The School Revolution (7 page)

Parental responsibility extends to every aspect of the educational program. Parents have a moral responsibility to understand what is in the textbooks assigned to their children. Yet how many parents sit down and read carefully
through textbooks from kindergarten through twelfth grade? Hardly any. It is easier to assume that everything is all right. Why should they assume this? The liberal establishment has controlled the book publishing industry for the public schools for well over a century. The fads of liberalism extend into the textbooks.

The classic example of this is the textbook that high school football
coach John T. Scopes used in teaching biology as a substitute teacher in 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee. The book was called
A Civic Biology.
It was published in 1914. Here are some extracts from that textbook:

Believe it or not, this was the standard liberal line in 1925. Two years later, this outlook was used by the Supreme Court to legalize the state-forced sterilization of supposedly retarded women. The case was
Buck v. Bell
. It has never been overturned by a subsequent Supreme Court decision.

Parents enroll their children in private schools. They hope that the textbooks will not be anything like
A Civic Biology
. But if parents are not willing to read the assignments, then they are forced to trust the headmaster of the private school in the selection of textbook and other course materials. The headmaster in turn has to trust the teachers. This is akin to a chain of command. The people
at the top are not really sure what is going on at the bottom.

I am not saying that every parent has to read every textbook. Parents have to make decisions regarding whom they rely on to provide the textbook materials in classroom instruction. But homeschooling parents have a much better opportunity to investigate what is being taught than other parents do. They can read any
of the curriculum materials for themselves. They see themselves as more responsible, so they are more apt to pay attention to what is being taught.

A homeschool parent has this advantage: if he does not like a particular textbook, he can substitute another textbook. He does not have this degree of authority even when he sends his child to a private school. He must accept the overall
program of that school. This is not the case when parents teach their children at home. They have far greater authority to substitute materials when they are homeschooling parents than they do when they are parents of children in private schools.

To sum up, parents have a moral and legal responsibility to educate their children. This authority
can be delegated, but parents do not escape the responsibility by delegating this responsibility. They remain the primary agents of education.

Parents decide which programs and materials are best for their children. Most parents do not give this much thought. But this does not in any way lessen their responsibility. They still decide. This decision is an inescapable concept. A decision
not to adopt a particular program is a decision to adopt another program. The state’s system of compulsory education forces this decision on every parent.

The availability of homeschooling materials, and of online education, makes possible far greater authority over education. There is a wide range of materials. The costs of buying online instruction keep falling. The old rule of economics
is true: “At a lower price, more is demanded.” This is why homeschooling is growing in popularity.

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n college-level textbooks on economics, there is always a chapter on monopoly. The textbook goes into considerable detail on the nature of monopoly, and how it hurts customers. The heart of the chapter is the discussion of how suppliers use government to restrict supply, which enables the suppliers to
charge higher prices for their output. Customers cannot go to rival suppliers in order to meet demand. So they are forced to deal with those sellers in the marketplace that have a competitive advantage granted to them by government privilege. The discussion centers on the artificial limitation of supply, and how this reduces the wealth of customers because it reduces their choices.

I have never seen a college-level textbook go into detail on how the government regulates educational institutions. The discussions do not point out that the regulatory system creates a monopoly, a cartel, at the university level. It restricts the supply of advanced education. The chapter also does not discuss how education at the kindergarten through twelfth-grade level is not merely
a cartel but also a state-subsidized system. These subsidies keep out competing programs that are not entitled to the state’s subsidies. Furthermore, the regulatory system restricts the supply of teachers, schools, and educational programs. By any standard, the educational system is either a monopoly or at least an oligopoly (consisting of a few sellers). The entire regulatory apparatus, when combined
with the system of tax subsidies, has produced a system of education marked by artificial limits on supply and high prices.

In the case of tax-funded education, the high prices are concealed from the voters. It is not clear what the cost per child is in any given school district. It is also not clear what percentage of the total budget goes to administration, as contrasted with classroom
teaching. Voters find it very difficult to sort out who gets what with respect to the money spent by the local school system. There is a decided lack of transparency. This is to the advantage of the bureaucrats who control the educational system, and it is especially advantageous to the administrators who benefit most from it.

