Economic segregation in public schools unacceptable

Prior to finding my true calling as a political science major, I had the fortunate and unfortunate opportunity to study finance and economics for three years. In those years of numbers and theories, very little stood out as specifically significant, but one theory did.

He called it the Law of Absolute Advantage, meaning that one country is simply better suited to produce one product than another, and vice versa. The advantage was a result of the country's available resources.

We can see this easily in certain world markets. The nations of Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries have an advantage in oil production, because they own almost all of it. Brazil has an advantage in coffee production, among other things, because of its climate. For years the United States has held its advantage in its workforce and its technology.

When we were producing labor-intensive products in the early stages of the industrial revolution, the American worker was not required to be well-educated. In fact, it was probably better that they were not, given the mind-numbing nature of factory work. The American workforce needed to be plentiful and cheap.

As time wore on, and as advances in technology changed the American workplace, the workforce grew with the market for a number of years. But the American workforce started to lag behind our technological advantage.

Our advantage has become increasingly technological during the last two decades. We no longer manufacture like we once did, instead sending the menial labor jobs to countries with a workforce willing to work a 14-hour shift for $3 a day.

Adam Smith would see this as the natural order of a free market, with one catch: while we have sent our manufacturing jobs to the Third World, we have not educated the next generation of the American workforce sufficiently to succeed in a market dominated by technology.

Education has always been revered in this country. One of the ways average Americans were supposed to attain the "American dream" was through education; this is one of the reasons we had the best public schools in the world for so many years.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. When the U.S. Supreme Court desegregated the public school system, it was not because segregation itself was unconstitutional, but rather that the separate schools were not equal.

That was the problem -- the inequality of the schools. So we desegregated along race lines and proceeded to segregate along economic ones.

The failure of the American educational system is not a lack of national standards, but rather that the system is unequal. Think about it: if the schools are, as the court says they must be, equal from Mt. Lebanon, Pa., to Harlem, N.Y., then the national standards already exist.

Unfortunately, as most people can attest, there is nothing equal about the public schools in this country.

I grew up in State College, an affluent town with an outstanding public school. Within an hour drive from here I can show you a half-dozen schools that would love to be equal to State College, but aren't.

There is a potential solution to this, and we don't have to look any further than Adam Smith -- a free-market school system.

This is commonly referred to as school choice, but it also resembles a free-market global economy, as it has several nations (schools), consumers (students), and no restrictions on trade.

With school choice, students can flow from one district to the other, based on the school's reputation.

Funding would be based primarily on enrollment, creating competition among schools. Those that excel will attract more students, leading to better funding, with which they can hire better teachers, resulting in better-educated students.

We can't make the schools equal, but at least we can offer an equal opportunity to pursue the best education possible.

School choice is a good idea, and maybe, just maybe, it will improve education in this country -- without resorting to another culturally biased, poorly designed and administered standardized test that only determines adequacy instead of striving for excellence.