9.  Microchoice: Beyond the “School Choice” Diversion


“Choice” Is Essential

  1. “Choice” as a synonym for free markets ── where consumers are free to choose and vendors are free to create and sell a variety of products and services ── is undeniably essential to cure education’s morbid productivity and festering irrelevance.  Replacing the government owned and commanded economy of schooling with competitive markets for learning is a prerequisite to truly productive change.
  2. However, the need not merely for “choice” but for commercialization of education has been overlooked by most would-be reformers.[*] We need commercial choice and competition in education first to goad technical innovation ── the profit motive is essential to reward the creation and provision of productive technologies.

  3. School Choice: The Inadequate Panacea
  4. “School choice” is the wrong kind of choice needed to reverse educational waste and obsolescence.  While choice and competition are prerequisites to the market systems needed to replace unproductive education systems, school choice does not provide real consumer choice and does not lead to genuine competitive markets for learning.


  5. Bodies, Buses, and Buildings
  6. To have any hope for a genuinely productive restructuring of learning systems, the learner as consumer must be the overriding focus.  No matter how much it speaks of “radical change” and “revolution,” any reform program that is based on “the school as the site of reform” ── as America 2000 states, and as virtually all reform programs assume ── is committed to a lethal error.

  7. The Microchoice Solution
  8. Microchoice is what is really needed.  Rather than try to salvage a bankrupt policy with semantic sidesteps, genuine education restructuring initiatives need to drop or ignore school choice and focus on the personal demands for learning made by individual learners, and on the specific products and services that respond directly to those personal demands.  The economy of microchoice must be independent of geography, architectural shells, and the artifices of attendance; learning via multimedia technology meets these requirements.

  9. The mechanics of a workable microchoice solution include five elements:

  10. 1. Microvouchers ── a financing technology similar to a bank credit or debit card that puts control in the hands of the consumer.

  11. 2. Intellectual “food courts” ── ownership of particular products or services is independent of the ownership of the structure within which they are delivered to the consumer, just as the restaurants or stores in a shopping mall are owned by companies independent of the mall owners.

  12. 3. Attendance-free accounting ── value of any learning experience is determined by outcomes achieved, not by time or place of attendance.

  13. 4. Intellectual “food stamp” funding ── to the extent public funds are provided to consumers via microvouchers, consumer choices are limited, as in the case of food stamps, only by the broad purposes of funding and not to particular vendors.

  14. 5. Market-based regulation ── no uniquely “educational” regulation is needed, but only normal consumer protective health and safety, antifraud, and antitrust regulations applicable to any commercial industry.

  15. The key differences between microvouchers and the kinds of vouchers associated with school choice are the degree and market impact of consumer choice.  With school choice programs, some kind of voucher ── whether called that or not ── is used to transfer government funds from one school to another, as a result of the family choice of institutions.  The voucher is, essentially, a check drawn on the government treasury to pay a school’s “tuition” in whole or part.

  16. In contrast, microvouchers would be specific charges made against a balance in an account under the control of the family or individual student, not of the school.  Technologically, the microvouchers would work the same way as a bank debit card account.  The government would periodically deposit funds representing education and training appropriations in each qualified recipient’s account, presumably at least once every fiscal year.  Like food stamps, the microvouchers could be spent only on eligible products and services ── those that nurture the development of knowledge and skills.

  17. Card account technology brings vastly improved elasticity to supply and demand in the learning market.  Rather than paying a lump sum for tuition once or twice a year, the student can make purchases monthly, weekly, hourly, or even minute-by-minute ── whatever is most appropriate and efficient.  Purchases can be made by the student-consumer either with the mechanical use of a plastic, data-encoded card or by the simple use of an account number.  As with commercial card systems, account security can be protected by some personal identification device such as a simple password or even more sophisticated ID systems using voiceprints, fingerprints, or eyeprints.

  18. The procedures and economics for operating this kind of system are well established everywhere in the world outside academia.  Purchasing an instructional service or material or tool would be the same as using your Visa card to buy tickets to a rock concert, a computer at a computer store, a book at a bookstore, a long-distance phone call, the use of an on-line database, or the opportunity to see a pay-per-view cable TV program.  Consumers could receive account statements monthly or even daily, as is possible with most automated banking systems today.

