,a publicly funded approach like the one currently in place is far superior. It spreads out the cost of education across all of a taxpayer’s life, which offers motivation for parents to start families. Hence, a strong advantage of government intervention.

So the current system is best to ensure that education is ubiquitous, accessible, and evenly distributed between classes, right? Wrong. Very wrong. If a privatised approach were to be taken, the wealth of the parents would determine the educational advantage that the child has, and therefore, it is an elitist and regressive idea. The same thing happens now.

Only those willing to pay a high rent can afford to live in Ridgewood; those who cannot might live in Clifton or Hackensack. Even less fortunate, maybe Camden, or somewhere inner city. When you drive through Camden, you will see that the houses in Ridgewood are significantly nicer and more expensive. The same is true for the schools. Public schools are funded almost entirely by property taxes – more expensive houses mean more money collected in property taxes, meaning more funding for the children’s education. In  Camden’s public schools, students have a 65% graduation rate.n Ridgewood, it’s 96%. The average SAT score in Ridgewood? 1360. In Camden?,  960. There are no two ways about it: American public schools are classist and a severe hindrance to social mobility.

This social stagnation also has effects which cause deeper issues. One of them is racial segregation in America. Much of the segregation seen in America today is a result of historically oppressed groups living in a system that does not offer their children an equal education to those of the more privileged. By restricting social mobility, public schools are consequently aiding the racial divide in America as well.

Would private schools do better? New Jersey and New York are some of the most segregated states in the country, and it is the housing sector’s fault. Over many years, many both institutionalised and de facto acts of racism have caused certain neighborhoods to become off limits to marginalised groups. While someone like Friedman would argue that this is a consequence of government intervention, which has definitely been a component of it, an irrevocable factor in the racial division of the housing market has been a result of inherently racist real estate valuation metrics. Essentially, if there were more minorities involved in an area, real estate agents would devalue the properties there. This led to the term “white flight,” where even if a white home owner wasn’t racist, they would move neighborhoods once a minority population moved in, fearing that their own property value would fall.

It would not be crazy to think that the same logic could be applied to a private school system, especially one relying on – often relatively uninformed and very subjective – third-party rating mechanisms. When interviewed about this, Ridgewood’s own Mr. Appel claimed that a more libertarian school system would “increase racial segregation significantly,not so much because of individuals being racist”, but also because of how it would cause class division more so, he claims, than the current system causes class division.

Then there is the issue of culture. When asked whether or not he viewed the American public school system as a ‘bedrock’ of our culture, Mr Appel stated “if you were to ask me on a scale of one to ten how far I’d agree, I would say ten. […] It’s one of the few things that’s more or less consistent across the country”.

There is a question over what American culture is, or does it even exist, due to the massive differences between us. The institution of public schools, Appel claims, is one of the very few uniting elements in the lives of Americans, where a common culture is formed and instilled in American citizens.

When asked if he would expand this to being as crucially important for our democracy, he emphasised the point that in public schools, “you could be put next to someone with completely different views from your own and forced to discuss with them. I think that some of that is lost when you go off to university, where it’s harder to find people with different views than your own”. When the public school system is moderated by the government and more or less unavoidable, you don’t have the luxury of choosing what political allegiance your child’s school has. Partly because you don’t want to have to pay for a private school, but also because the school remains nonpartisan. An analogy that demonstrates why a more libertarian system would cause greater political division would be news agencies: when choosing which news agency to read from, often readers will choose the one more aligning with their own political beliefs, acting like an echochamber, strengthening certain divisive views. If the choice were available in education, then parents would undoubtedly take the political beliefs of the school into consideration when deciding where to send their child, most likely leading to the child not getting the political exposure that they would benefit from in a public school.

A fundamental argument which is used to argue against libertarian school systems is the outreach. A K-12 public education is currently more or less guaranteed to everyone in the country; no such mechanisms would be in place if public schools were on a  pay as you go basis like private schools would be. The Cato Institute (a renowned libertarian think tank) would argue that “the pre-common school literacy findings suggest that’s almost certainly wrong,” claiming that literacy rates before the advent of widespread public schools show a more extensive education system.

Mr Appel would beg to differ, suggesting that with privatisation of public schools “the equality and extensiveness of education would decrease [..] and we would pay the price of having all these uneducated people participating in our democracy”.

There are many different conclusions we can draw from this – each one with many drawbacks – but one that I feel ought to be unanimous is that the current system of K-12 education has to be changed in some regard. Whether it be a more libertarian model like Friedman or the Cato Institute suggests, or even a more extensive role of the government as they have in parts of Europe, the issue of the classist division caused by the public school system needs to be held accountable for jeopardizing the American tenet of liberty through equality of opportunity.