The Most Basic Lesson for Educational Reformers

If the Chalkboard Project actually wanted to make a difference, they would focus on the nature of the system we use to deliver public education, the district system of exclusive franchises given to government agencies. Instead, CP tries to tinker with minor improvements in a hugely wasteful attempt to force the schools to perform better. Why does it waste its time on what amounts to protecting the continuation of this monopoly, a government monopoly at that, when it cannot ever be improved significantly beyond its current natural equilibrium between its performance and all our efforts to reform it and make it do better? I think the CP has not learned a basic economic lesson about the various designs of delivery systems. Only a free system in which many providers are free to offer education of any type that consumers are willihg to pay for will produce increasing quality and efficiency over the long haul. This lesson is general. Free markets are the only way a society can build itself. That lesson is repeated over and over again in the laboratory of world socieities. Only socieities that do not attempt to use the force of government to control or worse yet to produce goods and services. If one looks at the results from the world laboratory of human socieites, this lesson of free human activity as the source of human advancement is crystal clear. If we want to solve problems and improve the human condition, we must somehow find a way to prevent the government from trying to run or own things like public schools. The CP apparently is unaware of this fundamental truth.