Ruth Davidson speech to Adam Smith Institute

This week the ASI hosted the feisty Ruth Davidson to deliver a lecture on lessons from Scotland's founding father of economics - Adam Smith - as she outlined her vision of an alternative to the SNP's statist agenda.

Good Evening Ladies and Gentlemen.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you this evening.

It seems to me that there is a rather long and – if I might say – inglorious tradition of Scottish politicians hanging speeches round the neck of Adam Smith and his legacy.

I’m sure you’re familiar with them, but – for me – there seems to be two main types.

The first type is what I would refer to as the Gordon Brown method.

The Brown method is where you examine Smith’s philosophy from three hundred years ago and demonstrate that, astonishingly, it coincides almost exactly with your own policy agenda here in early 21st century.

Yes, it turns out that Adam Smith was a kind of New Labour prophet, just waiting to be discovered all this time.

Which shows your current policy platform isn’t a tricksy wheeze to triangulate left and right, all the better to scoop up the votes of middle England. Oh no!

It turns out that it has a “golden thread” linking it right back to the heart of the Scottish enlightenment where, before the words “Tony Blair” were ever heard, it was first discovered that liberal economics and social justice could go hand in hand.

The fact that Smith actually came from Kirkcaldy is just the cherry on top of the cake.

I can only say that if I was Gordon Brown looking for some kind of ballast to hold my political beliefs together, I probably wouldn’t have been able to resist either!

But that isn’t the only type of speech of course. There’s a slightly shabbier version of the Brown method which adds a great dollop of parochialism mixed with hubris.

This is the one where Politician B seeks to assert that pretty much everyone has got Adam Smith wrong from Day One. Apart, of course, from the speaker himself.

And why have they got him wrong?

Broadly speaking, continues Politician B, this is because they are not Scottish.

And, in not being Scottish, they therefore fail to understand the true meaning of Adam Smith.

Target number one is, of course, the Adam Smith Institute.

...

(Read the full speech here.)

School choice for Scotland

Nevada has become the first state in the US to enact a law making school choice universal. This is a groundbreaking example for other countries mildly experimenting with school choice. Adopting something similar in the UK context is an especially interesting idea. It works through an education savings account (ESA) in which the state deposits what it would averagely expend educating a child under the state system. Parents can use this fund for everything from school fees to private tuition – the choice offered in educational services being as wide-ranging and high-quality as individuals demand. And the catchment allocation of pupils to schools they don’t want to attend is a thing of the past.

Notably, families can roll over unused funds from year to year, a feature that makes this approach particularly attractive. It is the only choice model to date that puts downward pressure on prices. Parents consider not only the quality of education service they receive, but the cost, since they can save unused funds for future education expenses.

Scotland, with roughly double the population size of Nevada and a completely devolved education system, could technically do something similar. Not least because it's an idea that people of all political ideologies seem to be supportive of (see my previous post), but there is no freedom of movement in the education system – something that is neither fair on those trapped in the postcode of poorer schools nor an efficient way of driving up standards.

Remarkably many UK private schools at the cheaper end of the spectrum are running at a lower cost than state schools. Take a look at a 2011 paper (pdf) by James Croft that breaks down the cost of state and private sector schools, controlling for expenditures particular to each. Given that profit-making schools can achieve better outcomes for less money, the state handing back the cost of a child's 'free' education would enable people to attend a private school who previously couldn't afford it.

41% operate on fee levels less than, or on a par with, the national average per pupil funding in the state-maintained sector. On average, fees are approximately £7,500 annually. Fees at the more accessible end of the spectrum attract a high proportion of first-time buyers of independent education.

The best education policy currently on offer in Scotland is detailed in the Scottish Conservatives' 2016 Holyrood election manifesto (pdf) which promises school vouchers. But realistically, 60% of Scottish people voting next year are planning to support the SNP. There's just no avoiding for now that Scottish politicians will churn out yet more legislation from our unicameral conveyor belt to undermine independent schools’ autonomy and unintentionally halt our education system's advancement.

Take the Education (Scotland) Bill 2015 (pdf), which I have highlighted in a recent post for an unreasoned section that attempts to outlaw inequality in state schools – if it's successfully implemented teachers not registered with Scotland's General Teaching Council will be barred from teaching.This will massively limit what expert teaching Scottish pupils are exposed to. Meanwhile looms the threat that charitable status, and therefore up to 80% tax relief, will be removed from private schools, affecting hundreds of bursaries for disadvantaged children.

Interference with the better-performing independent schools and misdirected moves in state sector has created an environment in which it is impossible for an education market with school choice and low-cost private schools to emerge. Until we take steps in the right direction, the transience of politics will prove to be either a blessing or a curse.

Charter schools and the aspiring classes

There is significant research concluding that the ever-spreading charter schools in the U.S. are markedly improving pupils’ performance. Charter schools are free to attend, open to all children and publicly funded but independently run – the most similar comparison close to home being the Free Schools Programme in England. Since the first charter school law passed in Minnesota in 1991, almost seven thousand have opened with two and a half million children now being educated in a charter school. Previous studies have looked at lottery estimates. These compare how charter applicants perform when admitted to a charter school with how they would have performed had they attended a state school as the randomness ensures there are no systematic differences between those selected and not selected. But these studies do not account for pupils who never applied to a charter school and ended up attending one. Or for pupils attending charter schools for which demand is weak.

A new discussion paper (pdf) by Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Joshua D. Angrist, Peter D. Hull, and Parag A. Pathak does just this by testing the treatment effects of charter school attendance on middle-schoolers that are part of the new takeovers in New Orleans and Boston.