The free-market
doctrine is that there should be open entry into labor markets, capital markets, and the markets for goods and services. This open entry guarantees diversity. It provides a large number of choices to consumers. Consumers can match their desires with the available supplies of goods and services. The potential for profit lures suppliers into the marketplace, and their presence ensures a wide variety
of choices.

The free-market principle of open entry is challenged by governmental restrictions on access to consumer markets. There are many official justifications for these restrictions, but the main one is this: “Customers do not know what is good for them.” They do not know what products to buy, what prices to pay, or what arrangements to negotiate with respect to return and replacement.
Customers are in fact woefully ignorant of what they really need, so the state enters the marketplace to restrict what customers are legally allowed to purchase. The idea here is that state officials know what customers really need as distinguished from what customers are willing to pay for.

One of the justifications for this is that advertising deludes customers. This means that customers
are considered not able to sort out fact from fiction when they read or see an advertisement. It is interesting that the same advertising agencies hired by businesses to sell products are also hired by politicians to produce advertisements in election years. In other words, advertising is accepted as a legitimate way to motivate people to take action during election years, but is placed under
suspicion when it comes to advertising products and services. People in their capacity as voters are supposedly perfectly capable of making accurate decisions based on advertising. On the other hand, those same people in their capacity as customers supposedly are incapable of making accurate decisions based on advertising. This is utterly illogical, but it is basic to understanding all modern governments
in the West.

The state creates restrictions on entry into certain fields. The government says that customers must be protected by regulatory agencies. Regulatory agencies screen out sellers of goods and services that have not met certain government criteria. The assumption here is that the regulatory agencies are capable of specifying product quality, and that in order to enforce these
decisions, the government is authorized to impose negative sanctions, such as fines and even jail sentences. This assumes that bureaucratic standards of quality are superior to those of the marketplace. Customers are supposedly incapable of enforcing these standards in the marketplace. This is the reigning assumption of regulatory agencies everywhere.

Whenever the state intervenes in
a market to restrict entry by sellers, it results in higher prices. Customers are not able to buy the kinds of goods and services they want, at a price they are willing to pay. So the producers who would otherwise have entered the market are forced to enter other markets. These markets are less profitable than the restricted markets. Customers in the regulated markets are worse off, and so are marginal
suppliers who leave those markets.

We can see this principle at work in the market for education. The supply of education is limited by government restrictions on academic certification. Teachers must go through a specified regimen at the college level in order to be eligible to teach in the nation’s tax-funded school systems. This reduces the
supply of teachers who can legally be hired by local school districts. Furthermore, restrictions on school construction by private entrepreneurs limit the amount of competition tax-funded schools face.

So, parents are compelled to send their children to school, but the state restricts the number of schools available to parents. This creates a near monopoly of education, kindergarten
through twelfth grade, for the state. The state uses tax funding to build schools, and it uses the regulatory system to restrict the creation of rival schools. This is the classic mark of a monopoly.

The free-market solution is open entry and competition. Competition may be in the form of quality. Some parents want very-high-quality education for their children, and are willing to pay
a great deal of money to purchase it. They would not have to pay as much money if there were open entry into the local market for schools. Other parents cannot afford the best education for their children, because they do not have enough money. So, they want price-competitive education. This is also made available by entrepreneurs in the field of private education. These entrepreneurs can decide
which programs are affordable for which parents, and which programs will meet the demands of specific parents. As more schools come onstream, the range of choice for parents increases. This is the standard definition of what constitutes economic growth. Economic growth takes place when customers can buy more goods and services than they were able to buy prior to the increase in economic growth.

As I said, the libertarian begins with this principle: “One size does not fit all.” This applies to the field of education. The solution is open entry into the field of education. Producers can specialize. They can target specific groups within the society. Entrepreneurs can provide education at a competitive price. The range of choices available to parents increases. There will be competing
systems with respect to educational methodology. There will also be competing systems with respect to the content of education. Parents have a greater range of choice, but of course this means that they must spend more time researching the marketplace. They must find out what is available and at what price.

When parents have this degree of authority, they can exercise their responsibility
at a much higher level. They can concentrate on what curriculum materials are available. When the supply of these materials is limited by law, this reduces the range of choice available to parents, and therefore reduces the degree of responsibility parents are capable of exercising. If something is not being made available, the parent is not responsible for the fact that he did not investigate
it, evaluate it, or even purchase it.

