It's called Race to the Top, and if you haven't heard of it (lucky!), it works like this: states submit proposals for using federal grant money, and the proposal that the federales think is best gets the money. The competition among the states is supposed to permit a wide array of ideas to be developed, with the intent of securing better results than a top-down plan imposed from D.C. Here, I'll let the man himself explain it:
And here's how Race to the Top works. Last year, we set aside more than $4 billion to improve our schools -- one of the largest investments in reform in our nation's history. But we didn't just hand this money out to states that wanted it; we challenged them to compete for it. And it's the competitive nature of this initiative that we believe helps make it so effective. We laid out a few key criteria and said if you meet these tests, we'll reward you by helping you reform your schools.
So... the competition makes it effective? You just tell the producers what you want and give your money to whoever gives you the best result? If only we could apply this sort of genius to cars and computers! Oh, wait.
How about we have a real Race to the Top and divide our nation's education budget by our number of schoolchildren and let each family make its own Race to the Top grant to that education provider that they feel provides the best education? Why then, each student could be individually evaluated in depth in a way that no test could ever match, and instead of central planners determining from afar what they think might work best, parents could monitor the efficacy of individual schools themselves- not just states or districts- and make adjustments in real time! I know, I know, it sounds like sorcery, but apparently this technique works so well that I can, right now, without telling anyone ahead of time, go to the store and buy any sort of liquor I want from anywhere in the world. And that's just the power of markets as applied to liquor. Think what they could do for education.
1 comment:
I never really bought the voucher idea for schools (or really anything else that is generally used). If you have a scarce resource with a market clearing price of $X, and the government gives everyone buying that resource a voucher worth $Y that can only be spent on that resource, the price of that resource will now be $X+Y.
This seems to be what happened with higher education, and is why the sticker price of higher education has gone up so dramatically over the past 50 or so years. The government started giving out grants and subsidized loans, which allowed colleges to raise their prices, which caused the government to give out more grants and subsidized loans, which allowed colleges to raise their prices more . . .
Now, I know that this this isn't entirely true, because if you put more money into the system, it should drive supply, but given the experiment with higher education, this doesn't really seem to help. To the extent the supply increased, it increased at the bottom. Harvard and Yale were around before there was any financial aid, what we got was University of Phoenix and DeVry. Adding schools like this to the supply is arguably worse than useless.
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