Yesterday was a very sad day for about nine hundred kids and their families in Wake County. Raleigh Charter High School went through its annual ritual of selecting students based on a lottery system. It's demoralizing to sit there listening to the names of the few lucky enough to have their names drawn, knowing that the chance that your child's name will be drawn diminishes with each name called. In the coming weeks, thousands more will do the same across the rest of the state.
To commemorate the occasion, I'm re-posting something I did a few years back, with the first paragraph edited to reflect this year's numbers at Raleigh Charter High School.
Imagine coming upon a bakery where many hundreds of people have gathered at the front door, anxiously waiting. You question some in the crowd and learn that this bakery is preparing eighty-two loaves of delicious bread that it will distribute via lottery to just eighty-two of the one thousand and eighty-two people waiting outside, people desperately hoping they hold one of the lucky tickets.
The parent company of this bakery has a larger bakery down the street that will provide bread to those who don’t win, but the bread sold there is not nearly as good even though it costs the same. Consequently, an increasing number of people are rejecting this larger bakery and demanding the higher quality product from the better bakery. Unfortunately, in order to protect the workers at the larger bakery, the parent company is limiting the quantity of bread produced by the good bakery to just eighty-two loaves. Sadly, the vast majority of people waiting will leave disappointed.
As absurd as this scenario sounds, thousands of families across North Carolina experience something similar each year. Eager to get their kids out of low-performing schools, every spring they apply to have their child accepted to one of the hundred charter schools in North Carolina. They then anxiously wait, hoping their child will be one of the lucky few to win access to a charter school and escape the poorly performing public school to which their child has been assigned.
To illustrate the extent of this demand, thirteen charter schools currently operate in Wake County, North Carolina, home to the state's capital. Nearly all are limited to admitting just a fraction of those who apply. For example, in 2009, Franklin Academy in Wake Forest received 1,800 applications for approximately 100 slots from kindergarten through grade 12. Raleigh Charter High School received 649 applications for fewer than one hundred slots, and is expecting more applications this year. Magellan Charter School expects to admit 40 students from the more than 600 applications it received. And Endeavor Charter School received approximately 700 applications for just eight open seats.
To the dismay of most of these parents, despite this increasing demand for charter schools, North Carolina’s legislature capped the number of charter schools that can operate in the state at 100. Consequently, these parents will remain disappointed. So much for serving the interests of the customer/taxpayer/voters.
An increasing number of parents are registering their preference for alternatives to traditional public schools every year and charter schools are their most affordable option. For those whose family incomes cannot afford private school tuition, it’s their only means of escaping the traditional public school system. And yet, the education bureaucracy refuses to satisfy their demands. To the contrary, it spends time and money lobbying the legislature to maintain the cap on charter schools, thus foreclosing alternatives for these thousands of families who are dissatisfied with the education their children are receiving in traditional public schools.
Why does the education bureaucracy refuse to serve the interests of its customers? To understand why, let’s employ another analogy.
Suppose restaurants operated like the public school monopoly. A restaurant bureaucracy assigns you to a restaurant based on their preferences, not yours. You are taxed each year to cover the costs of operating these public restaurants and can only “attend” the public restaurant to which your family has been assigned. You are provided meals not of your choosing, but of that prescribed by the restaurant bureaucracy. Should you desire something better, feel free to patronize any private restaurant of your choice, but don’t expect a refund of the taxes you paid to fund the state-run restaurants.
It's easy to see whose interests would be served in this situation. Restaurants would not incur a loss for failing to satisfy its customers’ demands and we should therefore not expect them to do so. Moreover, they have every incentive to fight tooth-and-nail to protect their monopoly privilege to serve meals against competition from outsiders.
Our government-run schools operate under the same incentives. They receive funding regardless of their performance and how well or poorly they satisfy the interests of their customers. They therefore have little incentive to serve them well. In fact, by providing poorer quality services, parents complain more, which provides the education bureaucracy better ammunition for lobbying the legislature to increase its budget. Protecting this racket means blocking competition from outsiders despite the overwhelming demand for alternatives such as that provided by charter schools.
The education lobby and union officials routinely argue that teaching our children is not like buying a hamburger or a loaf of bread. I agree; educating our children is indeed far more important than buying a hamburger or a loaf of bread. All the more reason to not leave the education of our children in the hands of a government-run monopoly that has little incentive to serve the interests of its customers. Economic growth and success in the twenty-first century require better-educated students than those graduating from today’s public schools. Competition among providers is the only means for successfully realizing this objective.
To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, Governor Perdue, “tear down this wall.”
