Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

Some 40 years ago, not long after I attended the Cambridge Grammar School for Boys for a year, many counties in England ended the distinction between academic and vocational government secondary schools. The result was that more of the academic students went to private schools instead, schools which are frighteningly expensive (on the order of 15,000 pounds per year for a boarding school, and day primary schools that I looked at in Oxford were about that, too).

In effect, the government decided to get out of the business of providing academic secondary education, a libertarian step. That’s ironic, though, because it would have made more sense to keep the academic schools and privatize the vocational ones. Smart kids are more likely to have parents who can judge when the government school is doing a bad job and complain, or who will remedy its deficiences. Ordinary kids are more likely to have parents who can tell whether school A is better than school B from their advertizing, but can’t tell whether a monopoly is doing well or poorly.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 at 6:14 am and is filed under Economics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.