Argument Analysis: Privatizing Education System
Privatizing Education
Kevin B. Hawkins
Brigham Young University Idaho
Abstract
Given the current state of the education system, Kevin Hawkins argues that by increasing the amount of options that parents and students have for schools, and be decreasing federal control over the education system, the quality of the education that students receive will also increase. Hawkins utilizes the persuasive method of logos to show the logical need for change, the potential innovation that competition could create if implemented into our education system, and the way in which we could implement that competition. Hawkins argues that current federal programs are not producing the results that they were intended to produce. He claims that in many cases, these programs do more harm than good. Finally, Hawkins considers the opposing viewpoints. He fairly portrays opposing argument and states what parts he can accept and what parts he finds fallacious and why. He concludes that increasing the competition in our education system is the most logical solution to our current problem.
Introduction and Background Our education system is not producing the results that the …show more content…
youth of this country deserve. There are many different opinions as to why this is happening, but very few of these opinions are founded on empirical evidence. In this paper, I will first give some background information regarding the issue, and then I will define some key terms for my argument. Next I will touch on the important issues concerning the argument and explain why I support these positions. Finally, I will consider some of the prominent opposing views and explain why they lack the evidence that I would need in order to support them. Let’s start by taking a look at a little background information concerning the topic of education. According to an article published in the Summer 2005 edition of ED., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, education was largely an issue of local and state government until the passing of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965 (ESEA). This act was part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and has been by far the most expansive piece of federal legislation regarding education (Hana, 2005). We will take a closer look at this piece of legislation in the paragraph that follows, but first we will look at the argument that the federal government doesn’t have the constitutional right to enact legislation regarding education. The 10th amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” (U.S. Const. amend. X). So if there is no mention of education whatsoever in the Constitution, how could the government get away with passing legislation concerning education? Proponents of federal education programs argue that Article I Section IIX of the Constitution indirectly gives them this power in what is known as the “General Welfare clause.” This clause states, “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;” (U.S. Const. art. I sect. IIX).
Aimed at trying to give equal opportunity to all children in America regardless of race or economic wealth, ESEA grants financial assistance to local educational agencies for the education of children of low-income families. “In recognition of the special educational needs of low-income families and the impact that concentrations of low-income families have on the ability of local educational agencies to support adequate educational programs, the Congress hereby declares it to be the policy of the United States to provide financial assistance… to local educational agencies serving areas with concentrations of children from low-income families to expand and improve their educational programs by various means (including preschool programs) which contribute to meeting the special educational needs of educationally deprived children” (Section 201, Elementary and Secondary School Act, 1965).
My argument is that the legislation passed by the federal government in regards to education have done little to improve our education system, including for low-income children, and moreover that they have, in many ways, caused many of the issues impeding the progress of our education system. I will show that by eliminating the federal government’s control on our education, and encouraging the development of more charter schools and private schools, we will see more innovation and creativity both in our educators as well as the future generations of this country.
Key Terms:
Privatization: The transfer of ownership of property or businesses from a government to a privately owned entity.
Charter School: According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, “Charter schools are independent public schools allowed freedom to be more innovative, while being held accountable for improved student achievement.”
Magnet school: a public school or program, either elementary or secondary, that is designed for the specific purpose of attracting students who have a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds with the goal of voluntary reduction, prevention, or elimination of racial isolation. In addition, or alternatively, a magnet school may provide a focus, whether academic or social, on a special theme.
Parochial School: A Parochial school is one that provides religious education along with a secular one.
ESEA: Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965.
NCLB: Stands for No Child Left Behind. It is a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2001.
Standard Deviation: How much variation exists from the average or expected value. In this argument it is used in the context of educational statistics. For example, let’s say that the average graduation rate for high school students in a given area is 87% with a standard deviation of 2%. This means that if someone were to argue that something would benefit the graduation rate by 1 standard deviation, they are saying that it could improve the graduation rate by 2%. This is beneficial when talking about statistics from several different sources because you can compare several different areas using the same terms (standard deviation). So even if another area that was looked at had a graduation rate of 67% with a standard deviation of 3%, you could look at the effects that something has on graduation rates in general by looking at how many standard deviations it moves away from the average. If it moves the first graduation rate by 2% and the second by 3%, you can say that it will benefit the graduation rate by 1 standard deviation.
