Civitas

The reasoning goes like this. The real challenge is to create equal outcomes. Schools, as Toynbee puts it, are only remedial. In fact, successful schools create unequal outcomes. Consequently, because they put the attainment of equal outcomes above all other considerations, egalitarians find themselves opposed to effective schools.

The second group of Labour rebels has a more pragmatic focus on social solidarity. They worry that determined parents will monopolise the good schools and that less capable parents will find their children left behind in sink schools. Equal outcomes are not the top priority. Rather, step-by-step progress towards higher education standards for all is the aim. Consequently, good schools are not the problem. The issue is, how to make sure no one is left behind as we improve bad schools. This concern with social solidarity leaves its adherents open to rational persuasion, whereas the demands of the equalizers are incompatible with a free society and should be confronted and defeated.

But wait, are egalitarians really that bad? Are they not optimistic about human potential? Don’t they also want the best for everyone? If so, why the hostility to people who are already successful – the hated pushy parents? It’s because the idealism of equalizers only extends to potential people – to what they might become - not to actual people as they really are today. Typically egalitarians often reveal a strong contempt for people as they are. George Bernard Shaw, for example, one of the early exponents of equalization said in The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism that ‘For my part I hate the poor and look forward eagerly to their extermination. I pity the rich a little, but I am equally bent on their extermination’. All classes including the working classes had ‘no right to live: I should despair if I did not know that they will all die presently, and that there is no need on earth why they should be replaced by people like themselves.’

How could Mr Blair isolate and defeat the equalizers? Selection of pupils is the key and here we can learn from American experience in the 1980s. The issue for Americans was race rather than class, but the basic problem was the same: how could policy makers be sure that popular schools would not exclude disadvantaged children? They opted for lotteries.

One of the earliest cities to adopt lotteries was Chicago. The system was simple. Parents applied for the school of their choice. If a school with 100 places was over-subscribed, all the names were ‘put in a hat’ and the first 100 picked out. Covert selection on ability was impossible. A similar process was adopted for publicly-funded ‘charter’ schools that began to be introduced in the 1990s. Local authorities give a contract (or charter) to new schools and pay a fixed amount for each child who attends. Independent studies have found that charter schools assist children from disadvantaged backgrounds and achieve higher standards in reading and maths compared with similar local schools.

If lotteries were introduced here, it would turn the debate away from selection onto the real issue – namely does competition between schools benefit everyone? The evidence from countries such as Sweden, where a voucher scheme has been introduced, is positive but you don’t have to believe that schools are just like any other commercial product to see the strength of the argument for competition. Nor is profit the issue. A market system brings two strengths, compared with the public sector monopoly we have now. Pluralism on the supply-side reflects the reality that the drive for improvement in most walks of life comes from producers, not consumers. We learn the best ways of meeting our needs by allowing many people to discover the best solutions through trial and error. This diversity, when combined with the cut and thrust of critical inquiry through the media, allows us to learn rapidly from both successes and failures. Public sector monopoly creates entrenched interests that will not budge, as Mr Blair is finding. And it suppresses the mutual learning that pluralism opens up. Monopoly permits intellectual orthodoxies to flourish even when they are contrary to the declared aims of the system. The abandonment of synthetic phonics in teaching reading is only the most recent example of an educational folly that was enthusiastically embraced by teachers who, in their hearts, knew better. School diversity allows us all to take part in a journey of discovery, permitting the growth of our knowledge in the light of experimentation, rather than the suppression of sense by political dictate.

A system of lotteries would concede a lot to egalitarians, but it would also concentrate public debate on the real issue: whether supply-side pluralism would create educational opportunities for all and raise educational standards above the depths to which they have sunk under the watchful eye of monopolistic local government. Above all, it would reveal that concern for social solidarity is compatible with school diversity and parental choice. Social reform should happen on a scale that allows mistakes to be corrected quickly and successes emulated fast. No system of schools dominated by the deadweight of local politicians can come close.