  19. Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins proposed the term “meme,” as an analogy to “gene,” to represent the most basic elements or quanta of cultural knowledge.[*]  So, if the future of television is pay-per-view, as many analysts believe, then the future of education based on microchoice may well be “pay-per-meme.”

  20. ***

  21. This combination of information and financial technology makes the traditional school building obsolete.  The delivery of specific products and services for learning can be provided in the time, place, and form of the student’s choosing.  Technologically, the student can change “schools” as easily as switching TV channels, or can “attend” several different “schools” at once.

  22. To the extent younger children may still need a place to go for custodial care, that building need not be limited to ownership and administration by one school.  Nor do adults who prefer to go to some kind of center to participate in instruction have to be limited to attending one institution on a given campus.  Instead, buildings become discretionary, and no more than shells to cover an array of independent, competing enterprises available to serve the student-consumer.

  23. A familiar analogy for this arrangement is the shopping mall “food court.”  Like a village bazaar, the food court is a hockey-rink-size dining area surrounded by stalls from which a dozen to a score or more food vendors sell their products.  The food court not only empowers the consumer to choose, in one place, from among her favorite hamburger, or chicken, or Mexican, or Chinese, or whatever fast food restaurant.  She also can mix and match items from several menus, creating a meal from a much wider ── and more nutritionally balanced ── variety of foods than any one vendor would find it efficient to offer.

  24. The foods provided are produced by specialists whose ownership is independent from one another and independent of the ownership of the building that houses the food court.  It’s also irrelevant to the diners and to the restaurant businesses in the food court whether the building is owned by a commercial corporation, a nonprofit organization such as a foundation, or a government agency.  There is no direct economic relationship between the building owner and the consumer ── diners buy food from the restaurants, which in turn pay rent to lease space from the building owner.  Nor are the food vendors limited to selling only in that building ── they usually have their own freestanding stores, and often also sell their wares by home delivery services, through supermarkets, and so forth.

  25. With the ability to deliver mental nourishment telematically, via software and communications, the intellectual food courts that will replace schools don’t need to be housed in buildings at all ── most can be accessed through a portable, personal telecomputer terminal.  To the extent children or older students want to gather under one roof, the use of space and facilities in such a diversified learning center can be far more flexible than in the food court analogy.  Some spaces could be leased for specific purposes such as recreation, or health, or child care services.  Others ── ranging from libraries to theaters to wireless telecomputing networks ── could be provided either by building owners or by third parties as access points to other vendors’ products and services.  With everything paid for ŕ la carte with the student’s own money or microvouchers, the elasticity of the supply of services through the intellectual food court would be vastly greater than that of the traditional building-bound school.


  26. One of the objections to school choice that also will be made to microchoice is that the poor and disadvantaged are incapable of making proper choices for themselves or their own children.  Certainly the existence of a market by itself does not assure that consumers will be well informed or educated.  That is an argument for better consumer education, not for patronizing bureaucracy.

  27. Returning to the food stamp analogy, there is an obvious risk that poor families will choose a nutritionally deficient diet ── and in fact many do.  But the food stamp program does not dictate what recipients can eat.  Instead, the government attempts to communicate better information and education on proper diet to consumers.

  28. ***

  29. Microchoice permits and requires a robustly competitive marketplace for learning.  The microchoice strategy does not demand absolute laissez faire or zero regulation.  The learning market like any other is subject to fraud, abuse, and monopolistic practices that warrant policing by the state ── not to replace the market but to protect it.

  30. There is nothing about the learning business that demands more regulation or special kinds of regulation in contrast to other businesses.  That children are involved does not change this.  Children may in general be more vulnerable to some kinds of harm than most adults.  But many adults are as vulnerable to certain insults as children, maybe even more so.  The issue in regulation is the harm, not the age of the victim.  There is no less justification for laws protecting consumers in the learning market from fraud, theft, health and safety hazards, and anticompetitive business practices than in any other market ── but there is no greater justification either.