Politics

Why The Left Is Wrong On Education

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

I read with interest an op-ed piece in The Guardian by former Education Secretary under the previous Labour government, Estelle Morris, in which she argues that the very idea of profit-making schools threatens the “moral purpose” of education. I thought that it rather neatly summed up one of the major flaws in British left-wing thinking, and the reason why they are wrong on educational policy in particular.

To be fair, in her letter Morris states clearly that she is open to a greater mix of providers in the education space, and that this can bring benefits at times:

The role of the private sector has already been contentious. It’s certainly easy to make the case that it has not been a universal success – some school meals services and messy PFI contracts, for example – but the new “mix” ought to be welcomed. There is a wider and more diverse range of service providers, many bringing new ideas as well as experience, as schools increasingly control their own budgets.

This is to be welcomed, as there are those on the left who seem to reflexively oppose anything but centralised, standardised provision of public education, a stance from which Morris is at pains to distance herself.

Unfortunately, there the open-mindedness comes to an end. Harking back to a time before Thatcher, Morris recalls:

Thirty years ago, “not for profit” would have been assumed to be at the core of a key public service like education – part of its reason for being.

Here, right here, is the problem. Morris speaks as though this worldview was noble and that it died out thirty years ago, but to my mind it is an ignoble thing, one that it is alive and well in the hearts and minds of many left-leaning and Labour supporters in Britain today – the belief that part of education’s very reason for being is to not turn a profit, to deliberately shun the gaudy world of capitalism and the idea of generating a return on investment. This is actually quite a shocking sentiment to hold – the idea that the needs of the customer (the schoolchildren) must compete with any other motive or “reason for being” when educational policy is considered, and that among these valid and competing interests is the need to provide public services on a not-for-profit basis, regardless of the impact on quality. But of course, there are many such competing interests when one subscribes to this worldview – those of the teachers unions as well as left-wing ideology in general.

I should add a disclaimer at this point, that I am writing specifically about education policy in Britain, and that my views on these topics as they relate to the United States are different and will be covered separately in future.

We then reach the core of Morris’ argument:

At times of falling school budgets any surplus cash should be reinvested in schools rather than into people’s bank accounts; this is irrefutable but it is not the core of the argument. Profit can drive improvement. But the financial bottom line will never provide the motivation to deliver what we want and need from schools.

Firstly, I would like to know from Estelle Morris why the financial bottom line cannot deliver this motivation – surely the correct behaviour and outcomes from providers can be incentivised if the correct performance metrics and standards are used and applied?

But more generally, I would like to tackle this point with a hypothetical question. Suppose that there are two separate school systems at work in Britain, one state owned and not-for-profit and the other a regulated but private sector-delivered system, both receiving the same amount of funds per student from the government. The private system achieves significantly higher results in terms of test scores and long-term employability than the public system, and diverts a proportion of its budget surplus to dividend payments for shareholders. The public system achieves lower results and reinvests any budget surplus back into the system. In this scenario, should the private system be effectively neutered and shut down by being forced to reinvest its entire surplus back into operations rather than making payments to shareholders, even if this means that all students in the country then have to join the lower-performing public system? Leave aside for now questions as to whether or not privately delivered education would achieve better results, I’m just interested in the principle here. Yes or no?

Morris concludes:

There is a moral purpose that underpins education and, although by itself it is not enough, it must be the driving force. Without it, it’s too easy to accept that it’s not worth trying, yet again, to help a child to master a skill, or to rationalise that the social class divide is something we’ll just have to live with. Understanding this moral purpose for education is not the preserve of those in the public sector; others bring the same passion and determination and share in the same joy success brings, but all this feels strikingly at odds with the drive for profit. Value for money, certainly; careful management of resources, essential; but there can only be one set of shareholders – and that is the children.

I see in this argument a lot of hazy worries and doubts about whether profit-making companies can grasp and nurture what Morris calls the “moral purpose for education”, but no acknowledgement of the doubts – proven doubts, incidentally – that those of us on the right have about the public sector’s ability to deliver the value for money and good resource management that she also admits are essential. For-profit providers have not been given the chance to prove whether they can deliver public education to a good standard, because they are not presently allowed to do so. The public sector, however, has proved time and again that they cannot deliver quality educational outcomes that represent value for money or careful management of resources. And yet Morris proposes that we spurn the promise of the private sector and give the public sector carte blanche to continue just as they have for years, free from any competition or external impetus to improve.