Lines of Argument
My argument will be to show that due to the shortcomings of our current education system, and the fact that competition has created innovation and improvements in other sectors, more competition in the education sector would create improvements and innovation in our education system. We will first look at competition and how it relates to education.
Competition breeds innovation
Before we get into too much empirical evidence, let’s think about this from a logical standpoint. Let’s say that there is one barbershop in town and anyone that wants to get their haircut has to go to that particular barbershop. Let’s say that this barber does a decent job with the standard bowl cuts, but if you want anything different, you’re probably going to get a hack job. You’ve complained to the owner that he should practice other styles of haircutting but the owner knows that regardless of whether or not he takes your advice, you will have to go there out of obligation. Now let’s say that enough people get fed up with this attitude and decide to open up their own hair salon and within a matter of months, they are starting to have a competitive amount of customers because of their dissatisfaction with the previous barber. When the barber realizes that he is no longer the only guy in town cutting hair, he will be forced to either be content with half of his previous clientele, or adapt to the changing world and learn some other hair-dos. Now this is a very simple illustration and I’m sure far better ones have been thought of, but it will serve for now. The point is that if we allow our current education system to go on operating like it is right now, we are asking for failure. Right now in the U.S., you are assigned a school based on where you live geographically. It doesn’t matter if there is a better school five minutes away because if everyone was allowed to choose, then the few good schools would have all of the students, leaving the schools that don’t perform as well with little to none. But is that really such a bad thing? By impeding this form of natural selection, we are taking away from what should be happening: that schools should feel obligated to conform to their customers-families-and not the other way around.
Now let’s take a look at some empirical evidence that has been collected in regards to competition in the education sector. Clive R. Belfield of the Educational Resource Information Center-U.S. Department of Education- wrote an article in which he looks at over 200 tests in 25 separate studies on how more competition in the education sector affects the performance of the students. He first looked for how it affected test scores and found that, “…the effects of competition are modest. Approximately three-fifths of the tests show no correlation between competition and test scores (only a trivial number found evidence of a negative relationship). The average effect of increasing competition by 1 standard deviation is to raise academic test scores in public schools by approximately 0.1 standard deviation.” (Belfield, 2007) Later on, however, he looks at how competition improves education in other ways such as graduation rate and rate of college attendance. They also looked at possible negative aspects such as dropout rates. “Although competition doesn 't appear to affect dropout rates, an increase of 1 standard deviation in competition from private schools raises graduation rates in public schools by approximately 0.08 to 0.18 standard deviations.” (Belfield, 2007)
Shortcomings of current education system
Now lets look at some statistics that will help to further my point of the inefficiency of our current education system. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development puts out a study every few years about the education systems in different countries. In 2003 the study showed that the U.S. the fourth largest spender on education per student. Despite the large amount of money spent on education in the U.S., 15 year-olds ranked 35th out of 57 in mathematics, 19th of 38 in science, 12th of 38 in reading, and 26th of 38 in problem solving (OECD, 2003). According to this data, the amount of money that a country puts into education is not directly correlated with the performance of the students. Despite the goals and the good intentions of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, there still exist broad achievement gaps when it comes to race, gender, and economic circumstances. Since its signing in 1965, it has been reformed several times in attempts to help curb these achievement gaps, but to no avail. No piece of legislation has yet to have any impact whatsoever on this achievement gap. All that has been done is that education in general has been brought down to the lowest level in order to accommodate those that struggle while inadvertently impeding the progress of those students who would otherwise excel. Some blame it on racism or discrimination that exists in the education system but one interesting point to note is that the achievement gap between African-Americans and Caucasians is almost the same as that between Asian Americans and Caucasians. Therefore, it cannot be said that the system is discriminately biased towards Caucasian or white Americans any more than it could that it is even more biased towards Asian Americans.
