Understanding Private Sector Participation in Public Sector Education - Example

Student Name: Course Name: Tutor: Date: Introduction Secondary and elementary educational schemes in the United States require radical restructuring. Decaying facilities and buildings, and wobbly labor relations that do not meet educational requirements are some of the main issues undermining public schools. There is an expanding civic concern on the superiority of education grounded on the prevalent view that educational standards have fallen and several public schools are not meeting the intellectual requirements. This restructuring can be accomplished through privatizing major segments of the educational system through enabling the private industry to provide a variety of learning opportunities and provide efficient competition to public schools. Privatization education refers to transfer of educational activities, responsibilities, and assets from public or government organizations or institutions to private agencies or individuals. The most practicable way to execute such transfer from government to private enterprise is to ratify a voucher system in every state that allows parents to freely choose the schools that their children attend. The voucher should be widespread, accessible to every parent, and sufficient to cover costs of high quality education. Conditions that meddle with the liberty of the private enterprises to explore, to innovate, and to explore should not be attached to vouchers. Privatizing education through voucher programs Educational systems in the United States have not demonstrated any changes for a long period. Students are taught in a similar way they were taught twenty years ago. The introduction of computers has improved the situation, but not essentially. Computers have been added to public schools, but they are not being utilized in an innovative and imaginative way. Therefore, the sole way to make major improvements in the current educational system is by privatization to the extent at which a considerable portion of every education service is provided to students by private enterprises. The private learning institutions that 10% of students presently attend comprise of a small number of elite schools serving a small population at high price and several parochial nonprofit schools, which are able to compete with public schools through charging low amount of fees, which is made possible by dedicated services from teachers and subsidies from sponsoring institutions. These private institutions offer a quality education for a little portion of students, but they are not in a situation to bring about innovative changes. As a result, there is a need for a more vigorous and much larger private enterprise scheme. This can be made through vouchers, which can act as a transition from a government system to a market system. Vouchers are capable of promoting swift privatization if they create a great demand for private schools to make up a valid incentive for the entrepreneurs to enter into the industry. An education voucher is a certificate granted by the government which parents are able to apply toward tuition in a private school other than in the government school to which their kids are assigned (Ball, 150). Under the non-voucher system of education, people who make payments for private teaching are also taxed for government schools and therefore fund both private and public education simultaneously. Vouchers are meant to enable people to expend their taxes toward education of their preference without utilizing direct deduction or tax credit. This requires the vouchers to be universal and available to all parents who are entitled to enroll students to public schools. According to Weil (30), the voucher should also be adequate to cover up the costs of profit making school providing a superior education. If this is accomplished, a considerable number of parents will be able and willing to supplement vouchers so that their children can get superior education. For this to happen, it is fundamental that no conditions should be attached to acceptance of vouchers that impede the liberty of the private enterprises to explore, to innovate and to experiment. Privatization of education will generate new and highly profitable and active private industry that will offer an actual opportunity for several talented individuals who are presently hindered from entering several professions by the terrible condition of the public schools. In order to attain a majority of the public to support a substantial and universal voucher, it should be straightforward and simple so that it can be logical to voters. The voucher should guarantee that it will not add to tax burden in any manner but will relatively lessen net government expenditure on education. In Russia, the education system is under pressure to restructuring because of reduction in federal financing and the requirement to modernize curriculum content and learning methods in public and schools. Significant indications of attempts to adjust the shifting requirements of students and parents for education are changes in graduations and admissions in several fields of specialization, an expansion in the number of private schools and colleges that offer training in the most required educational areas. The education system has reacted to the reduced federal financing by expanding extra budgetary and local budget sources. However, the public education sector is continuing with suffering from lack of a clearly defined responsibility between government agencies and the private enterprises and lack of accountability in use and allocation of public funding. According to Kaplan & Eklof, (235), restructuring of education system in Russia has taken place through educational vouchers and standardized computer graded test which have been introduced so as to make education more accessible, funding more effective and lessen admission of pupils to public schools. The voucher system has failed and therefore privatization of education systems is being viewed as a fundamental procedure