The more that one hears arguments such as this from the British left, the harder it is to avoid the conclusion that for them, the ultimate prize, or the “reason for being”, is not to offer the best standard of education that can be provided to British children, but rather one of two very different, rather grubbier goals: either to ensure that every child receives precisely the same standard of education, even if this means embracing the lowest common denominator rather than striving for the best and risking unequal outcomes, or else having the ideological satisfaction of knowing that all public services are provided centrally by the state, whatever the cost in terms of wasteful spending or squandered potential.

A higher moral purpose indeed.

In Praise of David Laws

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

David Laws

 

Yesterday I recently read some of the most refreshing words on economic policy to have been uttered by a British politician in recent months, and they came not from a Conservative but from a Liberal Democrat MP.

In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, David Laws, briefly Chief Secretary to the Treasury but now a lowly backbencher, made the case for reduced tax rates, deeper (but more wisely targeted) cuts in public spending and reform of the public sector:

… Mr Laws said the share of the economy accounted for by the state was “out of kilter” with the amount of tax the public were willing to pay.

Only spending on health, education and pensions should not fall as a share of GDP, the MP said.

The former chief secretary to the Treasury’s views will alarm many Lib Dems who have opposed the Coalition’s spending cuts. However,

Mr Laws argues that cutting state spending would be in keeping with the founding fathers of the Liberal Party.

“Even after the existing fiscal consolidations, state spending will account for some 40 per cent of GDP, a figure that would have shocked not only Adam Smith, William Gladstone, and John Stuart Mill, but also John Maynard Keynes and David Lloyd George,” he says.

“The implication of the state spending 40 per cent of national income is that there is likely to be too much resource misallocation and too much waste and inefficiency.”

Too much resource misallocation and too much waste and inefficiency. Yes!

I have found it irritating beyond measure to see minister after government minister talk about the need to reduce the ridiculous proportion of national output accounted for by government spending as a sad necessity resulting from the economic recession rather than as something desirable as an end in itself. When critics accuse the Conservative-led coalition government of using the recession as a trojan horse to impose ideologically-inspired reductions in the size of the state, I actually wish that they had the impetus to do just that – but this accusation greatly overestimates the political savvy and core convictions of the current Conservative Party leadership and instead, government spending continues to increase in real terms, and no big-name Tories are speaking out in favour of a leaner public sector.

David Laws (together with other likeminded libertarian-leaning types such as Michael Gove MP) is one of the few politicians to actually come out and make the case that the British public sector has grown far too large and bloated, and that reducing its size is both necessary and worthy, not just because of the present economic difficulties but because it is the right thing to do.

But why do we only hear this call for a  from a backbench Liberal Democrat MP and not from a frontbencher in the Conservative party, who should hold these views just as dearly? Why isn’t David Cameron acting as head cheerleader for shrinking government and making the case that important services can still be provided – often to a higher standard – when the government does not have ownership of them? Where is George Osborne, and where are the urgently-needed supply-side reforms so glaringly missing from his last Budget?

In short, why did I campaign for and help the Conservative Party fight the last general election, when it has fallen to a Liberal Democrat to make the case for a small, lean state and for economic liberty?

The End Of America As We Know It? Hardly.

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Andrew Sullivan posts an excellent retort to Mitt Romney’s fear mongering that the United States is about to make a binary flip from being a free enterprise nation to having a “government-run economy”, based on this illuminating chart:

As you will note, the line indicating growth in corporate profits (in billions of dollars) obstinately refuses to go in the direction that it would need to point in order to signify the government-led smothering of the private sector that Romney wants us to believe is currently taking place.

The Republican presidential candidate has been giving speeches bemoaning the notion that President Obama doesn’t understand capitalism or the free enterprise system, and that this ignorance is leading Obama to implement policies that are harming the economic recovery. Romney has advanced this line of attack frequently, most recently at a campaign event in St. Louis, Missouri, though to be fair, he seems willing to ascribe Obama’s supposed failures to ignorance rather than malice:

I do not believe this has been done with evil intent or ill will. But for a family watching their house being sold at foreclosure, or the family that is forced to spend their kid’s college savings just to make ends meet, the results are just as devastating.

