Education as a Commodity

Our generation of students is extremely fortunate. Many of us were educated in public school systems in a time of great economic growth. The nineties didn't see any serious market contractions as we saw recently and have seen in the past. We were educated when state budgets were relatively stable, and only the tip of the iceberg of immigration was showing.

However, school administrators and policy-makers are facing a rapidly changing landscape where education programs are on shoestring budgets, children of immigrants that speak limited or no English are flooding the system, and the federal effort to salvage a steadily declining quality of education in the form of No Child Left Behind is generally regarded as a failure. It is perhaps easier to understand the problem of declining educational quality as a commodity, since it has increasingly become the case that the quality of one's education is directly related to the amount one can pay for it.

Lets say that the the success of an individual is determined by distance traveled. Students are mechanics, and education is the accumulation of parts of a car that will enable you to travel more quickly--the uneducated walk, bike or hitchhike. In this situation, as in reality, the quality of the parts are determined by their price, and what the school can afford is determined largely by county property tax. This is why you see more luxury vehicles pouring out of wealthy counties, and you see old beaters coming out of inner cities. The inner cities tend not to have the large houses and valuable properties that generate revenue for the school, while at the same time inner cities have to churn out more cars (students). This disparity has been building throughout our time in the education system.

Now enters another complexity. Whereas before now all of the cars were using parts based on the English system of measurement, new mechanics are flooding the system that only use the metric system. They are assembling the cars in fundamentally incorrect ways because despite their ignorance of English units, we attempt to drown them in non-metric tools and parts hoping they will cobble something together eventually. Meanwhile, the non-metric parts are coming from somewhere. We are stripping our other mechanics of everything from cruise control to airbags to save money for metric parts. It has become a zero-sum game. And in great irony, some of the metric mechanics do succeed despite having to adapt measurement systems and create beautiful machines despite overwhelming odds, only to have their cars impounded due to lack of a driver's license.

The ideal is that every mechanic would have a chance to build a complete and dependable car. But in these circumstances, what do we do? In a situation where car parts are already scarce, do we try to switch from English units to metric? Or do we risk ending up unfinished vehicles, wheels with a frame and seats but no engine? Or will having a population base of individuals that can work with both English and metric allow for cost savings in the future? Maybe metric-based airbags are cheaper, and initial training cost will lead to long-term benefits.

There are many questions to ask. Do we spend too much money on paint? Chinese cars may only have rugged-looking primer, but their engines are top of the line. And yet other questions are easy to answer. Do we impound high-profile cars due to lack of a driver's license? The DREAM Act should take care of that, noting the obvious consequence that one less driver is one more hitchhiker.

It's easy to say we need more metric parts. But when acting on any type of policy we need to be very careful. Metric parts are currently very expensive, and inevitably another mechanic will be losing the means to build their car. There is a balance, and we need to ensure that in the process of the inevitable conversion to a dual system, we do not rush into a situation where all of our mechanics are left with Go Carts.