Opposing View Those who oppose the argument above attempt to show that the risk is too great in moving away from our current system and that it creates an achievement gap among racial, socioeconomic, and gender related divisions. They argue that the testing scores in charter schools are not all that better than public schools and in some cases, they are worse. Probably the most sound argument against increasing competition is the fact that if you look at upper and middle class communities, their public schools tend to be serving them just fine. It is in the urban, more poverty-stricken parts of the U.S. that the education system is not producing the desired results. These are just a few of the arguments that I wish to review.
Performance of public schools vs. performance of charter schools and the use of standardized testing
There has been a lot of research done about the performance levels of charter schools compared with public schools. One such report done by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University found in a 2009 report that, “17% of charter schools outperformed their public school equivalents, while 37% of charter schools performed worse than regular local schools, and the rest were about the same.” (Education Justice, 2010). This means that a far larger portion of charter schools perform worse than do public schools. They argue that if this were the case, why on earth would we want more public schools? In order to understand these statistics, it is important to understand what exactly they are performing better in.
In this case, it is standardized testing that is looked at. Since this is the case, we then need to ask ourselves, “Are standardized testing results really effective in evaluating the overall learning that is taking place in a school?” Some would argue that they are not. According to the Cato Handbook for Policymakers, in 2000 the U.S. ranked 18th overall in the world in math on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) but after the implementation of the No Child Left Behind act, which focused on standardized testing more than ever before, the U.S. slipped to 31st. There was a similar slip in Science. (Cato,
2010). The above study suggests that there is at least a correlation between our focus switching to standardized testing and the decrease in our ranking on the international scale. I am not saying that the declining ranks are direct results from standardized testing, but I do believe that it definitely shapes the way our teachers are teaching. Instead of teaching in order to help children understand, they are teaching them to memorize facts and numbers in order to perform well on a test, but then once the student is placed in a real world situation, he or she is usually unprepared to make the connection between the fact that they learned and how it applies to the real world
Public School performance in middle and upper class areas vs. in urban areas Recent studies have shown that the average high school graduation rate in the 50 largest cities was 53% compared with 71% in the suburbs (Education Research Center, 2009). When these are averaged, it makes it look like the graduation rate is pretty week overall, when in all reality it is pretty good in the suburbs, but inefficient in the urban areas. This helps us to understand that the problem may not lie in more competition, but some deeper socioeconomic issues. Though there are definitely many socioeconomic problems in the U.S., I believe that the problem with education cannot be put off until we find solutions to those problems. The evidence we have looked at thus far has demonstrated that our education system is not producing the results that it should be. We spend more money on our students than most other countries when much of this money could possibly be used to help out with those socioeconomic problems.
Conclusion
After reviewing the problems with our current education system, I conclude that it is necessary to increase competition in order to produce more innovation amongst students and amongst teachers. This can be done by encouraging more charter and magnet schools as well as doing away with standardized testing and other programs that have failed to deliver what they have promised. I personally went through the public education system and still feel the effects that it had on my desire to learn. Sure there were a few teachers who inspired me to do better and to go above and beyond, but these teachers were few and far between. The youth of this country deserve more.
References
Belfield, C. R. (2007). The Effects of Competition on Educational Outcomes. Educational Resource Imformation
Dillon, S. (April 22, 2009). Large Urban-Suburban Gap Seen in Graduation Rates. New York Times
Education Law Center. (2009). Charter School Acvhievement: Hype vs Evidence. School Funding and Reform accross the Nation, Retrieved from http://www.educationjustice.org/newsletters/nlej_iss21_art5_detail_CharterSchoolAchievement.htm.
