Free Market Uber Alles

My wife and I moved into our house on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC almost five years ago. At first we got a lot of mail addressed to the previous owners, but that quickly slowed to a trickle and then stopped altogether, with two exceptions: a seed catalogue based in the Midwest (tithonias, only $2.45 for 50), and regular propaganda from the Cato Institute. Apparently, the wondrous efficiencies of an unfettered free market don't extend to updating your mailing list.

The Spring 2006 "Cato's Letter" arrived this morning, feauturing some kind of manifesto from Tucker Carlson--ack--and an interview with Andrew Coulson, director of Cato's "Center for Educational Freedom." In addition to the usual monomaniacal focus on vouchers he adds:

"We have to fight for market reforms at the K-12 level and also against state and federal government encroachment at the preschool and university levels."

This is a nice summary of where logic takes you when you embrace one and only one principal--"markets, good; government, bad"--to the exclusion of all else, such as the obvious best interests of students and children.

The free market does a pretty decent job of providing Pre-K services to children of people who can afford them. It does a lousy job of providing them to low-income children, just as it does a lousy job of providing nearly everything to low-income people: witness the shady pawn shops, grungy grocery stores, check cashing outlets, and payday lenders common to low-income neighborhoods.

That's why a lot of people are pushing for universal preschool. There are legitimate arguments about how to get there, whether to expand rapidly or focus on the most vulnerable populations. But to reject helping all children get a decent education in the critical early years on principle--well, you'd have to be some kind of extremist organization that simply doesn't believe in public education at all. As Education Sector's Sara Mead recently wrote, there are ways to expand Pre-K funding while preserving the diversity and dynamism of the market. One doubts Cato would have interest, there are larger anti-government principles at stake.

Ditto the concern about higher education--again, it's abundantly clear that higher education does a bad job of serving many students, particularly low-income and minority students, less than half of whom graduate on time and who appear to be learning much less than their more affluent, white peers. The smart solution is for the government to bring more information about student success into the higher education market through mandatory transparency and reporting--like the SEC does for publicly-traded companies--but again, that's just not as hard-core as rejecting government involvement out of hand.

Markets, competition, choice--these are all good things, of which public education needs more, not less. But bringing the benefits of choice into the education arena while staying true to bedrock public values of access, community, and fairness is difficult and complicated. It's possible, but it means opening your mind to multiple--even competing--principles. But if you're pure of heart like Cato, that kind of thinking just marks irresolution and weakness. Free market today, free market tomorrow, free market (and, apparently, quarterly publications I don't want) forever.