Rethinking the Welfare State: The prospects for ... - e-Library

Primary and secondary education 145
functions. Further, it is widely claimed that there are too many administrators for too few
teachers. Chubb and Moe, in their landmark survey of education in the United States, for
instance, argue that high levels of bureaucracy systematically compromise school
performance because it limits school autonomy. In particular, they find that: “[a]utonomy
has the strongest influence on the overall quality of school organization of any factor that
we examined. Bureaucracy is unambiguously bad for school organization.” 32 Moreover,
as with any non-marketdriven resource allocation mechanism, the educational
bureaucracy suffers from the difficulty of translating parental and student preferences
into concrete programs without the benefits of the price mechanism. That is, without the
price mechanism to transmit information between suppliers and consumers, bureaucracies
as central planners must gather and assimilate a daunting amount of information in order
to make socially desirable decisions. Finally, existing collective bargaining arrangements
involving teachers and other educational actors, it is argued, promote a culture in which
individual merit and initiative are discounted and complacency, conformity and seniority
are rewarded. 33
Accountability
Another criticism of the publicly delivered system relates to its lack of accountability to
parents. Although there are elected school boards and other forms of democratic control
over the operation of schools, these are often felt to be too far removed from individual
concerns to be effective. A system where credible threats of “exit,” actual “exit” and
“voice” are available means of feedback to providers has strong appeal to those who feel
disenfranchised under the current arrangements in which government-supplied schools
are the only institutions that can benefit from public subsidies. As Hirschman argues, 34
one problem with the “exit” option, however, is that those with the greatest ability to
discipline through “voice” are often the first to exit. Once they have done so, those who
are left may have fewer levers to exercise any control over the system. 35 However, it is
the fear of prospective exit that will cause existing institutions (in this case, schools) to
seek to correct a deteriorating state of affairs.
Demand-side education subsidies
In light of the various criticisms of government-provided education enumerated above, a
number of commentators have argued for the need to instill greater scope for parental
(and, where appropriate, student) choice in determining how public funds will be
allocated in the system. The claim for enhanced choice, as discussed earlier in Chapter 2,
is predicated on the belief that giving citizens greater scope to determine how public
funds are spent to advance their interests will ensure greater responsiveness of suppliers
(in this case, educators) to their preferences, thereby addressing the accountability
concerns discussed above. 36 Of course, enhanced accountability means not only that
schools can be expected to be more efficient in how they provide their programs, but that
the array of programs (and choices) available to parents can be expected to expand as
well, thereby addressing the many other concerns that have been leveled against
conventional publicly provided education.