Oh wait, perhaps not:

I will not be that President of deception and doubt. I will lead us to a better place.

Then, of course, comes the obligatory lie about Obamacare, the Affordable Healthcare act:

Today, government at all levels consumes 37 percent of the total economy or G.D.P. If Obamacare is allowed to stand, government will reach half of the American economy. And through the increasing controls government has imposed on industries like energy, financial services and automobiles, it will soon effectively control the majority of our economic activity.

This line only works if you are ill-informed enough to actually believe that Obamacare effectively appropriates and nationalises the entire US healthcare industry, bringing it under government ownership as opposed to just regulating the industry to a higher degree and increasing the customer base of the insurance companies through the individual mandate. So it’s basically a big fat lie, though Romney is clever enough to choose his words carefully, stating “government will reach half of the American economy”, a quite meaningless phrase, but one that deliberately and incorrectly suggests ownership and control of half of the US economy without actually putting him on the record as having said so.

And finally, the crux of Romney’s argument:

One must ask whether we will still be a free enterprise nation and whether we will still have economic freedom. America is on the cusp of having a government-run economy. President Obama is transforming America into something very different than the land of the free and the land of opportunity.

We know where that transformation leads. There are other nations that have chosen that path. It leads to chronic high unemployment, crushing debt, and stagnant wages.

I don’t want to transform America; I want to restore the values of economic freedom.

This is what really irritates me about the Romney argument, this idea that there is a binary choice between “free enterprise” and “government-run”, that America has always dwelt on the free enterprise side of the line and that Obama wants an old-school socialist planned economy. It is borne out of the total allergy to nuance or shades of grey currently affecting the Republican party, and is one of the main reasons why I cannot bring myself to support them at the moment.

Of course there is no such binary choice. What percentage of GDP would have to be consumed by government spending for “free enterprise” to officially be declared dead according to the Romney definition? 37%, the current figure? 50% + 1? Something else? All conservatives – myself included – want to see government spending account for as small a proportion of GDP as possible, and most would agree that the current level – in Britain as well as in America – is too high. But the size of government has expanded under both parties, and though Obama may be guilty of failing to reverse the trend, he has at least slowed the rate of increase in the size of government, when the stimulus measures are factored out. For Mitt Romney to suggest that the US is teetering on the brink of becoming a planned economy under Obama when government spending accounts for 37% of GDP is not only the worst type of scaremongering, it also ignores the significant contribution that his own party made to the problem.

And as for this narrative about Obama seeking to “transform” America, to turn it into something unrecognisable from before – while it may be the only narrative that Romney can hope to ride to the White House in November, it is also untrue. Obama is a centre-left politician implementing mostly centre-left policies, some of which would actually have enjoyed a measure of support among Republicans if they had been proposed by a President Bush, Cheney or McCain. But for Romney to get out the vote, he must convince his supporters of something patently untrue, that Obama is a radical, a dangerous subversive trying to alter the fabric of America.

I’m an economic conservative, I believe in a small state and limited government involvement in private markets. But given the choice between someone on the centre left who is making an honest effort along Keynesian lines to solve the economic difficulties facing America and someone on the right who screams “socialism!” where none exists, and who remains in denial about his own side’s complicity in the downturn and the detrimental effect that his policy proposals would have on the recovery, I have to hold my nose and support the centre left guy.

Which is a shame, because it would be nice to have a genuine choice in 2012.

My Turn To Be President

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Politico reports on Jeb Bush’s surprisingly frank confession that he believes 2012 was his “time” to run for the presidency, and that he may now have missed his chance:

“This was probably my time,” Bush told “CBS This Morning,” referring to the ongoing presidential campaign. “There’s a window of opportunity, in life, and for all sorts of reasons.”

 

I think we can all quite happily do without a third member of the Bush dynasty ascending to the presidency and making a mockery of American meritocracy. Thanks for sitting this round out, Jeb.

That said, the Florida Republican doesn’t know whether he ever wants to be president.

“Have you made a decision that you don’t want to be president?” asked CBS host Charlie Rose.

“I have not made that decision,” Bush responded.

Uh-oh.

How Not To Cover An Election

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

It is very hard to disagree with this damning article from Politico, assessing the current state of cable news in America:

If ever there was a political event to lay bare the partisan ideologies of the cable news media, the Wisconsin recall was it.

