I’ve read the new Rick Hess-Michael Horn edited volume, Private Enterprise and Public Education, and most of the chapters in earlier versions for the Andrew Kelly-Kevin Carey anthology, Stretching the Higher Education Dollar. Given my disappointment over the more general “here’s where the market drives things so don’t harsh or hate so much” chapters, I’ve been trying to sort out why the weak chapters felt less ideological than just … missing a huge opportunity. Depending on your interests, either anthology is worthwhile for the stronger chapters, and both capture a certain zeitgeist about both defense of the profit motive and some significant weaknesses in thinking about markets. That weakness provides an opportunity for someone to make a significant scholarly contribution in the near-term future.
At one level, the framing of these volumes is straightforward: For Hess-Horn, they urge us to look at the different aspects of for-profit businesses when in education, instead of trying on ideological hats. The second chapter is very useful in that regard: Andrew Kelly parses opinion survey data to argue that for-profit activities are most easily accepted by the public (and parents) when on the margins of the actual teaching in schools, especially for K-12 schools. Mickey Muldoon’s chapter on the organizational capacities of non-profit vs. for-profit groups was similarly interesting. But when Todd Grindal’s chapter on “disruption” begins, things get much more slippery, and I was left without a clear understanding of where Grindal thinks a disruption lens makes sense and where it’s a hammer in search of nails or things-that-can-be-called-nails. Michael Horn’s and John Bailey’s chapters were … well … gave me the feeling of being fluffed-up op-ed columns, being decent arguments but not enough for a chapter.
For Stretching the Higher Education Dollar, or the chapters available in draft form, the framing is both incrementalist and avowedly radical/disruptive: in a time of public disinvestment in higher education, how can we improve higher education? If you’re interested in one version of the higher-education critical zeitgeist, pick up the Kelly-Carey volume for chapters by Jeff Selingo, Paul LeBlanc, Ben Wildavsky, and Robert Martin. They are detailed, and especially LeBlanc’s and Martin’s chapters raise important questions about what drives prestige-oriented administration decision-making, and what options are available at least to lower-status institutions such as Southern New Hampshire University. Other chapters are weaker, I think. What struck me is not my inconsistent reaction to chapters — that’s life with anthologies — but that I was so unimpressed by the 2012 papers written by Horn and by Burck Smith (head of StraighterLine), and how both the texture of those chapters and the general thrust was similar to the weaker chapters in the Hess-Horn volume.
One problem is how both volumes have become captured in some way by the disruption metaphor. “Disruption” appeared in Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997), who argues that a significant path for market change is the undermining of the market leaders by cheaper, inferior goods and services that bring in new consumers and overturn the basic assumptions of the existing market. “Disruption” has been more common in op-eds on higher education than with K-12, but it appears as a (often-vapid) buzzword in both. Maybe the influence in this particular volume is the influence of Michael Horn, co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, but there is a reason why Hess invited Horn into a co-editor role in the first volume, and why another author in the second volume argued forcefully on behalf of the disruption metaphor in education, moreso even than Horn.
There are two significant weaknesses of the metaphor’s use in education:
- Disruption has become the analytical hammer in search of any nail, or anything that looks sort of like a nail. Christensen’s disruption model is one method of market succession. But there are plenty of types of market succession unrelated to Christensen’s innovator’s-dilemma argument. In the late 19th century, the development of monopolies and trusts were far from the low-price innovator. Or if one considers durable goods rather than railroads or natural resources, as David Hounshell writes in From the American System to Mass Production, the creation of interchangeable parts in factories enabled a much cheaper way of creating consumer goods, and that led to another requirement for success: distribution. Even Ford’s Model T, often held up as an archetype of disruption, would not have become successful without Ford’s being willing to pay workers more and then, about halfway through the run of the Model T, with the creation of the distribution system we now call dealer franchises. All of these examples are less evidence that disruption is a horrible model than that it is a good model for those cases of market succession where it is a good model. But some market succession stories are far from the disruption model. In addition, the model cannot tell us where attempts to disrupt a market are likely to succeed and where they are likely to fail (Second Life, anyone?). The analytical problem here is that the disruption model’s advocates cannot tell us where its boundaries lie.
- Much of the recent discussion of the profit motive in education conflates the cases where a company is selling services or goods to the government (i.e., a government contractor) with those cases where someone or some organization is selling basic educational services to consumers, either in a voucher program or in other situations. Defenders of the profit motive make this confusion–such as John Bailey’s chapter in Private Enterprise and Public Education; so do many self-described opponents of privatization who discuss voucher programs, charter schools, and contractors as if they are identical market structures. Muldoon’s chapter in the Hess-Horn volume is a healthy corrective to the blandishment/broadside pattern, and it should be considered a potential start to looking at educational markets in at least a squidge more sophisticated way.
The fundamental fact of education markets is that they are complex. Not only is there significant information asymmetry (parents do not have great information about the quality of schools, nor do schools purchasing services know much about the competence of vendors or often the potential of job applicants), but the geographic specificity of school districts frequently makes it difficult for education markets to have enough “thickness” to work in a functional sense, to use the language of 2008 Nobel Prize economist Alvin Roth, and some parent preferences revolve around issues (such as feasibility for work, after-care, etc.) that may or may not lead to a great classroom experience for their children. That’s not horrible of parents–usually it’s a matter of practicality–but it means that bromides about choice and markets solving all are … um, bromides. If you look at the types of education markets where the public sector does not dominate in the same sense as K-12 — that is, early childhood and higher education — you see a good bit of market failure.
Alas, most of the economic and political writings around education markets remain untroubled by the real world of schools and education markets. There is some very good econometric analysis of vouchers by David Figlio and a few others, and this analysis involves a fairly narrow analytical perspective. That doesn’t say anything bad about Figlio at all, but it is notable that we have a great deal of writing that is either Figlio or the pale attempt to be like Figlio, and very little on education markets that pull from other relevant streams of economic literature. What else should be on the table, from economics:
- Behavioral economics, also known as “cognitive psychology that economists will actually use.” This is the type of research that Daniel Kahnemann won the 2002 economics Nobel Prize for (prospect theory), and is the inspiration for the work of Cass Sunstein and others who would like to nudge us towards better actions.
- Market design, which earned Roth his Nobel Prize (along with Lloyd Shapley). Roth has done considerable work in education, and there are a number of papers either authored or co-authored by him and Atila Abdulkadiroğlu about designing school-choice programs, including their helping Boston completely redesign its family-preference system. If you look at K-12 education, you might think that those who research vouchers and other market systems would look at the market design literature. The total citations of a sample of 3-4 papers on designing school choice by either Roth or Abdulkadiroğlu in papers written or co-written by Figlio, Jay Greene, Marcus Winters, Cecilia Rouse, Paul Peterson, or John Witte? From what I could tell in Google Scholar, zero.
The failure of so-called education market researchers to use important, relevant pieces of the economic literature about market failure is telling at the same time that “disruption” has metastasized as a metaphor. This is not a horrible problem, in the long run. It should be a significant opportunity for an enterprising scholar who is willing to bone up on either behavioral economics or market-design mechanisms and then reap an intellectual windfall from applying either to education markets.