Stossel on America's schools

This week, ABC's John Stossel has been promoting tonight's 20/20 feature on how the American public school system is falling behind. Countries like Belgium and even poorer countries like South Korea and Poland are moving beyond US kids based on an analysis of standardized test scores, and as Stossel points out here, the reason is because of lack of competition. Last night on the Factor, he said:

"The school system is a government monopoly, and government monopolies fail their customers. We have a system where you can't give the good teachers more money and you can't fire the lazy and incompetent people. It's a recipe for mediocrity."

Stossel also pointed to the fact that in New York City over the past two years, out of 80,000 teachers, two - yes, two - were fired for incompetency. (Way to go, unions.) You can't tell me that 79,998 teachers are doing a great job if kids' test scores are falling behind those of Poland.

The aforementioned lack of competition combined with rigid labour market rules are having a negative impact on the education of American kids, despite the fact that governments spend more per pupil in the US than almost anywhere else in the world.

(I wonder how Canadian kids stack up, since we quite often follow the US's lead on education.)

I would love to see more competition in education through increased use of a voucher system. For more info on that, read Milton Friedman's classic "Capitalism and Freedom".