The School System Monopoly

In an interview with Brenten Miniter South Carolina state Sen. Robert Ford, a Democrat, said recently that he saw the inside of a jail cell 73 times, he did so to make a point. He was referring to the arrests that occurred during the civil right’s protests of the 1960’s. Today this African-American Democrat says the new civil-rights struggle is about the quality of instruction in public schools, and that to receive a decent education African-Americans need school choice. He wants the President's help. "We need choice like Obama has. He can send his kids to any school he wants."

Mr. Ford now advocates tax credits and scholarships that parents can spend on public or private schools. He has studied, over the past three and a half years, how school choice works and he's now advocating what some call a ‘voucher’ system. And he is not the only Democrat to think so.
In Economics a monopoly exists when a specific individual or enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it. It has long been frowned upon in the U.S. except in certain cases – the public school system being one of those cases.

Teacher unions have the exclusive right to represent teachers and to negotiate teacher contracts with school boards in 90 percent of American schools. To put this in economic terms, they enjoy a near-monopoly of teacher supply in the education market. This gives them enormous power to raise the price of teacher services—and in effect to divert spending from better education to better pay and conditions for their members.

So what do we end up with as parents? More money being thrown into the educational systems K-12, but not with better educated children, but higher teacher incomes and more teachers doing less work for more money. And what keeps all of this monopolistic activity continuing: A public school system with too many administrators and the knowledge that there is no competition for the education tax dollars coming in to the bureaucracy. No one is forced to be accountable.

I know about this from personal experience. My husband and I lived in Tucson Arizona at the time and our son was part of the grand ‘busing’ experiment that failed miserably – he was a 3rd grade student. We lived in an area of town that included a junior high school and a high school and elementary school but our son was bused out of our area to another part of town. We attended meetings with angry parents that were concerned that their children were being bussed out of the areas where they lived, spending countless hours on buses and fracturing their ‘neighborhoods’ in the process. These were parents from all areas of town, including low, middle and high income families. No one cared about the parents, no one listened, certainly not the school district or the elected officials of Tucson. They were going to bus children to a central holding facility and then re-distribute them out to schools everywhere.

When our son started 3rd grade I volunteered as a reading instructor in his class two mornings a week. You learn a lot about what goes on in a classroom when you volunteer, by the way. The classroom was in constant motion with none of the children remaining seated at their desks, all of them talking to each other and not listening to the teacher, and certainly no education was going on. My reading group, which included my son, had to move to another room to have the quiet necessary for studying. The teacher in that classroom was an overpaid babysitter, a babysitter who no one could fire due to incompetance since she had been on the job long enough to have tenure, the most evil word in the public school sysem.

Then the school asked me if I would like to help them improve the education for all of the children by helping to turn the school into a magnet school. We as a committee worked for hours and days and weeks on the project and as the project wound down I felt that the school would become a good educational experience for all of the children, our son included. That is when I was informed that my son would not be attending the school but would be bussed to some other school. When I asked which school they couldn’t tell me. Our son was being used in some grand scheme known only to the bureaucrats. We pulled our son out of the public school and placed him in a private school. We didn’t want any further ‘experimentation’ using our son as a guinea pig.

Public schools charge people for educating their children even when they send them to private or parochial schools. And since very few parents can afford to pay twice for their children's education, they are effectively compelled to use the public schools and to pay, through various forms of taxation, for the inflated salaries and low productivity negotiated by the teacher’s unions. And since these parents cannot go elsewhere, they have no leverage to compel the public schools to raise their performance.
Overall, therefore, the education market, like all monopoly-dominated markets, is inefficient, uncompetitive and marked by low innovation, poor standards and high prices.