Hanna, J. (2005). Elementary and Secondary Education Act: 40 years later. The Ed. - See more at: http://reffor.us/index.php#sthash.tOvnHeLx.dpuf
U.S. Constitution, Amendment 10
Kevin B. Hawkins
Brigham Young University Idaho
Abstract
Given the current state of the education system, Kevin Hawkins argues that by increasing the amount of options that parents and students have for schools, and be decreasing federal control over the education system, the quality of the education that students receive will also increase. Hawkins utilizes the persuasive method of logos to show the logical need for change, the potential innovation that competition could create if implemented into our education system, and the way in which we could implement that competition. Hawkins argues that current federal programs are not producing the results that they were intended to produce. He claims that in many cases, these programs do more harm than good. Finally, Hawkins considers the opposing viewpoints. He fairly portrays opposing argument and states what parts he can accept and what parts he finds fallacious and why. He concludes that increasing the competition in our education system is the most logical solution to our current problem.
Introduction and Background Our education system is not producing the results that the …show more content…
youth of this country deserve. There are many different opinions as to why this is happening, but very few of these opinions are founded on empirical evidence. In this paper, I will first give some background information regarding the issue, and then I will define some key terms for my argument. Next I will touch on the important issues concerning the argument and explain why I support these positions. Finally, I will consider some of the prominent opposing views and explain why they lack the evidence that I would need in order to support them. Let’s start by taking a look at a little background information concerning the topic of education. According to an article published in the Summer 2005 edition of ED., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, education was largely an issue of local and state government until the passing of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965 (ESEA). This act was part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and has been by far the most expansive piece of federal legislation regarding education (Hana, 2005). We will take a closer look at this piece of legislation in the paragraph that follows, but first we will look at the argument that the federal government doesn’t have the constitutional right to enact legislation regarding education. The 10th amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” (U.S. Const. amend. X). So if there is no mention of education whatsoever in the Constitution, how could the government get away with passing legislation concerning education? Proponents of federal education programs argue that Article I Section IIX of the Constitution indirectly gives them this power in what is known as the “General Welfare clause.” This clause states, “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;” (U.S. Const. art. I sect. IIX).
Aimed at trying to give equal opportunity to all children in America regardless of race or economic wealth, ESEA grants financial assistance to local educational agencies for the education of children of low-income families. “In recognition of the special educational needs of low-income families and the impact that concentrations of low-income families have on the ability of local educational agencies to support adequate educational programs, the Congress hereby declares it to be the policy of the United States to provide financial assistance… to local educational agencies serving areas with concentrations of children from low-income families to expand and improve their educational programs by various means (including preschool programs) which contribute to meeting the special educational needs of educationally deprived children” (Section 201, Elementary and Secondary School Act, 1965).
My argument is that the legislation passed by the federal government in regards to education have done little to improve our education system, including for low-income children, and moreover that they have, in many ways, caused many of the issues impeding the progress of our education system. I will show that by eliminating the federal government’s control on our education, and encouraging the development of more charter schools and private schools, we will see more innovation and creativity both in our educators as well as the future generations of this country.
Key Terms:
Privatization: The transfer of ownership of property or businesses from a government to a privately owned entity.
Charter School: According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, “Charter schools are independent public schools allowed freedom to be more innovative, while being held accountable for improved student achievement.”
Magnet school: a public school or program, either elementary or secondary, that is designed for the specific purpose of attracting students who have a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds with the goal of voluntary reduction, prevention, or elimination of racial isolation. In addition, or alternatively, a magnet school may provide a focus, whether academic or social, on a special theme.
Parochial School: A Parochial school is one that provides religious education along with a secular one.
ESEA: Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965.
NCLB: Stands for No Child Left Behind. It is a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2001.
Standard Deviation: How much variation exists from the average or expected value. In this argument it is used in the context of educational statistics. For example, let’s say that the average graduation rate for high school students in a given area is 87% with a standard deviation of 2%. This means that if someone were to argue that something would benefit the graduation rate by 1 standard deviation, they are saying that it could improve the graduation rate by 2%. This is beneficial when talking about statistics from several different sources because you can compare several different areas using the same terms (standard deviation). So even if another area that was looked at had a graduation rate of 67% with a standard deviation of 3%, you could look at the effects that something has on graduation rates in general by looking at how many standard deviations it moves away from the average. If it moves the first graduation rate by 2% and the second by 3%, you can say that it will benefit the graduation rate by 1 standard deviation.
