With communism crumbling in Eastern Europe and nations rushing to adopt a market economy, it seems that more people than ever before believe a competitive market system is the only one that will work. John Chubb and Terry Moe think the market system will also work to revive America's faltering schools. In Politics, Markets and America's Schools (Washington, D. C.: The Brookings Institution, 1990), they suggest a voucher system that would give students publicly funded "scholarships" to attend any school of their choice -- public or private. They paint a rosy picture of how the market would provide schools geared to satisfy every type of education "consumer." Markets undoubtedly do many things well. They're also lousy at other things, but Chubb and Moe don't discuss the down side of their market schools.
Being driven by market forces is no guarantee of quality for schools. Far from it -- market schools are subject to the same abuses as other businesses. A Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune reporter, David Peterson, found this our when he investigated Minnesota vocational and technical schools in 1988. In competing for students, these public and private schools used slogans like "90 percent of all technical institute students start careers in their chosen fields. You can, too." Upbeat slogans like this probably impressed prospective students, but few of the schools had placement records to match -- "50 percent of all students get permanent jobs" was more like it. And, Peterson found, even those figures were generous because they included people who got menial jobs that had nothing to do with what they had studied in vocational-technical school -- for instance, two graduates "trained" as electromechanical technicians working as janitors.
Chubb and Moe say consumers will be protected by the government even under a system of market schools. But it didn't work that way in Minnesota, which was spending more on these schools than on its state universities. In fact, the state regulators did check, but when student surveys disagreed with the information provided by the market schools, the regulators mostly ignored what the students had to say. Finally, they stopped asking for student surveys.
This isn't an isolated case, either. A 1984 survey of proprietary trade schools conducted by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) sampled 1,165 private, for-profit schools that were getting $185 million a year in Pell Grants from the federal government. Its findings? Nearly half the schools admitted students who did not meet federally mandated admission requirements. (And when 74 percent of these students dropped out without having gotten the training they expected, the schools of course help on to the $13 million the students had brought in government grants.) Two-thirds of these market schools misrepresented themselves in recruiting students, many by lying about the jobs their graduates got.
Again, the agencies -- public and private -- that were responsible for monitoring the very minimal standards that these 1,165 schools were supposed to maintain had not done so. They were hampered by scarce funds and lack of personnel. And if we were to move to a system of market schools, more than 100,000 schools would have to be monitored. Could we afford to do this? And if we did somehow find the money, wouldn't we be moving the schools back to the bureaucratic control from which Chubb and Moe are -- rightly trying to free them?
Chubb and Moe make a powerful argument in favor of vouchers because they don't meet the scholar's obligation to deal with both sides of the story. So they aren't worried about crooked entrepreneurs or the costs and dangers of regulation. They're not worried about schools' getting mediocre results, either. They say that academically excellent schools will prosper and grow because parents and students will surely select them and that bad schools will lose customers and either shape up or close. But is their assumption that parents and students will always -- or almost always -- make choices on the basis of how good schools are warranted?
We already know that nonacademic issues are very important for students taking advantage of Minnesota's choice plan. In 1989-90, 40 percent of students who went to a school outside their district did so for reasons of "convenience," like easy transportation or the availability of day care. And market schools would increase, not diminish, the tendency to make choices for nonacademic reasons. Creative marketers with schools to sell would find plenty of ways that had nothing to do with producing more learning to attract kids to their schools -- Get a free trip to Disneyland! Come to the school that produced last year's state champs! Swim in our new Olympic pool!
At this moment, we are in the midst of a vast national effort to set American education right -- the president, the governors and the whole business community are involved. The process is slow and difficult, and we're not entirely sure what will work. But this much is clear: Our efforts are focused on improving student learning; the market schools that Chubb and Moe propose are focused on attracting and holding on to students. One has a good chance of making our schools what they should be; the other will stop short with making our students happy.