Education and the Election

By Liam Jaeger
Spring 2008

Any person who doubts that education reform should be at the forefront of the upcoming U.S. presidential race needs only to look at the most recent Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) from 2006. While politicians pander on hot button issues such as abortion and gay marriage, and commentators perpetually inquire into why Barack Obama doesn’t wear an American flag lapel pin, our country’s educational system is falling desperately behind in national rankings. Out of 30 countries, U.S. fifteen year-olds trail behind 16 others in science and 23 in mathematics. Those countries outranking the U.S. included Hong Kong, Canada, Japan, Belgium, and Finland who placed first in science and second in math.

Expectedly these results were a wakeup call for the U.S., as President Bush has made efforts towards increased funding to improve the quality of our country’s math and science education programs. However, is a lack of funds really the problem? According to the 2007 Education at a Glance report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), who is responsible for coordinating the PISA, the U.S. is the second highest spending country on education. Findings also showed that the U.S. spends more money per student and a greater percentage of its GDP on education than, you guessed it, Finland.

In fact, schools in countries such as Belgium that fail to deliver a quality education are shut down rather than given more funding. In these countries money is not given directly to the school, but instead to each individual student in the form of vouchers. Each student then gets to make the choice of which school they wish to attend instead of being assigned to one, thus putting pressure on the schools to educate well in order to attract more students. It is worthwhile to note that this system is one that was espoused by one of Rutgers’s greatest alumni, Nobel Prize-winning economist and intellectual, Milton Friedman.

Is this pressure such a bad thing? When a person wants a pizza for dinner, they will choose to give their money to the restaurant that provides the best one for the price. It is this sense of competition that creates an incentive to provide better services, whether that service is food, a cell phone plan, or an automobile, and it is what our public school system lacks. Consider teacher unions. These groups have made it so difficult to fire incompetent teachers that even those who have been accused of sexual harassment are still allowed in the classroom, let alone those who simply do not teach efficiently. It is so tedious to get rid of a tenured teacher that most principles won’t even bother jumping through all the hoops to do so. Can you think of any other profession in which your performance has little to no effect on whether or not you will keep your job? What kind of incentive to perform well does this provide?

By moving towards a less government-regulated and unionized education system, our country’s schools could gain an autonomy allowing for positive growth and change. It should not be surprising that we need only to look to Finland to find evidence that this can happen. Finnish schools have no uniforms, no honors societies, no valedictorians, no classes for gifted students, no internet regulation in their libraries and no national standardized testing. Teachers are also given a great deal more academic freedom than those in the U.S. As long as Finland and other countries continue to outperform our students to the extent which they have been, it would be incredibly ignorant to leave the topic of education on the back burner during the months leading up to November.

Liam Jaeger is the Public Relations Director of the Rutgers Libertarians. He is a Rutgers College Senior, majoring in Mathematics.