Epilogue

We have learned from progress in the field of psychology that certain biases are baked into the human condition. However, the fact that we live and process information in real time, in a temporal order, is not a mistake. It affects what we end up thinking, so it is a bias in a way; yet it is not a mistake, and there is no way for human information processors to avoid it. Even so, open-mindedness pays dividends. Because each of us set out to defend children rather than to defend theories, in the course of our back-and-forth each of us ended up learning something about what serves that more or less common aim. In particular, we understand that one of society’s legitimate aspirations is to be a place of opportunity, and above all a place of opportunity for its least advantaged citizens. We also understand what this overarching aspiration leaves open. It does not determine the particular missions of more specialized institutions within society, including institutions of education. We leave that as a question for the reader, but we hope to have shed some light on how to think about it.

How to Improve Education

This chapter examines and proposes alternative measures aimed at making schooling more efficient and improving schooling for less advantaged and lower achieving students. Out of school measures would include: reducing child poverty, improving child healthcare provision, and improving pre- and postnatal nursing and medical care access for poor children. School-based measures would include improving early childhood education provision, offering better preparation for teachers and principals and reducing the barriers for teachers becoming principals, establishing an infrastructure that supports continuous improvement in teaching and learning, rewarding and supporting good teaching, and changing funding arrangements so that more resources are targeted to lower-income students.

Introduction

The evolution of educational institutions has been shaped by an uneasy mix of standards-based and market-based reforms. How we understand education’s outcomes for students and for society at large will shape how we think about the general idea of market-based reforms. Yet any given reform is a particular intervention in a particular time and place, so a responsible evaluation of reform ultimately must be an analysis of particular observations. General principles of philosophy and economics can illuminate, but real cases have a way of turning out to be special cases. So while this is a debate about the role of market-based reforms in education, we want to avoid engaging in a duel of rival theories and instead speak on behalf of real children, real parents, and real teachers.

Setting the Stage

Chapter 1 will set out the assumptions behind the argument, and the theoretical framework within which it is made. Chapter 2 will set out and argue for a set of aims for an education system. Chapter 3 will outline the extent to which markets already, and unavoidably, play a role in the way educational opportunities are created and allocated. Chapter 4 provides first a theoretical argument that a fully marketized system is unlikely to further the aims outlined in chapter 2, and then an argument, grounded in careful consideration of the existing empirical research, that recent market reforms have not, in fact, furthered those aims. Chapter 5 outlines a sketch of some more promising reforms.

Justice and the Division of Labor

Teaching students to be complete citizens is a big job. However, it does not encompass everything. What do schools owe students? Plato’s Republic supposed we could learn about justice in an individual soul by looking at justice in the city—he called the latter “justice writ large.” Philosophers ever since have been skeptical, doubting that justice of the soul (doing justice to the parts of one’s soul) is akin to justice of the polis (members of a community doing justice to each other). My hypothesis here is that justice in our schools (a question of how to do justice to our students) is not like justice in the larger polis, either. Yet, our theorizing about justice has so far been largely concerned with justice writ large. Thus, when it comes to educational justice, much of our extant theorizing about justice may be no more than an analogy at best.

Society Is Not a Race

We observed that educators and educational institutions have a twofold mission. Here is an implication: If we perform well in our role as educators, we make our classroom a society—a cooperative venture for mutual advantage. If we perform well as certifiers, we turn our classroom into something else: a race, albeit a fair one. Society, in any case, is not a race. No one needs to win. Therefore, no one needs an equal opportunity to win either. To prepare students for membership in society, the exact thing students need, no more and no less, is a genuine chance to make something of whatever potential they have.

The Case Against Markets in Education

This chapter makes the case against markets in education. It identifies four issues often raised by opponents of markets. In a pure market system, private organizations would run schools, children would be allocated to schools through parental choice, there would be no government funding, and there would be no education-specific regulation of schools. The chapter gives reasons for believing that such a system would fall far short of the goals we should have for an education system. Then the chapter reviews the research on actual choice systems in the US, and argues that the evidence suggests that, whereas some charter and voucher schools may serve some students well, the preponderance of evidence does not support the claim that markets have made significant improvements in educational provision.

The Ineliminable Role of Markets in Schooling

This chapter identifies markets that currently frame the provision of schooling. Schools and school districts compete with one another for teachers in the labor market; people respond to labor market signals in deciding whether or not to train to become teachers; people exercise school choice through the housing market; and, as long as private schools are legal, those who can afford it can exit the public sector into private schools: in the UK, 7 percent of children attend private schools, and in the US about 12 percent do. The chapter argues that no market-free approach to education policy is available.

What Should Schooling Be About and How Should It Be Distributed?

This chapter lays out the several principles that should guide decisions about the structure of the education system. Children should develop the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and dispositions that will enable them to be effective contributors to the economy, to be competent democratic citizens, to have healthy emotional relationships, to be able to make their own authentic judgements about how to live their lives, and to have fulfilling personal lives. Equality has some weight when thinking about how educational success should be distributed, but focusing on lower achievers, within limits, is a matter of considerable urgency, greater urgency than educational equality.

What’s So Good About Education?

Here we consider twin concerns. First, when a good is a purely positional good, and thus of no particular social value, markets are likely to oversupply it. Second, if education is instead a public good, and indeed a critically valuable public good, then markets are likely to undersupply it. To the extent that it is better to have educated neighbors, education is more or less a public good, and in particular, it is not a zero-sum game. It may be positional in a particular narrow context, but even there education is not, and cannot be, merely positional.