Lines of Argument
My argument will be to show that due to the shortcomings of our current education system, and the fact that competition has created innovation and improvements in other sectors, more competition in the education sector would create improvements and innovation in our education system. We will first look at competition and how it relates to education.
Competition breeds innovation
Before we get into too much empirical evidence, let’s think about this from a logical standpoint. Let’s say that there is one barbershop in town and anyone that wants to get their haircut has to go to that particular barbershop. Let’s say that this barber does a decent job with the standard bowl cuts, but if you want anything different, you’re probably going to get a hack job. You’ve complained to the owner that he should practice other styles of haircutting but the owner knows that regardless of whether or not he takes your advice, you will have to go there out of obligation. Now let’s say that enough people get fed up with this attitude and decide to open up their own hair salon and within a matter of months, they are starting to have a competitive amount of customers because of their dissatisfaction with the previous barber. When the barber realizes that he is no longer the only guy in town cutting hair, he will be forced to either be content with half of his previous clientele, or adapt to the changing world and learn some other hair-dos. Now this is a very simple illustration and I’m sure far better ones have been thought of, but it will serve for now. The point is that if we allow our current education system to go on operating like it is right now, we are asking for failure. Right now in the U.S., you are assigned a school based on where you live geographically. It doesn’t matter if there is a better school five minutes away because if everyone was allowed to choose, then the few good schools would have all of the students, leaving the schools that don’t perform as well with little to none. But is that really such a bad thing? By impeding this form of natural selection, we are taking away from what should be happening: that schools should feel obligated to conform to their customers-families-and not the other way around.
Now let’s take a look at some empirical evidence that has been collected in regards to competition in the education sector. Clive R. Belfield of the Educational Resource Information Center-U.S. Department of Education- wrote an article in which he looks at over 200 tests in 25 separate studies on how more competition in the education sector affects the performance of the students. He first looked for how it affected test scores and found that, “…the effects of competition are modest. Approximately three-fifths of the tests show no correlation between competition and test scores (only a trivial number found evidence of a negative relationship). The average effect of increasing competition by 1 standard deviation is to raise academic test scores in public schools by approximately 0.1 standard deviation.” (Belfield, 2007) Later on, however, he looks at how competition improves education in other ways such as graduation rate and rate of college attendance. They also looked at possible negative aspects such as dropout rates. “Although competition doesn 't appear to affect dropout rates, an increase of 1 standard deviation in competition from private schools raises graduation rates in public schools by approximately 0.08 to 0.18 standard deviations.” (Belfield, 2007)
Shortcomings of current education system
Now lets look at some statistics that will help to further my point of the inefficiency of our current education system. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development puts out a study every few years about the education systems in different countries. In 2003 the study showed that the U.S. the fourth largest spender on education per student. Despite the large amount of money spent on education in the U.S., 15 year-olds ranked 35th out of 57 in mathematics, 19th of 38 in science, 12th of 38 in reading, and 26th of 38 in problem solving (OECD, 2003). According to this data, the amount of money that a country puts into education is not directly correlated with the performance of the students. Despite the goals and the good intentions of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, there still exist broad achievement gaps when it comes to race, gender, and economic circumstances. Since its signing in 1965, it has been reformed several times in attempts to help curb these achievement gaps, but to no avail. No piece of legislation has yet to have any impact whatsoever on this achievement gap. All that has been done is that education in general has been brought down to the lowest level in order to accommodate those that struggle while inadvertently impeding the progress of those students who would otherwise excel. Some blame it on racism or discrimination that exists in the education system but one interesting point to note is that the achievement gap between African-Americans and Caucasians is almost the same as that between Asian Americans and Caucasians. Therefore, it cannot be said that the system is discriminately biased towards Caucasian or white Americans any more than it could that it is even more biased towards Asian Americans.
