Tragedy of the Commons: Education

Reading the latest post from Mencius Moldbug, I made a connection between yesterday's post on education and his use of the Tragedy of the Commons.

The example used in Moldbug's post is the fisheries. When one person/company/organization/caretaker owns the fish, they will protect them and only extract the "interest". They will maintain a relatively stable population of fish and only take the excess. When many fisherman can take the fish, their incentive is to grab as many fish as possible, otherwise someone else will, and overfishing leads to a decline of the fisheries. Moldbug then goes on to discuss this in the context of fractured authority.

This go me thinking about the education system in America. What is the nation's greatest resource? It is the students. If all power were given to the student or their parent (guardian), their incentive would be to maximize their return. They have full ownership of the thing of value in the system—themselves. (State spending is dependent on the student. No students, no schools, no spending.) But instead of giving the student absolute authority over the spending of education money, it is fractured throughout federal government, state government, local government, teachers' unions and school boards. Thus, the one person who has the most interest in maximizing their educational return, the student, in fact has almost all authority and capital stripped from them by various parties with their own personal interests and goals, which may or may not coincide with the interests of the student.

The federal bureaucrat's mandate is to ensure education money is spent effectively. No Child Left Behind includes tests to measure student performance. They do not care if the tests really work, their job is to administer tests, and they do so. Massachusetts state government administers MCAS for the same reason, with the same effects.

Local government's strip the public of capital and redirect it in the interests of the majority of the public, which will never be closely aligned with the interests of students.

School boards are there to make sure money is spent properly and to hold the educators accountable. I don't need to go far to find an example of Creation/evolution battles to show that they are not acting in the interest of the individual students. These are the battles that make headlines, consider how many pass without interest to the public, such as battles over which foreign languages to teach, or what math courses to offer.

Finally, there are the teacher's unions. Their interest is to maximize the flow of income into the school system, and then maximize the flow of said income into their members' pockets. They've done a masterful job of convincing the public that our biggest problem is underpaid teachers.

Consider the converse. Imagine a system where the student can choose among public schools. (School choice) Here, the student can outmaneuver the school boards and perhaps find a school more in tune with his educational needs.

Imagine a system where the student directs the capital. (Vouchers) The student can outmaneuver the school board, and to some extent the teachers' unions. With fractured control over spending, the union could no longer control the flow of funds at the school level (which now depends on how many students choose to attend). They can still lobby for more funding at the government level, and there's still the ultimate control of government on how the money is spent.

Now imagine a system where the student owns the capital. In this system, there is no authority higher than the student. Government cannot impose testing on the student (though they may try, "in the public interest") because the student does not use public funds. The student finally has the ability to maximize his return on investment (ROI). The student has the choice to attend a school, or to maintain total educational freedom in the environment of a home school. (And in light of European systems with educational choice, homeschooling would meet very strong competition from educations with an economic incentive to deliver superior returns.) With local and state government out of the picture, the teachers and boards of private schools only have control to the extent that they show a superior ability to maximize the student's ROI.

All the failures and reforms of public education fail and continue to fail because they are trying to fix a system flawed from the start. To the extent that school choice and vouchers show improvements, it is because they are closer to the ideal system of total student control. Efforts at school choice and vouchers, however, are wasted efforts. Promoting a less-bad system is to promote a bad system. If all the school choice, voucher, and home school supporters combined their efforts and promoted the best system, we would have the chance to accomplish something good.