I have a great new plan for grocery stores. Here’s how it’ll work. We’re going to split the entire state into grocery districts. Each district will have a democratically elected board to make grocery decisions within the district. But we’ll also have a state-wide board to set high-level decisions about all district-run grocery stores. And of course the legislature gets to determine grocery rules as well.
Oh yeah, and we’ll also let the federal government get involved in funding and rule-making in all district grocery stores in the nation. But I’m sure it won’t cause any problems at all, or lead to any political turmoil, to have four main levels of government responsible for setting the rules for district grocery stores.
Here’s the best part: Groceries will be free for everyone in their designated district grocery store! That doesn’t mean you can just walk in and get whatever you want, of course; some people would load up on ribeye steak and not eat any vegetables. Others would just get junk food. Others would be wasteful. So there will have to be democratic oversight for what groceries people can take.
To make groceries available to all for free, of course, we’ll have to ask everyone to voluntarily pay their fair share of taxes to support this great system of public groceries.
I doubt we actually have to send anyone to prison if they don’t voluntarily pay their fair share. Probably some fines and threatening letters will do the trick in those rare cases in which someone fails to see the benefits of voluntarily paying up.
We’re going to preserve freedom of choice! If you don’t like your local district grocery store, you can choose another district store if there’s room. We’ll also allow a few “charter” stores with moderately more freedom of operation.
You can still buy groceries at private grocery stores if you want. You can also homegrow your own food. And here’s a really great deal: If you choose to homegrow your own food, we’ll even let you use a designated district store to get maybe a quarter or even half of your groceries (we’ll figure out those details later).
But we can’t let you undermine the district stores by taking your money out of them. You have complete freedom of choice, so long as you continue to voluntarily pay for the district stores, whether you use them or not.
The above, of course, is analogous to how public schools are set up (the comparison is not original with me). No sensible person would propose such a scheme for grocery stores because it would lead to obvious disaster.
We would expect district grocery stores, which people are forced to fund, to largely offer low-quality products (although with better outcomes in wealthier districts), to be broadly unresponsive to the needs of “customers,” to become bureaucratically bloated, to become mired in political fights, and to offer low value for the money. And, indeed, those are exactly the outcomes we see with public schools.
The Sheridan disaster
Colorado Public Radio (CPR) reports on the Sheridan school district’s “13-day teacher strike [as of April 17] that has led to significant drops in attendance and missed instruction.” This has led Sen. Jeff Bridges to suggest that the relatively small Sheridan district be absorbed by the much larger Denver district. As CPR paraphrases, Bridges worries that “the small, high-poverty district has a limited tax base to fund its schools.”
Governor Jared Polis also expressed concern about the strike. He said, per CPR, “Student learning and success must be our top priority, and this strike is derailing student learning for families who cannot afford to lose another day of instruction. I am calling on the Sheridan School District Superintendent, Sheridan School Board, and the Sheridan Education Association to negotiate in good faith to reach an agreement that creates a workable pathway to recognize educators’ right to organize and gets students back in the classroom immediately.”
Workers at private businesses also can go on strike. But generally customers can find other ready suppliers. Granted, it’s a lot easier to switch grocery stores than to switch schools. Moreover, stores properly remain free to hire replacement workers. (As I’ve written, I think there are a lot of problems with existing federal union rules, and I favor a rights-based approach.)
The basic problem with union demands in the context of tax-funded enterprises is that the people paying the bills—the taxpayers—are locked into funding them no matter what. When the customers easily can take their dollars elsewhere, businesses and employees have a built-in incentive to reach employment contracts that ultimately serve the paying customers. Coercive funding largely destroys such incentives.
Another look at social studies testing
Last time, I looked at the legislature’s efforts to reduce state-wide social studies testing to a single grade. I also reviewed the generally poor results on the social studies portion of the Colorado Measures of Academic Success (CMAS).
Because of the built-in incentives problems of tax-financed schools, testing is the only serious way to offer parents and taxpayers any accountability for outcomes. Is testing perfect? No. Do schools often “teach to the test” at the expense of other educational goals? Yes. But, without testing, there’s no good way to tell if students are learning anything at all in schools. As it is, testing reveals that many students are learning very little and are way behind.
As I’ve bragged before, my ten-year-old scored in the top one percent on the California Achievement Test (CAT), which covers basic literacy and math. So our homeschool program works in terms of actually imparting a serious education.
The CAT does not, however, cover social studies. So I asked my son to take the CMAS practice questions available online. I offered him ten bucks to take the tests because, as you can imagine, he was not super-excited to do it otherwise. I also got his permission to discuss his results in my column.
Interestingly, my fifth grader did pretty well both on the fourth-grade and the seventh-grade practice tests, scoring 21 out of 25 on the first and 19 out of 23 on the second. I’m not sure how that would translate to the state’s scaled scores or performance categories. Nor do I know how representative the practice questions are of the test as a whole. Still, I was happy enough with his results.
Why did he do about as well on the test supposedly two grade levels ahead of him? I think there are two reasons. First, he learned something about how the test is set up from the fourth-grade section. Second, the seventh-grade questions include a lot more text, and that actually benefits my son because he is a strong reader.
It turns out you don’t actually have to know anything in particular to do well on the CMAS social studies test. Most of the questions (at least on the practice tests) are structured to reveal enough information to allow someone to reason toward the correct answer. The first question on the fourth-grade test, for example, just asks students to find a marked landmark on a gridded map.
Having background knowledge of related topics and a strong ability to analyze texts and maps helps a lot. To a large degree, the social-studies test is a reading test, and students who struggle to read will struggle with all aspects of the CMAS.
I was surprised that my son missed the question about what year Colorado became a state, given that we’ve gone over that many times (the “Centennial State!”), but the test gave us the opportunity to go over the basic timeline again.
We don’t follow a structured social-studies curriculum, but we integrate many related books and projects. My wife and son read through the book “Discover Colorado,” and they’re also going through “Curiosity Chronicles” about global history. We’ve been to History Colorado many times, we’ve toured the Capitol three times, and recently we watched the excellent documentary by Ken Burns about the American Revolution.
Unlike the legislators and other officials who want to scale back CMAS social-studies testing, I take seriously the idea that people need to know the basics of world history, government, economics, and related topics to participate responsibly in civic society. I have strong incentives to educate my son that people running public schools frequently lack.
The way out
Unlike many “school choice” advocates, I don’t favor universal vouchers. Because vouchers are redistributive, they necessarily invite extensive government oversight. Vouchers also bring their own incentives problems, in that users of vouchers are incentivized to spend the total amount even when marginal spending is low-value.
I instead favor just letting people direct their own education-directed dollars to the schools or educational projects of their choice. I think that, at a minimum, families who use private schools or who homeschool should be able to keep their own educated-related dollars to spend on their own children’s education.
Longer-term, we could talk about letting everyone choose how to direct their education-related tax dollars. If someone would rather fund homeschoolers or a Catholic school than the public schools, why should the person not have that choice? We can hardly deny such choice if we take freedom of conscience seriously. We could talk about even farther-reaching reforms, but I’m already well outside of “Overton’s Window.”
Maybe one reason that many legislators wish to curtail CMAS social-studies testing is that the legislators themselves resist the obvious implications of economic incentives for public schools. If we were serious about teaching social studies to students, more people would come to see the inherent problems with coercively financed education.
Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.
