Long before the No Child Left Behind federal education policy was en-acted, analysts realized that American education was in trouble. The public education system has done such a poor job of teaching basic skills that nearly half of Americans, according to the North Carolina Literacy Research Council, read and calculate at fifth-grade levels, at best.

U.S. students lag the developed world in scientific and factual knowledge, as results from the Third International Mathematics and Science Studies have repeatedly shown.

Statistics measuring low graduation rates, achievement gaps between white students and Asian students vs. black students and Hispanic students, and the breakdown of school discipline speak volumes about the widespread failure of public education. No Child Left Behind signals an increased urgency for reform. And if money were the answer, private and home schools should not consistently outperform their public counterparts. But questions remain about how exactly to attain the high standards that federal regulators envision.

In Market Education: The Unknown History, Andrew Coulson, senior education policy fellow at the Mackinac Center in Midland, Mich. asks “What Makes Schools Work?” On the assumption that if we know what makes schools work, we can avoid mistakes, he offers glimpses of history that illustrate both success and failure. From eighth-century Persia to 21st century America, his answer includes five key elements of successful schools.

Parents make schools work

Who should make the big decisions about how a child is educated? According to Coulson, “five interrelated traits… have characterized every consistently successful school system for the last two and a half thousand years.” The interrelated traits that make schools work, he says, are choice and financial responsibility for parents, plus freedom, competition, and the profit motive for schools — a true free market in education. Parents are the hinge in the system.

“Parental essentials” top the list for creating schools that work instead of schools that fail. “Many people — good people —are simply not comfortable with the idea of profit-making schools, or the elimination of oversight of government education…And here’s the rub: It just so happens that the way to reach those goals, the way to finally get what we want from our schools, is at odds with both our current approach to schooling and our most dearly held notions about how schools should work.”

But parents hold many goals in common for their children. Knowledge, skills, and values are the common goals that parents typically put at the top of their concerns for schools, whether they favor a highly structured environment or a “free atmosphere that lets students direct their own learning experiences.”

Coulson confirms what was suggested by the performance of the Charlotte Children’s Scholarship Fund, a private voucher program formerly operating under the direction of the North Carolina Education Alliance. Poor or disadvantaged parents are just as capable of making educational choices as are wealthy ones.

A majority of parents participating in the Charlotte program in 2002 indicated that they would like to continue in private schools if possible. According to one parent, ”I have referred several families to your program.” Another, whose income exceeded the qualifying limit, stated in the parent survey that they were choosing to continue in private school anyway, since they were ”better able to provide for it now.”

According to Coulson, “study after study has confirmed that parents who have the opportunity to choose their children’s schools base their decisions on sound academic, discipline-related, and moral grounds.” But financial responsibility is also key, Coulson says.

Financial responsibility

Without assuming responsibility for the cost of their children’s education, Coulson believes that parents cannot hold on to the freedoms necessary to make schools work.

Sheldon Richman, editor of Ideas on Liberty at the Foundation for Economic Education, and author of Separating School and State: How to Liberate America’s Families, emphasized the critical link between financial responsibility parent-directed outcomes. ”If the state is the source of funding, whether through taxes or vouchers, government is not going to be able to resist defining what is education,” Richman said in a recent interview. “Once you cede that, the game’s over,” he says.

Coulson agrees, and notes that ”even private schools are not immune to the effects of outside financing.” These include regulations concerning salaries, curriculum, and facilities, to name a possible few.

Freedom and learning

Candace Allen is a former social studies teacher, recipient of the Colorado Enterprising Teacher of the Year Award (1989), a Milken Family Foundation National Educator Awards recipient (1993), and author of numerous articles on economics and education. In a short piece titled ”Teachers Can’t See What System Does To Them,” Allen comments on a question she was led to ask herself daily: “If we were working directly for parents, would they pay [me] today?” It caused her to shift her thinking and behavior, “acting and teaching as if she were in a free-market environment.”

Allen, Richman, Coulson, New York State Teacher Of the Year John Taylor Gatto, and educator-author Michael Strong all emphasize the role of choice in education markets. Among the ideas that free-market education advocates reject as antichoice is compulsory education. Compulsory attendance laws assume that we must prevent parents from shirking their responsibilities. Otherwise, the “rebellious, difficult-to-educate child,” will remain ignorant and illiterate, the theory goes.

In Separating School and State, Richman documents extraordinarily high literacy prior to mandatory schooling. In 1828, The Journal of Education stated that for a population of 12 million, there were 600 different newspapers and periodic journals in production. Thomas Paine’s pamphlets, and Walter Scott’s and James Fenimore Cooper’s novels enjoyed sales in “the equivalent of tens of millions of copies.” According to the Journal, “There is no country where the means of intelligence are so generally enjoyed by all ranks and where knowledge is so generally diffused among the lower orders of the community, as in our own.”

Competition, co-ops, and profit

Age is just another dimension of choice, say Richman, Allen, and Gatto. It is so self-evidently a good idea that making it compulsory “is no more necessary than making commerce compulsory,” Richman says. What about the “rebellious, difficult-to-educate child?” As Coulson says in “What Makes Schools Work?” “the same freedom that allows some schools to reject such students allows others to cater to their special needs.”

Competition forces teachers and principles to offer the kinds of services people want, Coulson says. If parents want phonetic reading, children will be taught phonics. By making schools eke out the most for every dollar with every student, competition also keeps costs low and quality high.

Education historian Lawrence Cremin noted that the 89 signers of either the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or both, were products of “provincial education in all its richness and diversity.” This includes apprenticeships, co-ops, tutorials, self-education, colleges, parents, and various schools.

Coulson argues that profit is the final necessary ingredient, if only because it compels growth and progress in schools, just as in industries. Although private schools perform much better than public schools, nonprofit status allows them to stagnate. Without profit there is less incentive to innovate. Reduced ability to attract and pay excellent teachers may be holding back even the best schools in this category.

Michael Strong, in From School Choice to A Better World, quotes Aristotle on choices: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”

Dr. Karen Palasek is an assistant editor of Carolina Journal.