In my direct experience with both public and private education, I’ve observed one big difference between public and private school administrators:

• Public school administrators are trying to attract distant public money with aggregated quantitative data.
• Private school administrators are trying to attract money from individual parents who want to see qualitative proof that their money is well-spent.

If a private school parent sees that his child is bored, unhappy, lethargic or stagnant, that school will lose funding from that parent. Consequently, private schools focus all their effort on making students interested, happy, energized and engaged. They don’t attempt to quantify any of this, because the outcome is immediately present to the decision-maker.

In contrast, if a public school parent sees problems with their student, they can lobby, complain, threaten and escalate issues all day, but it will not affect the bottom line. Generally, the most convenient lever for making a change is harassing and blaming the individual teachers. Escalating issues to administrators is a means of pressuring teachers, not in effecting change to administration to to the design of the system.

Public school administrators focus most on serving the only stakeholders that really matter: the bureaucrats above them who scrutinize their numbers and dispense reward or punishment. The numbers are what matter, so numbers are the real product of public schools, and the students are only a means to making those numbers.

To the public school system, if something isn’t quantified, it doesn’t exist. However, though some indicators of educational success are quantifiable, at bottom education is an essentially qualitative endeavor. Education cannot be reduced to quantitative terms without destroying it. But because we insist on trying to control it centrally from a distance, the more we try to take centralized control of it, the more the system falls apart.

For this reason I actually agree with conservatives on the desirability of school vouchers. I have not any progressive thinker take the concept seriously and try to find ways to make school vouchers less abusable by the rich. I don’t think the problems with vouchers are insurmountable.