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The Folly of Picking Winners and Losers
Here’s an interesting new study from the Cato Institute that takes note of the fact that many charitable foundations have recently been partnering with selected charter school networks in an effort to ensure the development of very successful schools. Looking at California charter school networks and controlling for individual student characteristics and peer effects, the author finds virtually no correlation between foundation funding and charter network performance.
The report supports other education research suggesting that spending more on schools will not necessarily improve their performance. The report also suggests that it is very difficult, if not impossible, for charitable foundations to pick winners and losers and that, although market forces are not perfect when it comes to rewarding high performers, they are likely to do a better job than charitable foundations (or government agencies, for that matter).
It looks as if a better role for charitable foundations would be to fund organizations that promote the use of market forces in education. Like, for example, the Society for Quality Education. ☺
Could it be as simple as the human factor?
“The central problem confronting education systems around the world is not that we lack models of excellence; it is our inability to routinely replicate those models. In other fields, we take for granted an endless cycle of innovation and productivity growth that continually makes products and services better, more affordable, or both. That cycle has not manifested itself in education. Brilliant teachers and high-performing schools can be found in every state and nation, but, like floating candles, they flicker in isolation, failing to touch off a larger blaze.”
In my own opinion, it is impossible to create consistent school models of excellence, without taking consideration that each human being is unique, composed of differing DNA and environment experiences, that impact each human and those around them. Always changing, and never staying the same like the raw material needed to manufactured a product.
The public education system model, is one that forces a child to adapt to their ways, without regard to the unique makeup of the individual students. Forcing students into the round pegs of the most successful and brightest students, and if not, make them fit into the round pegs, regardless if a student is a square, a triangle, or an oval.
It does create the Kumons’ of the world, the charter schools, voucher systems, and others that caters to the unique makeup of the individual, rather than the typical ideal model student of the public education system. Whatever that is since no one has ever come up with a model that consistently produced models of ideal students, that fits perfectly into the round pegs.
Charitable foundations would be better off to fund organizations that caters to the market forces which in turn caters to the individual unique make-up rather than forcing all individuals into the round pegs that are imposed more often by the public education system, on ideology and dogma, and not working with the uniqueness of each student.