http://stevehargadon.blogspot.com/2006/03/more-on-ed-tech-in-rebuilding-gulf.html
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OK, so as a liberal arts major who is also a geek, it is hard for me to watch how much we spend on computers, and then how quickly we discover we have to spend it again to keep current… There are no simple answers, but I would imagine that many schools and districts have already looked back and wondered if they could have used some of that money for other things.
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If I can interject a little Austrian-economic Libertarian (I.e., classical liberalism) thinking, then I’d say that State Skooling suffers from the fatal flaw of all gummamint thinking.
They are, or have, THE solution. Only THEY can have the right ideas. THEY are the intelligentsia looking out for the befuddled masses.
Austrian economic thinking points out that only economic man struggling to satisfy his fellow man has the benefit of the marketplace to learn what people do and do not want. They don’t have that competitive marketplace to serve as a check on their ideas.
From my view, they have no competition to:
(1) assess if the money they are spending makes sense.
Envision that there were two competing schools. They are identical in all respects except one. One comes with all the latest and greatest computing. One come with the “old” LTSP model with old surplus hardware networked to one powerful server. Now clearly the “new” school would have to charge more for all that new hardware. Would the parents pay the difference to have their children go to the “new” school or would they e satisfied with the “old” school. There is no place to test if the extra money is well spent.
(2) in the “public school” funding model, the taxpayers don’t get a choice.
I am saddened by the implicit assumption that the school gets to use money for alternatives. It’s never given back to the poor taxpayer. Just keep using it and using it. Like a duck being fatten for pattefoigras. Just keep stuffing as much money as posible into the “education factory”. Without the discipline of the marketplace to tell a school administrator that they have reach the end of the marginal utility curve, how does a school administrator knwo when they have spent to much? When they have spent 200% of their budget and then whine in the press that there is never enough money. For the children.
When the taxpayers wake up and say we don’t want, or Intelligent Designer forbid, we can’t, to pay anymore, they will get the cold ice water bath of a “pair of dimes” (paradigm) shift.
The principles of the new paradigm will be: (1) Publik skools fail because there is no marketplace to discipline them. Marketplaces satisfy our needs by the greedy self-interest of providers. The ineffective or inefficient fail. We need failure so that we can fine tune how much resource is applied to the various human needs. (2) People want their children educated to suceed. He who has the gold makes the rules. The marketplace empowers the buyer to satisfy their various needs. Education is just one of those needs. (3) Government (gummamint) is the worst way to provide any social service. It really has only one role to protect us from violence and fraud. Citizens need to restrain it to only those functions. Gummamint running education is a conflict of interest; educated citizens are needed to restrict it to its proper role.
Can’t happen fast enough if we are as a nation to survive.
Posted by reinkefj 
Reinke Faces Life 