On Crooked Timber, Kieran Healy quotes the poem “Claudy” by James Simmons as a kind of memorial for last week’s bombings in London. “Claudy” is a ballad about an IRA bombing in 1972: very direct, song-like, and simple. It made me think of the following passage from Seamus Heaney’s Nobel Lecture. These words are not verse but they are poetic in their concentrated power and wisdom:

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I suspect that increased choice and competition may improve educational outcomes to a degree. I am fairly agnostic about the advantages and disadvantages of market mechanisms. However, the potential drawbacks are at least worth listing:

1. Motivation: Usually, if a company makes money on each client, then it wants to attract more. It is motivated to please its customers and develop a good reputation. However, many educators prefer to work in smaller schools and within smaller organizations. They are not automatically motivated to attract more “clients” (in this case, students and parents). If we decide to reward them for increasing the size of their schools or for founding new branches, then those benefits will to some degree counteract their desire to remain small. It would be a good idea to reward educators for expanding their organizations if we thought that big schools (or chains of similar schools) tended to work better than small ones. But the contrary is more likely to be true.

2. Sorting problems: Parents want their kids to get good educations. But they also want their own kids to be among other children who are relatively well-off and academically successful. I know this for a fact, since I hear parents in my neighborhood talking about the percentage of students in each local school who are “out-of-bounds.” The in-bounds kids around here tend to be affluent and White; the out-of-bound students tend to be poorer and very diverse. Many parents quite blatantly choose their home addresses so that their own children can attend schools without many pupils from poor neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the private schools are highly exclusive, and that exclusivity is one value that parents are buying (for $20k/year). It doesn’t matter if a private school adds much value through the quality of its teaching; as long as the student body is highly selected, kids’ talents and advantages will rub off on one another.

All of this means that in a true market, kids’ socio-economic status and test scores will be valuable commodities. Those who are better off will be desirable, both to schools and to other parents. The result will be increased sorting–which we already see in markets like DC where there is a lot of private education.

3. Public goods: Our surveys and focus groups have often found that parents want other people’s children to be educated for citizenship; they are not so concerned about civic education for their own family. This may be because civic skills and attitudes are examples of public goods. If a child becomes a capable and responsible citizen, then everyone benefits. In contrast, economic skills benefit the individual first, and society only indirectly. In a market, parents are likely to demand information about the effects of schools on their own kids’ economic skills. Such data will be provided, and parents will choose schools accordingly. They are much less likely to demand evidence that schools are enhancing public goods such as citizenship, social cohesion, and equity. Thus a market mechanism is likely to enhance certain kinds of education over other kinds.

4. Bad parents. It’s politically incorrect to suggest that some parents are not up to the task of selecting schools. And indeed, I am often the first to complain that big school systems undervalue their parents and take too little advantage of citizens’ talents and energies. However, some parents are the problem. Yesterday, Kate Zernike wrote in the New York Times:

Nationwide, the Drug Enforcement Administration says that over the last five years 15,000 children were found at laboratories where methamphetamine was made. But that number vastly understates the problem, federal officials say, because it does not include children whose parents use methamphetamine but do not make it and because it relies on state reporting, which can be spotty.

In a true market, there is no “paternalism,” because customers make their own free choices. But in education, kids are not the decision-makers; parents are. So there is no escaping paternalism. The only question is what balance of power we want to accord to literal parents versus the community or the state. While this balance should favor parents, it can’t tip all the way over, as long as some adults are abusive and neglectful.

Finally, I am convinced that much of the enthusiasm for markets arises because people believe that teachers and administrators, on the whole, are lazy and/or incompetent. Thus “market discipline” would squeeze out the waste and enhance efficiency. But my many visits to urban public schools tell me that teachers and administrators, with some exceptions, are hard-working and idealistic. Increasing their motivation through market mechanisms wouldn’t help, since they are motivated already.

Today was the last day of the Leaders for Tomorrow summer program. Eleven University of Maryland undergrads have been in residence on campus since Memorial Day, working with me and my excellent graduate assistant Libby Bixby Skolnik, to create materials about our community. Their products range from an audio portrait of the County’s diversity (a set of musical clips that you can hear by clicking on a map), to a detailed explanation of mission planning at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, to a short story about teenagers’ experience of busing in 1973. All these products have been fed into the Prince George’s County Information Commons website, which is also the home for work created by high school students. (In fact, by July 15, we expect to be able to post a nice new video feature on obesity, created by students from Northwestern High School as part of a project that I direct.) Other material is also on its way, including a “flash” (i.e., movie) introduction to the whole site.