Bureaucrats in the field of education, which is almost exclusively nonprofit education, have a bias against price-competitive academic programs. They assume that these programs are of low quality. They think it is a good idea to close the market to sellers of any kinds of curriculum not certified by educational
bureaucrats. They have greater control over the content and structure of education when they can restrict entry into the marketplace. In the name of helping children, these promoters of self-interested restrictions on entry conceal the fact that they are able to exercise greater power over education and then charge more for the privilege of doing so.

This is why libertarians believe
that there should be open entry into the field of education. They do not trust state bureaucrats to act on behalf of parents, especially parents who have a particular view of the best methodology and content for the education of their children. The bureaucrats operate in their own self-interest, which is to expand their power and income.

This raises the issue of government regulation
of schools. First, the government requires compulsory attendance. Second, in order to keep control over the content of the curriculum, governments establish rules and regulations governing those schools. Parents are not allowed to send their children to schools that do not meet these qualifications. The qualifications are set very high, so that not many schools can be established to compete against
the public school system. This increases the power of the public school system, and the power of the bureaucrats who run the system.

An example of this kind of regulation can be seen in the requirement that private high schools have libraries of at least 1,500 books. States around America had this requirement or something similar to it in the 1990s. But a student in the early 1990s was
able to carry a CD-ROM with 5,000 books on it: the Library of the Future. No matter. A CD-ROM and computer stations did not count as meeting the 1,500-book requirement. The books had to be physical, so tax money had to go toward that. Today students have access to hundreds of thousands of books by means of the cell phones in their pockets. But accredited high schools must still have physical libraries.
These libraries must be run by someone with a degree in library science. Conclusion: The library requirement has nothing to do with number of books in the library. It has everything to do with increasing the cost of building a facility that qualifies as a school that meets the government’s regulations.

The goal of academic regulation is to limit the supply of schools that compete against
public schools. This is done in the name of guaranteeing the educational quality of the school, thereby protecting the students. Yet the academic performance of the public schools continues to decline, and has done so since the early 1960s. The scores on the SAT and ACT exams continue to fall. The high point was in the early 1960s. So, regulation has not been successful in guaranteeing the quality
of education. But it has been quite successful in restricting entry into the field of education.

In the 1980s there was a great battle over homeschooling. States around the nation passed laws prohibiting parents from substituting homeschooling for schooling in either a tax-funded school or a private school. The private schools were so expensive that only a handful of parents could afford
them. This meant that parents would simply have to send their children to the public schools. The appearance of homeschooling in the 1970s and ’80s represented a threat to this strategy of restricting the supply of competing educational programs. States prosecuted parents for teaching their children at home.

A major case was tried in Texas in 1985,
Leeper v. Arlington
, in which a coalition
of homeschool advocates brought a class-action suit against the state. The state lost the case in the state supreme court in 1994. The court required school districts to compensate the parents of the children who brought the suit.
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This case sent a clear message to local school districts in Texas. Overnight, they removed most of the restrictions against homeschooling. The state of Texas became
very friendly toward homeschooling. But it took a court case to achieve this goal.

Parents should exercise their legal authority to establish whatever kind of curriculum and structured environment they deem appropriate for their children. This assertion of authority is deeply resented by the states’ educational bureaucrats,
who for more than 150 years have waged a war against parental authority in the field of education in the United States. The idea that parents have sufficient judgment to determine the education of their own children is rejected automatically within those institutions of academic certification that train public school teachers and administrators. The critics argue that some parents will not care
enough about the education of their children to go to any trouble to provide a curriculum for them. They argue that the state has an obligation to mandate the proper instruction of those children.

It should be obvious why this argument is not sufficient to establish a massive bureaucracy that regulates all educational programs. If the vast majority of parents did not care enough to educate
their children well, they would have the power politically to elect representatives who would strike down all such laws. Rather, the only way that such laws get passed is because the majority of voters believe that the state does have legitimate authority in establishing compulsory attendance laws and regulations regarding the kind of curriculum assigned to students. This is a case in which
educational bureaucrats blame a nonrepresentative group of parents, who in fact constitute a small percentage of the members of the community. On the basis of defending the children of these households, the bureaucrats persuade politicians to pass comprehensive compulsory education laws and other regulations governing private schools that meet the standards of the compulsory education laws.