Opposing View Those who oppose the argument above attempt to show that the risk is too great in moving away from our current system and that it creates an achievement gap among racial, socioeconomic, and gender related divisions. They argue that the testing scores in charter schools are not all that better than public schools and in some cases, they are worse. Probably the most sound argument against increasing competition is the fact that if you look at upper and middle class communities, their public schools tend to be serving them just fine. It is in the urban, more poverty-stricken parts of the U.S. that the education system is not producing the desired results. These are just a few of the arguments that I wish to review.
Performance of public schools vs. performance of charter schools and the use of standardized testing
There has been a lot of research done about the performance levels of charter schools compared with public schools. One such report done by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University found in a 2009 report that, “17% of charter schools outperformed their public school equivalents, while 37% of charter schools performed worse than regular local schools, and the rest were about the same.” (Education Justice, 2010). This means that a far larger portion of charter schools perform worse than do public schools. They argue that if this were the case, why on earth would we want more public schools? In order to understand these statistics, it is important to understand what exactly they are performing better in.
In this case, it is standardized testing that is looked at. Since this is the case, we then need to ask ourselves, “Are standardized testing results really effective in evaluating the overall learning that is taking place in a school?” Some would argue that they are not. According to the Cato Handbook for Policymakers, in 2000 the U.S. ranked 18th overall in the world in math on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) but after the implementation of the No Child Left Behind act, which focused on standardized testing more than ever before, the U.S. slipped to 31st. There was a similar slip in Science. (Cato,
2010). The above study suggests that there is at least a correlation between our focus switching to standardized testing and the decrease in our ranking on the international scale. I am not saying that the declining ranks are direct results from standardized testing, but I do believe that it definitely shapes the way our teachers are teaching. Instead of teaching in order to help children understand, they are teaching them to memorize facts and numbers in order to perform well on a test, but then once the student is placed in a real world situation, he or she is usually unprepared to make the connection between the fact that they learned and how it applies to the real world
Public School performance in middle and upper class areas vs. in urban areas Recent studies have shown that the average high school graduation rate in the 50 largest cities was 53% compared with 71% in the suburbs (Education Research Center, 2009). When these are averaged, it makes it look like the graduation rate is pretty week overall, when in all reality it is pretty good in the suburbs, but inefficient in the urban areas. This helps us to understand that the problem may not lie in more competition, but some deeper socioeconomic issues. Though there are definitely many socioeconomic problems in the U.S., I believe that the problem with education cannot be put off until we find solutions to those problems. The evidence we have looked at thus far has demonstrated that our education system is not producing the results that it should be. We spend more money on our students than most other countries when much of this money could possibly be used to help out with those socioeconomic problems.
Conclusion
After reviewing the problems with our current education system, I conclude that it is necessary to increase competition in order to produce more innovation amongst students and amongst teachers. This can be done by encouraging more charter and magnet schools as well as doing away with standardized testing and other programs that have failed to deliver what they have promised. I personally went through the public education system and still feel the effects that it had on my desire to learn. Sure there were a few teachers who inspired me to do better and to go above and beyond, but these teachers were few and far between. The youth of this country deserve more.
References
Belfield, C. R. (2007). The Effects of Competition on Educational Outcomes. Educational Resource Imformation
Dillon, S. (April 22, 2009). Large Urban-Suburban Gap Seen in Graduation Rates. New York Times
Education Law Center. (2009). Charter School Acvhievement: Hype vs Evidence. School Funding and Reform accross the Nation, Retrieved from http://www.educationjustice.org/newsletters/nlej_iss21_art5_detail_CharterSchoolAchievement.htm.
Hanna, J. (2005). Elementary and Secondary Education Act: 40 years later. The Ed. - See more at: http://reffor.us/index.php#sthash.tOvnHeLx.dpuf
U.S. Constitution, Amendment 10