We see this as pretty innovative, because it is …

I didn’t watch any of the Live 8 concerts, but I was intrigued enough by the newspaper coverage that I checked out the official website and some prominent links, including DATA (“debt, AIDS, trade, Africa”), which is supposed to be the source of information for the Live 8 movement. I am struck by the overwhelming image of Africa as pathetic and needy, exemplified by the videos of orphans and “street toddlers.” With the exception of Nelson Mandela, there are no prominent African adults on these websites, saying what they think about the continent. There is very little about the assets and capacities of Africans. The few positive remarks tend to emphasize the crucial role of outside assistance. For example, “Mozambique’s economy grew at an astonishing 12 per cent in the 1990s when aid constituted 50 per cent of its income.” (Could Mozambique’s growth rate have had anything to do with its own people and government?)

We’re told, “LIVE 8 is about justice not charity.” But saying that doesn’t make it true. Justice would require collaboration and respect, which I don’t see on the websites. Justice is a political concept, and the Live 8 movement has no politics (other than the demand that Western elites provide more cash).

All this matters because the developing world is littered with the refuse of good intentions. From missionaries to the Western-trained mandarins who ran countries like Tanzania and India under Nehru and Mrs. Gandhi, people with good hearts and lots of cash have been damaging economies and undermining self-respect for generations. I think justice would mean considerably more aid, and better trade policies, for Africa. But it’s not worth raising a few billions if Africans obtain no power, and all the decisions are made by Western celebrities.

One of the buildings planned for the World Trade Center site is a museum, the International Freedom Center. As planned, the Center would offer space to several art galleries, some of which have previously shown controversial art. It would also provide a permanent exhibition called “Freedom’s Walk,” that would include displays about great tyrannies from the past. There would an educational and cultural center and a “civic engagement network” where people could find opportunities to volunteer in their communities. The plan recently attracted criticism from families of 9/11 victims, who want it to be a memorial to the tragedy of that day, and from conservative commentators, some of whom see the proposed museum as a “Marxist-left, anti-American media center.” Special criticism has been reserved for one of the nonprofits offered space in the arts complex, the Drawing Museum, because it has previously shown art works based on the Abu Ghraib scandal, and other anti-Bush pictures.

I happen to think that government funding for culture raises complex issues. Freedom is not the only value at stake; it’s also important for government money to support art that’s excellent, representative, inspiring, appropriate, consistent with democratic values, and so on. Moreover, I don’t believe that it’s possible to give out government money simply on the basis of “freedom.” Someone must make decisions about who shall get the cash. If the government subcontracts its decisions to boards of artists or to museum directors, then it is simply annointing particular groups as its agents.

Nevertheless, freedom is a great good–and we can maximize it. A cultural center devoted to freedom would indeed make room for controversial discussions, for art that challenges conventional views from various perspectives. It would indeed contain rooms like the “civic engagement network,” whose content is contributed over time by multiple independent groups. There might even be a speaker’s corner and facilities (such as video studios) that visitors could use to create ephemeral works of their own. Designed that way, the museum really would promote freedom, albeit at some cost to other values–national solidarity/patriotism, focus on the 9/11 victims, and popularity.

Under the circumstances, I can understand the choice not to maximize freedom, but rather to create a more conventional memorial to the dead of 9/11. However, I am increasingly angry at the use of “freedom” when it doesn’t apply. The President says that “freedom is on the march,” thanks to his policies at home and abroad. But even a friendly reading of his motives would suggest that the United States is balancing freedom against national security, stability, majoritarian democracy, traditional values, prosperity, and other goods. If anything, freedom is waning in the United States thanks to the Patriot Act and other restrictions on individual civil rights. Maybe that’s necessary–but don’t call it “freedom.”

Somehow, the replacement design for “Freedom Tower” at the World Trade Center site–with its 200-foot, impregnable concrete-and-steel plinth–makes the point most clearly. Even as we restrict liberty, we are eager to use the rhetoric of “freedom.”