Takeovers see traditional state schools closed and then re-opened as charter schools. Students enrolled in schools designated for closure are eligible to be ‘grandfathered’ into the newly-opened charter schools. This means that they are guaranteed a place.

What this new paper finds is that highly disadvantaged students have experienced substantial gains in their achievement after enrolling in takeovers passively. It was previously believed that urban charter lottery applicants enjoy an unrepresentatively large benefit from charter attendance because they are either highly motivated or uniquely primed to benefit from the education these schools offer. Now we have both estimates from grandfathering and lottery-based research that weigh against this view.

These successes have also prompted similar approaches to be explored in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee despite the controversy caused by the proliferation of charter takeovers in New Orleans, Boston and elsewhere.

Charters Without Lotteries: Testing Takeovers in New Orleans and Boston is one report of what is becoming a substantial compilation of literature on why charter schools are working. They are some of the top-performing schools in the country with a higher percentage of charter school students accepted into a college or university. They are raising the bar of what is possible and should be expected in public education.

Teachers in charter schools are given the freedom to innovate and have more powers to explore the best practices. The schools can adopt themes and focus on specific fields like STEM subjects, performing arts or meeting the special needs, for example, of autistic children.

How charter schools are quickly extending choice to the poorest is exciting. And crucial. It is not widely recognised that choice already exists – but for the wealthiest. The most privileged can not only afford private schools but through the state school catchment system the housing market is the market for schools. An accepted way of boosting real estate is by improving schools as families want to buy houses in areas with good schools. School choice gives the poor a way to access the already existing market.

The disadvantaged are on the rise and benefiting more than ever from state education as a result of what is the best prominent educational movement in the U.S right now.

CMRE's Friedman Lecture on school choice

The Centre for Market Reform of Education’s Inaugural Friedman lecture kicked off with success last week amid a plethora of events marking international school choice week. Sir Julian Le Grand delivered the lecture ‘School choice matures: lessons for policy makers’ as educationalists of all spheres, from teachers to campaigners, posed questions and examined how best to reform education systems and advocate educational freedom.

Increasing the diversification of producers and external pressure on public services, the Social Policy and Economics Professor described, would improve the quality of education. School choice is the crucial cause of both of these. Chaining people to their local schools by means of catchment-allocation alongside the state’s one-size-fits-all approach is failing. People would prefer the pressure of markets - with parents and children choosing the institutions and preferred teaching methods - as opposed to perpetual pressure from politicians imposing targets. 

Public perceptions of profit-making and the belief that school choice is a 'middle class thing’ were distinguished as impediments to the truth that proponents of the freedom to choose have on their side: creating an environment conducive to competition, and thus advancement in schooling provision, requires that options within the reach of the wealthy and middle classes are available to the poorest sectors of society also. Precisely why, Professor Julian Le Grand said, the poor benefit most from school choice.

You can listen to an audio recording of last week’s lecture and find CMRE's detailed publications on school choice, incentivising quality and educational inequality here.

School choice: first evidence to prove long-term benefits

A report released this month by Victor Lavy of CESifo is the first evidence of its kind to prove the long-term social and economic benefits of school choice. Up until now, research conducted has explored life outcomes resulting from varying teachers' quality, schools' quality, classroom sizes and other school programs. Yet to be unravelled was the impact of school choice later on in life and how the effects of different types of post-secondary schooling, varying by quality, persist beyond attainment and standardised test scores. Adult employment, earnings and dependency on welfare are all examined in primary school students offered free school choice in the junction of transition to secondary school to determine which educational interventions best achieve the desirable long-term outcomes.  Remarkably, students who had choice at primary school are 4.7 percentage points more likely to enroll in post secondary schooling, and to complete almost an additional quarter year of college schooling in comparison to controlled students. Further to this success was an estimated 5-7 percentage points increase in average annual earnings among treated students at ages 28-30. This is explained by the improvement in academic outcomes resulting from the school choice program and post-secondary schooling attainment which are highly correlated to labour market earnings. Most surprising in the findings was that school choice led to reductions in health or mental disability rates at age 30 and to a decline in eligibility and recipiency of 3 disability welfare allowances.

Lessons learned from this study - which was conducted in Israel - can be easily applied to other educational settings due to different countries having very comparable and similar high-stakes exit exams. The school choice program also has similar features to related programs in the US, in Europe and in other OECD countries. As a result, variants of this school choice program have the potential to be implemented in developed countries across the world.

A great advantage of this study is that it is also the first of its kind to present evidence that can easily be acted upon directly via policy. Whereas most related studies have looked at long-term outcomes of measures not easily manipulated by policy like teachers' and schools' quality.

All the evidence now suggests that allowing children and their parents to choose freely at age 13 which secondary school they will attend, not only improves sharply their high school outcomes six years later, but also influences their path to post-secondary schooling, enhances their earnings over a decade and a half later and reduces their dependency on the public welfare system. These results are important because the school choice experiment targeted a disadvantaged population in some of the more deprived parts of Tel Aviv. This is now the most potent contribution of late to the critical question surrounding what educational interventions are conducive to the best possible life outcomes. Now the empirical evidence provided by the paper creates a fuller picture of the individual and social returns from these interventions, and will equip educators and governments with the information required to make the most informed decisions as to which educational programs constitute the most beneficial use of limited school resources.

With increasingly prominent advocates of free school choice and more evidence exhibiting its merits, we can hope to see it embodied in policy in the near future. Standing in the way, unfortunately,  are politicians and educationalists with an unfaltering dedication to the taxpayer-funded state-monopoly of learning. Opponents of school choice are not home with freedom. For if you had the freedom to choose how to be educated, you would not choose their way.