that must be formalized and legalized. Competition through education voucher programs Education voucher system encourages competition between both private and public schools and helps in improvement of education quality to satisfy the parent’s needs of school choice. Kishan (95) argues that the original intention of voucher system was the expansion of the rights of parents to choose the establishment of competition into government schools and ensure educational equality through financial aid to children from poor families. The issuing of vouchers has altered the conventional direct funding of schools by the government to support education activities. Through issuance of vouchers has led to fierce competition between schools and the competition is appropriate for improving the superiority of education. In this manner, private schools and public schools must compete in order to offer better and quality educational services to satisfy the parental needs of school of choice. School voucher scheme acts as a competition mechanism, stimulates diversification of school types, expands flexibility of school system, curbs bureaucratic growth in the education system, and fosters education innovation power. Education privatization and free market competition Education is greatly paid for and almost wholly administered by the nonprofit institutions or governmental bodies. This condition has developed steadily and has been taken for granted to the extent that little overt attention is not being directed to the rationale for special treatment of learning even in nations that are principally free enterprise in philosophy and organization. The consequence has been a haphazard expansion of government responsibility. The task allotted to the government in any specific area is determined by the principles acknowledged for organization of the society in general. The society takes the liberty of the individual or the family, as its definitive goal, and tries to extend this goal through relying mainly on deliberate exchange between persons for the institution of economic activities (John, 43). In free private enterprises exchange market, the primary role of the government is to conserve the law of the game through enforcing contracts, sustaining free markets, and preventing coercion. Apart from this, government involvement should be validated under three main grounds: First, the natural monopoly or identical market imperfection that makes competition effective and consequently thorough deliberate exchange impossible. Secondly, is the subsistence of considerable neighborhood effects, implying that the act of a single individual imposes considerable costs on other people for which is not practicable to make that individual recompense them a condition that renders voluntary exchange unfeasible. The third ground emerges from a uncertainty in the definitive goal other than the complexity of accomplishing it by deliberate exchange, known as the paternalistic concern for kids of other negligent individuals. Provision of education vouchers by the government make the education a free economy by providing parents with the opportunity to choose the forms of schools their children attend. Burch(93) argues that given that parents can enroll their children to public schools without any special payment , a little number will or can enroll them to other schools, unless these schools are also subsidize. Parochial schools are disadvantaged by not obtaining government funds directed to education, but they gain the recompensing advantage since they are operated by organizations that are ready to finance them and can raise finances to do so, while there are few sources of funds for schools. Education vouchers are availed to the parents in spite of the schools they enroll their children, provided that the schools are able to meet the stated minimum standards. Parents are able to directly express their opinions about schools, by transferring their children from one school to another. Generally, parents can take this move by altering their places of dwelling. Other parents can express their opinions via cumbrous political channels. To some extent, a more degree of liberty to make school choices can be made available in governmentally administered schemes, but it is difficult to execute it in the view of the commitment to offer every student with a place. The competitive private schools are likely to be more effective in fulfilling the needs of the parents than nationalized schools. The ultimate consequence hence will be less other than more education that is parochial. Benefits of privatized education to vulnerable groups Privatized scheme of education has results that are more positive for children from poor families because it equalizes the disbursement of educational outcomes and educational quality among parents with diverse incomes. In addition, extension of voucher to private education has few and only negligible negative consequences. This is because the probable downsides of privatization are strongly connected to harmful distributional impacts, namely, harm to public education system and the windfall benefits to upper and middle class groups. The existing voucher systems have led to any significant effect on public schooling but have had a positive result since they have expanded competition. The negative distributive impacts can be tackled by restricting vouchers to parents who have low income but this stipulation is conflicting with universal claims of privatization. Restricting vouchers to low income parents limits choice, which disagree with the choice standard for vouchers. The limitation of voucher to low income parents prevent the probability that a free market in schooling for every family will result to more educational inequality than a government education system. When the main subject is the improvement of education to children from low-income families, privatization by vouchers possesses both negative and positive aspects. The positive aspect is that it attracts attention to poor educational quality in low-income regions and can