A few thoughts in response

I appreciate the thoughtful comments that four invited scholars made to my article “Public schools for private gain.” Let me provide a few thoughts of my own in response to each.

Eric Hanushek makes an economic critique of my argument, asserting that schooling does more than provide credentials that get people jobs; it provides skills that are highly valued by employers because they make these employees more productive. He doesn’t deny that credentials may be the basis for the original hire, but he argues that over time employers keep and promote those with the best skills and then refine their future hiring in light of this process. I would agree up to a point. But this still leaves a powerful credentialing effect in place, since it’s the primary way to get hired in the first place. Employers rely on credentials for hiring decisions and hope they signal needed skills, which they don’t find out until workers have been on the job for a while. By this time, they’ve picked up the skills they need on the job that are not really taught in school anyway.

Another issue that he raises at the end is his concern about the possible policy interventions that might follow from my analysis. I share his concern, which is why I don’t recommend such policies. In an authoritarian state it is possible to restrict individual choice to keep families from pursuing their own interest through the educational choices they make on behalf of their children, but you can’t and shouldn’t do this in a liberal democracy. One thing you can do, however, is to keep from making things worse by encouraging more school choice. The public school bureaucracy is resented by upper-middle-class parents precisely because it limits their ability to pursue advantage for their own children at the expense of other people’s children.