Public education helps the poor?

A user whose name I've forgotten, unfortunately, was a supporter of public schooling. He claimed that even in the most favorable of circumstances, a large minority would be unable to afford schooling if a public option wasn't available. This is an unjustified claim.

The purpose of this video is to explain why and to outline some of the considerations that suggest that private schooling would be affordable to low-income families in the absence of public schooling. The main mistake this user made was that they didn't take into account that if public schools ceased to exist, the market for education would look completely different, and the options available to low-income families would also be very different because of that.

So first of all, all families would get to keep the part of their earnings that are currently extorted from them to pay for public education. This would mean that when a parent paid for private tuition for their kid, they'd no longer be paying for education twice over, as is the case with the current system. So immediately, the simple absence of taxes extracted for the funding of public schools would mean that more people would be able to afford private schools.

Incidentally, because public education includes colleges and universities, this is especially relevant to low-income families. These families are less likely to send their kids to college or university, which means that the taxes that currently subsidize these institutions are a disproportionately high cost for the poor. They have to pay the tax anyway but don't use the service it pays for. But getting to keep the money currently extorted to fund public education is just, it's a help but it's only a small help, really.

Two, in the absence of public schools, there will be an enormous increase in the number of private schools. The higher density of private schools would mean that parents would have an increased choice of where to send their kids in their immediate locality. They wouldn't have to put up with a single nearby school and its high fees just because the next one is too far away from where the parents could find work.

The increased density of private schools would greatly increase competition between them. Rival schools would try to under-bid each other to attract customers, at the same time as trying to out-compete each other in quality. So, in the absence of public schools, the increased competition between private schools would lead to falling fees and increasing quality.

Currently, sorry, number three: currently, because the customers of private schools are paying for public education they don't use, private schools tend to attract more wealthy parents. These parents are willing and able to pay twice over because the private schools are so superior to the public ones; it seems worth it for them. So currently, private schools will tend to cater to this kind of customer, offering very high-quality education. They'll tend to be better equipped, have smaller class sizes, etc.

Currently, there's very little demand for budget private education—that is, private schools that offer a lower quality of education, perhaps on a par with public schools. This is because parents who are not willing or able to buy high-quality education for their kids are already being forced to pay for public schools, and you're not going to pay extra to send your kids to a private school that's just as good as a public school.

In the absence of public schools, this would change. Private schools would offer a range of different educations, not only the deluxe and super deluxe versions that we're familiar with, but also the regular, the budget, and even basic varieties. The budget options would certainly be cheaper than the current private school fees are. We don't know exactly what the fees for these cheaper varieties would be, but looking at the examples of deregulated schools in developing nations, it's likely that the market would provide an education option suitable for every income bracket, the lowest fees being affordable even for the lowest income families.

Four, if in conjunction with the abolition of public education, the terms under which education can be offered were no longer dictated by the state, the rate of improvement in the education levels available to all, including the poor, would multiply again. Relief from having to conform to arbitrary national standards would allow teachers to compete with each other in a new way. They'd be free to adopt widely varying teaching models.

The assumption that you need a teacher, a classroom, and a bunch of desks could easily be overturned by radical innovation, especially considering the technological progress that has occurred since this archaic model was first conceived. In a process similar to natural selection, the teaching models that proved successful would spread. It seems likely that certain models would be more suitable to certain children, so education institutions would likely specialize to a far greater degree than they do now, further enhancing their efficiency.

Granting teachers the ability to teach on their own terms would quickly lead to huge gains in efficiency and quality of education for all.

Five, public schools currently are currently burdened by a massive and costly bureaucratic layer. I believe this is the primary reason that public education in the U.S. costs about twice as much per child as private education does. Public education institutions whose funding doesn't depend on providing a cost-effective service are very much more likely to develop a wasteful and unnecessary bureaucracy than are the private institutes, which are responsive to market forces and incentivized very strongly to eliminate unnecessary costs.

So for all the reasons mentioned above, it's far from clear that in the absence of public education, a large minority would be unable to afford a good education for their children. In fact, I believe that the opposite is true: a free market in education would greatly benefit the vast majority, including the poor.