highly benefit more motivated families. If a voucher scheme is limited to poor children, they can benefit though not fundamentally, since access to private schools would increase their test scores because private education offers pupils from poor families an improved self-perception but not a lot of high-test scores. The aim of such voucher scheme is to alleviate poverty, but not to privatize education and raise school choice. The negative aspect is that such vouchers plan distracts attention from larger investments that the societies require to enable children from low income families overcome the impacts of poverty on education achievement. Efficiency of private enterprises in operating education systems Private companies are capable of achieving greater efficiencies and economies of scale in operation of government schools and then allocate the finances to attained from these benefits to improve learning and teaching. Privatizing of government education services liberates schools from restraints of public bureaucracy and therefore enables them to become more innovative. According to Murphy, education vouchers may result to an increase in the range of schools in a society, which when merged with offering parents with the chance to make choices on the most suitable schools for their kids implies that schools are forced to make improvements on the quality of education services they offer or risk losing children. In addition, schools that are not performing well leads to reduced enrollment of students and are therefore closed down and this increases the general quality of government education in the society (12). On the contrary, private enterprises running public schools may make decisions based on expanding profits as contested to improving learning and teaching. Additionally, to get cost savings, the private enterprises can reduce teaching staff or employ cheaper personnel who are not fully qualified. There is also a perception that disbursement of taxpayer finances top private enterprises is an abuse of public finances. Allowing private enterprises to offer education services reduces the ability of the schools to pass on civic democracy and values and replaces them with a system that is focused on personal needs whereby teaching is a product while parents are the consumers. Political affiliation and education privatization Government funded education vouchers assure to improve consumer preference while still offering public funding needed for parents to adequately invest in education of their children. However politically and in practice, the option that vouchers grant can imply a lot of issues, including eradicating neighborhood residency as a stipulation for attending public schools to permitting groups of teachers and parents to establish their individual schools, for instance charter schools in the US. This can imply an educational scheme that is partly publicly financed but privately operated and owned without any public regulation. Privately managed schools are inherently more cost effective and more effective than public schools. Privatized education scheme is also more efficient than government education in improving social mobility of students form low-income backgrounds and social costs of privatizing public educational systems are minimal (Levin, 50). When private education is not both more cost effective and more effective than government education, granting vouchers to private schools which are unregulated may lead to an increase in competition in false symbols or claims of success but would not reduce costs, increase quality and introduce dynamic innovation. Additionally, if the implication of efficiency is redefined to involve production of outputs other than schooling and not in public charter, private schools would be more efficient than government schools and would increase the private welfare of some families but may not essential improve public good. For instance, in the United States, private schools provide religious education but this is not legalized in public schools. Religious teaching for their kids is regarded as a gain by some parents. Yet the utilization of tax finances for religious teaching could be converse to political ideologies of the enormous majority of national society and may expand the degree of conflict over society goals. Inclusion of private education into voucher plans can expend choice options, even with evenly effective private and public schools. This is possible if private schools can provide outputs that government schools cannot, like religious teaching. Conclusion Privatization of education results to improvements in the quality of educational services delivered to students. Private enterprises have the ability to achieve greater economies of scales and efficiencies in operation of public schools and then distribute the funds generated from these gains to improve teaching and learning. Privatizing public education services flees schools from constraints of public bureaucracy and thus enables them to become more innovative. Education vouchers give parents the opportunity to choose the types of school to enroll their children and this makes schools to be more competitive in delivering quality education, which meets the needs of the parents. Works cited Ball, Stephen. Education: Understanding private sector participation in public sector education. London: Routledge, 2007. Burch, Patricia. Hidden Markets: The New Education Privatization. New York: Routledge, 2009. Weil, Danny. School vouchers and privatization: a reference handbook. New York; John Wiley and Sons, 2002. John, Edward. Hidden markets: the new education privatization. Boston: Springer Publishers, 2006. Kishan, Ramnath. Privatization of education. London: sage, 2008. Murphy, Joseph. Pathways to privatization in education. New Jersey: Norwood, 2002. Levin, Henry. Education privatization: causes, consequences and planning. New York: Springer, 2002. Kaplan, Vera, & Eklof, Ben. Educational reform in post-soviet Russia: legacies and prospects. 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