School's Out

...Today, the desirability of maintaining Jewish identity is becoming a more persuasive consideration...

...At present, there is overwhelming support for vouchers from the orthodox community and strong opposition from reform and conservative Jewry...

...Coulson’s analysis of contemporary education, especially charter schools and private scholarship programs for students from kindergarten to twelfth grade, is particularly insightful...

...His lengthy discussion of the best way to teach reading illustrates this point...

...On this issue, Andrew Coulson, who supports privately funded scholarships for children, may have hit the jackpot...

...What’s incredible about this is not the number of applications, but the fact that they’re only partial...

...His case for a competitive education industry does not rest upon any particular denominational or political or cultural position...

...Instead of showing why phonics is superior to the whole-language approach, Coulson would have been better served by emphasizing how such issues would be resolved under markets instead of bureaucrats...

...It does not, however, try to predict the near future of vouchers...

...But he is at his best in demolishing the arguments for the public school monopoly...

...One advantage of the careful work Coulson has done is that his Market Education cannot be characterized as the product of a zealous right-wing extremist...

...As reform and conservative Jews become increasingly concerned over the loss of Jewish identity, however, they are beginning to reconsider vouchers as a way to reverse or at least halt assimilation...

...Indeed, if the government were to provide vouchers to nondenominational schools, wouldn’t it be contrary to the First Amendment not to provide them to denominational schools as well...

...Our schools are not such an industry, however, and the arguments over whether it is a “failure” do not matter as much as the attention given to them suggests...

...He presents an imaginative but plausible scenario of how they might replace government funding as the dominant system for financing elementary and secondary education...

...In other words, 1.23 million families who can ill afford to pay anything at all are willing to pay for a service that is available at no cost from the public schools...

...But I still have no hesitation in saying that Andrew J. Coulson’s new study, Market Education: The Unknown History, is the most challenging book on the subject I’ve read...

...Anyone who thinks that public schools foster harmony among the American people should read Market Education...

...On April 21, the Children’s Scholarship Fund, an effort to provide four-year scholarships to children from poor families, announced that it had received 1.23 million applications from low-income families for the first 40,000 awards...

...In the past, reform and conservative Jews were primarily interested in protecting Jewish pupils in public schools from the imposition of Christian practices such as school prayer, Bible reading, and nativity scenes that isolated or embarrassed Jewish students...

...Instead, Coulson argues that a market system is the most effective way to achieve better educational outcomes at a lower cost...

...The open markets of Athenian education gave us Plato and Socrates, Sophocles and Aristophanes...

...Henry Ford’s Model-T was not a failure...

...The reader who isn’t convinced is probably immune to evidence and logic on the issue...

...in fact, the problems relate to matters that could simply have been deleted or shortened...

...This thesis holds as far back as the ancient Greeks...

...Fortunately, this doesn’t affect the main argument...

...Of course, such discussions have an important political dimension: Citizens who believe that our public schools are failing are more receptive to proposals for a different system...

...Such a system would greatly diminish the pervasive conflicts that result from efforts to impose majoritarian educational policies on widely diverse groups in our society...

...Vouchers for School Choice is a helpful overview of the current education controversies in the American Jewish community...

...Perhaps the most important is the idea that treating denominational schools equally with nondenominational schools cannot, or should not, be construed as an unconstitutional establishment of religion...

...Market Education is the first book to show why privately funded scholarships for these students in the United States today will result in better education than governmentfunded vouchers...

...It turns the separation issue on its head by making the issue not whether it is permissible to provide government benefits to denominational schools, but whether it is permissible to exclude them from benefits...

...The Spartans’ governmental monopoly on education has left us, as Coulson remarks, with a nickname for football teams...

...labeling their schools “failures” can generate resistance as well as support for alternative systems of education...

...The weaknesses of Market Education result from Coulson’s effort to squeeze too much into one book...

...The story of how Market Education came to be written is as astonishing as the book itself...

...You can see the same pattern occur over and over again: in classical times, the middle ages, and the early modern era...

...in Europe, Asia, and the Americas...

...Coulson’s thesis is simple: An analysis of history demonstrates that education provided by open markets is consistently better than education funded and operated by government...

...School’s Out The Case for Competition By Myron Lieberman I’ve been reading books about education since 1948—book after book after book, in what seems now, fifty years on, to have been a never-ending stream...

...Coulson is a graduate of McGill University, where he majored in mathematics...

...That’s not to say that the book is perfect (even though the author does thank me in his introduction, when all I did was recommend it for publication...

...Applying families are required to pay $1,000 a year over a four-year period (though they can substitute in-kind services if necessary...

...Choice, a collection of thirty brief articles on school choice—ten devoted to the implications of vouchers for the Jewish community—edited by Marshall J. Breger and David M. Gordis...

...The fact that this outcome appears in so many different cultures in so many different eras is an exceedingly strong indication that the deficiencies of governmentsponsored education cannot be overcome...

...It’s an international history of education, a critique of contemporary education, and a proposal for the future—all woven together in a very readable style...

...On the contrary, it was a huge success, but it was the product of an industry in which improvement is essential to survival...

...The numbers we’ll see once vouchers or tax credits or privately funded scholarships are made available to every family will prove, once and for all, that Americans are ready to embrace a market system of education...

...The implications of this argument are staggering...

...A useful adjunct to Market Education is the new volume Vouchers for School Myron Lieberman is senior research scholar of the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, at Bowling Green State University in Ohio...

...After working for Microsoft, he retired at the ripe old age of twenty-six, having earned enough to live comfortably and spend the next four years working on Market Education...

...In his discussion of teacher training, he is critical of the fact that teachers take courses in the history and philosophy of education—an odd objection from a man who has just spent four years researching and writing on these topics...

...The articles in the book are uneven, but a few raise issues that are just beginning to affect the controversies over school choice...

...But there is a downside even to the political case for emphasizing it: Many Americans (especially older ones) remember their public schools with affection...

...The book, for instance, sets forth an extensive argument that public schools are failing—when this issue, which preoccupies a great deal of current discussions, is substantively irrelevant to the desirability of a market system of education...

...Like most supporters of school choice, Coulson devotes too much attention to issues that would be settled by the system he advocates...