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Markets ought not be judged by what they produce for winners, but on their outcomes for the losers

Competition makes losers as well as winners. This fact makes a simple rule for judging when it is useful to society and when it is dangerous. Can we afford to look after the losers? They are not going to vanish. From about 1979 to 2008, policymakers across the western world were agreed that there were hardly any problems that could not be solved by organising some kind of market, from which the magic of competition would produce much better results than planned cooperation ever could. The last 10 years has been a time for unlearning all those lessons and there are few places where this is more obvious than in education.

The introduction of the academy system was among other things an attempt to make central planning impossible. The market, and the self-interest of parents, would ensure that good schools flourished and bad ones – well, they would disappear, perhaps by osmosis. Yet local authorities still have a statutory duty to ensure that every child has a school place – and the political imperative to avoid discontent among parents who vote – even while the means to do so have largely vanished now that two thirds of secondary schools are academies which they do not control. One result is last week’s report that the country is facing a shortfall of more than 100,000 secondary school places over the next five years, as a demographic bulge pushes upwards through the school system.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2NFKhnz