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| Letters: From Our Readers |
Free-Market Dynamics
11/01/2006
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Dear Editor:
In your September article “Educational Entrepreneurs” (September 2006)
, I am listed as founder of Girls Preparatory School in Manhattan. While
nothing would make me prouder, I am, in fact, one of many. The effort was
actually started by my friends Bryan Lawrence, Eric Grannis and Miriam Lewis
Raccah, who recruited me and the rest of the founding board members to help get
the school off the ground.
 On another note, the article concludes that
the wide charter school effort could be in vain because “based on test scores,
charter schools’ average performance is no higher than that of public schools,”
and some charter schools end up closing. The problem with this analysis is
two-fold:
First, state-run schools in the study received nearly twice as much
government funding as the charter schools. New York Times columnist John Tierney
notes that if GM bragged that its $40,000 cars ran as well as Toyota’s $25,000
cars, people would find it ludicrous. Yet the educational establishment sees
validation from the fact that charter schools can’t do better than match their
schools at half the cost. Imagine what the results would be if charter schools
received equivalent funding.
Of course, parity is not the goal. It is
more important to realize that even if the average charter school is only
equivalent to the average state-run school, over time, charter schools will be
better, because the worst charter schools are constantly being closed and the
most excellent ones are growing and being replicated. This free-market dynamic
is absent for most stagnant inner-city school systems.
Airline
deregulation spawned the uncomfortable People’s Express and luxurious Jet Blue,
but market competition ensured that only one survived. As a result, someone who
works as a clerk at Costco today can afford to fly comfortably from New York to
Los Angeles for a holiday—something that was unthinkable in the pre-deregulation
1970s.
Great education for children is surely more important than a better
air travel experience, but the defense of an antiquated, monopoly system is
vigorous.
Boykin Curry, New York
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