National Post – August 31, 2010
Believe it or not, running schools like businesses can help the have-nots
By Marni Soupcoff
In today’s paper, we have a story detailing the lousy progress Ontario public elementary students are making in reading and math. The piece includes comments from Peter Cowley, director of the Fraser Institute’s School Performance Studies, who suggests that sometimes schools have to act like businesses, modeling themselves on their more successful competitors. “In some areas,” he says, “the replication of a successful school is exactly like the replication of a successful coffee shop: You figure out what works.”
I have no doubt that these words will create a good deal of controversy. People like to think of education as a public good that is simply too important to be left to the vagaries of the market. Implying that schools should be run like Starbucks competitors – jumping on and copying whatever frozen mocha beverage the big guys are serving this month because it happens to be selling well – gives many the willies. Where’s the integrity? Where’s the fairness? What about the children?
Well, what about the children? As coarse and distasteful as the public may find business analogies when it comes to education, it’s very hard to prove that restricting kids to schools that don’t have to compete for their attendance does them any good. In fact, I’d say that the yesterday’s report from the Education Quality and Accountability Office suggests the opposite, as we’ve been seeing in public education settings across the continent: It does them a disservice.
The typical response to invoking a market model to compel schools to improve their performances (by making them compete with each other) is captured by Margaret McNay, associate dean of the University of Western Ontario’s Faculty of Education, who is quoted in the story as saying that competition: “may be fine in communities that can support four or five different schools from which to choose, but once you get the private sector involved, you’ll have schools that will say [to potential students], ‘No, we don’t want you for whatever reason.’”
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