MSNBC was blatantly rooting for Tom Barrett to defeat Gov. Scott Walker, even sending union champion Ed Schultz to cover an event with no apologies for the dog he has in the fight. (Earlier tonight, Chris Matthews even told Schultz that if he wasn’t an MSNBC host, he could be head of the AFL-CIO.) When it became clear that Barrett would lose, Schultz looked almost teary eyed. Not long after, the network’s contributors immediately began suggesting that this was, in fact, good news for Obama — who, after all, hadn’t even set foot in Wisconsin — and began attacking Mitt Romney.

Meanwhile, Fox News was blatantly rooting for Gov. Walker, and the moment it became clear that Walker might win, host Sean Hannity called it “a repudiation of big unions,” which did “everything they could do to demonize Scott Walker.” Guest Hugh Hewitt then predicted that, five months from now, Romney would follow Walker just “as Reagan followed Thatcher.” Fox’s Greta Van Susteren later hosted what amounted to a victory celebration for the Republicans.

Given this blatant partisan coverage, it was absolutely impossible to watch either network and weed out any clear understanding of the actual significance of the event, much less what effect it would actually have on the 2012 presidential election.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/06/the-worst-night-on-cable-news-125389.html

Out of a mixture of boredom, insomnia and a ravenous (bordering on unhealthy) appetite for US political news, I stayed up until 2AM watching MSNBC’s live coverage of the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall election (MSNBC being the only channel I was able to stream on the internet since our satellite television decided to break at the weekend). And goodness me, the coverage was bad. And by “bad”, I mean really unworthy of a channel that purports to be a television news network rather than a propaganda station.

Don’t get me wrong – I like MSNBC a lot. As the US Republican Party has lurched ever further away from being a centre-right party favouring limited government towards becoming a win-at-all-costs, fear-stoking, hypocritical, economically and historically illiterate party for idiots I have found no small degree of comfort in having my displeasure and frustration validated by the likes of Chris Matthews, Martin Bashir, Rachel Maddow, Al Sharpton and the rest of the MSNBC cast. I think that’s a fine and healthy thing to do in small measures, so long as one does not go too far and close oneself off from divergent opinions and other sources of news. However, at some point – I’m not even precisely sure when – it became okay for news networks to openly cheerlead for certain politicians or parties, not just during the opinion shows but while covering live election events. No pretence at impartiality any more, just open bias toward one or other party throughout the broadcast.

MSNBC dispatched their entertaining and highly watchable anchor Ed Schultz to Wisconsin to cover the results in front of a crowd of union-supporting, pro- Tom Barrett people. After talking up Barrett’s prospects throughout the show, he did not try very hard to conceal his disappointment when Republican incumbent Scott Walker was projected to survive the recall challenge:

 

At this point it really goes without saying that the Fox News team were up to exactly the same type of shenanigans on their network, before and during the voting:

 

Of course.

What exactly is wrong – or detrimental to good ratings – with having a lively, spirited but even-handed broadcast while we wait for the results to come in and a victor to be declared, featuring moderated discussions with people from all sides of the political spectrum (so we actually have a chance to learn something rather than just have our existing prejudices reinforced), which could then segue into the usual partisan bombast, in a separately branded show, once the results were announced?

Look, I get it. Conservatives long perceived a bias in the news networks and took to talk radio to find a place where they could hear their opinions reflected in the coverage. Conservative talk radio was eventually augmented by the Fox News Channel, which became so successful that liberals felt that they also needed a channel of their own, at which point MSNBC was hijacked and directed to “lean forward”. CNN tried to maintain an ideological balance and haemorrhaged viewers as a consequence, supposedly validating the “pick a side” approach taken by the others, and has had to resort to ever more desperate technological gimmicks such as interactive video walls, holographic reports beamed into the studio, and Wolf Blitzer, just to remain competitive. Apparently we want our news delivered to us by people who share our political leanings. I’m all for the free market, so what’s wrong with that? Nothing, really.

Except that aside from doing a disservice to the many excellent television journalists who have gone before, it is just plain tacky to call yourself a news network and then park yourself in front of a bunch of partisan supporters and openly support one candidate over another, before polls close, during a segment that is billed as live election coverage rather than political commentary or opinion piece.

Really, really tacky.