The model for public school behavior – that is the PS Administrations’ behavior in opposing school vouchures is complicated but can be simplified using the concept of the Cost Maximizing” institution.
This is a concept first developed by Seymour Melman, a very left wing Professor of Industrial Engineering at Columbia, when describing the Pentagon in the 60′s. I was a student of his, enjoyed his teaching and often disagreed with his views.
He pointed out that those in charge get prestige and pay based on the amount of resources under their control. It is not correlated with actual results. This runs counter to the usual economic analyses that economic organizations are cost minimizing (or value maximizing)- in order to compete. There is no direct pressure to minimize costs – only when some externality intervenes (parental/political outrage?) will the system make any changes. Even then it is always drawn back to it’s primary objective. This does not, of course, mean that there are not managers or administrators that do the right thing, or that these people are inherently evil, just that the real rewards are not clearly related to the quality or quantity of results. It gives any such system a tropism or tendency. At best it tends to produce what is called satificing behavior – the minimum needed to satisfy or get by.
This model is oversimplified, and my explanation oversimplifies it further, but it can give a powerful insight into behavior not only of public education, but of health care, and other institutions where span of control and resources used are more important to the managers’ careers than the results delivered to their customers.
Incidentaly, Melman would have a heart attack seeing his arguments used to support this kind of endeavor: his response alway was to nationalize everything – but “this time we will run it correctly”. How this was to be insured was never made clear. He was a compatriot of Barry Commoner, for those old enough to remember him. It always struck me as ironic that he wanted, in effect, to turn the entire economy into many little Pentagons!
