Building a Competitive Education Industry
A Weekly Column by Myron Lieberman

Several years ago, I would meet occasionally with Chistopher Cerf, an attorney who directed the Edison Schools' operations from a Washington law office. Although Cerf's concern about the NEA/AFT opposition was evident, I said that if I were in his position, and speaking solely from a business standpoint, I would try to cut a deal with the NEA/AFT. The quid pro quo would be Edison's agreeing to have the NEA/AFT represent Edison teachers in exchange for union acceptance of virtually any arrangements that school management wished to adopt.

This kind of a deal was foreshadowed in the automobile industry, especially at the Saturn plant in Tennessee. General Motors agreed before the workers at Saturn could express their wishes that the United Auto Workers would represent the Saturn employees, and Saturn management would get a relatively free hand in operating the plant in return. After all, the union's interest is primarily in its cash flow; if that can be assured, it is very hospitable to management. It wasn't the first time that management and unions had teamed up to disadvantage employees represented by the unions, and it was not to be the last. From a business point of view, the same arrangement would seem to be the solution in the ongoing battles between Edison and NEA/AFT locals. Each party achieves its main objective; as long as the teacher union doesn't insist upon an excessive price for cutting a deal, the outcome seems to be virtually foreordained.

I have never been very optimistic about the reform possibilities of charter schools; the possibility that charter schools, especially the ones operated by companies such as Edison, would reach agreement with the NEA/AFT only added to my pessimism concerning their reform possibilities. But the significance of charter school/union cooperation points to an even more serious problem concerning the relationships between public and private schools.

What will happen if and when the NEA/AFT realize that their efforts to limit private schools will not be very successful? In my opinion, the most likely outcome is that they will try to do what public and private institutions of higher education are already doing, to wit, joining together to get more money for both from government. Such an interest group would be very difficult to oppose successfully - consider how little effective opposition there is now to the public school lobby on its own.

Much as I fear this outcome, I don't claim to know what, if anything, can be done about it at this time. I will say, however, that the problems of achieving reform in K-12 education are just a warmup to the larger problem of achieving reform in higher education. Grade inflation, wacky feminism, cheating on examinations, lower standards - you name the educational problem and it is highly probable that it originated in higher education. This is especially true of the anti-entrepreneurial and anti-market attitudes that are so pervasive among our young people.

Although many "private" ones are very adept at getting money from the government, about 80 percent of college enrollments are in publicly supported institutions, What is seldom noticed are the effects of having our young people growing up in the anti-market environment of tax-supported and nonprofit institutions. As Lieberman's law has it, the more important something is in education, the less the American people know about it. Institutions of higher education are supposedly research institutions, but the research is seldom critical of higher education per se.