During my recent election campaign, I spent several months knocking on doors around the district and discussing various issues. While these discussions are still relatively fresh in my mind, I thought it might be fun to use this blog to review some of the more interesting debates I engaged in with local residents. One of the most common discussions was about my position supporting school choice: the idea that parents should have the option to choose alternatives like charter schools, or get a partial tax credit to send their child to a private school, if they prefer that over their local public school. We currently have some very limited choice programs in Kansas, but other states go much further.
I was reminded of one common talking point on this topic recently, when I saw this tweet making the rounds on X:
Of course, the intention of the negative-sounding phrasing “One man’s liberty is another man’s school closure” it to imply that this is a horrible situation— that any time a school is closed, it means something bad has happened to the community, and somehow overall education is negatively impacted. This argument was brought up by a number of the local residents I spoke to, mainly ones currently or formerly employed by the public school system.
But we need to ask a key question: Is any individual student not getting educated, or receiving a poorer education due to these school closures? The answer is clearly No: in nearly all cases, when the parent chooses a private or charter school, it is in pursuit of a higher-quality education. Thus the students are generally better off as a result of this policy. I would judge this policy a huge success, if (as the tweet implies) 10000 kids are now attending schools that better meet their individual needs. Private schools have consistently been shown to outperform public schools on a variety of measures, even when attended by economically disadvantaged students.. And that is even before we consider other issues like students’ physical safety from violent bullying, dismal at many urban public schools, or the widespread refusal of public schools to fundamentally do their jobs during the COVID panic.
The fact that schools can close is a feature, not a problem, of school choice. An important key to the long-term success of the US economic system, in comparison to most other countries around the world, has been that businesses have to compete to survive. Those that don’t meet the needs of their customers are allowed to fail. This causes short-term pain for employees of those businesses, but strengthens the economy overall when the best-performing ones survive. The same principle applies to schools: bad ones should close, while good ones continue to thrive.
Some say it’s unfair to close failing schools, since the teachers are willing to try harder. Often with changes in management, plus enough effort and time, many poorly performing schools could turn around— but the time to work on such turnarounds is as soon as progress starts to fall behind. If they are paying attention to their performance, there should be time to make improvements before it gets so dire that a critical mass of parents no longer want their children there. And in fact, it’s been shown that having this incentive of competition actually does cause public schools to improve. In other words, the improvements due to school choice are not limited to the students who switch schools: the existence of this competition benefits even those who remain in place.
The biggest argument I heard against such closures was the fact that hardworking teachers would lose their jobs. Sure, we all feel bad for the teachers that lose their jobs when a school closes, just like I feel bad for all my former Intel colleagues who were recently laid off when that company’s computer chips fell behind. But the best teachers, like the best Intel engineers, will soon find other jobs— probably somewhere with better management and policies that enable them to succeed, making their jobs much more satisfying in the long term.
Ultimately, we need to keep in mind that the school system is an education program for students, not a jobs program for teachers.