If you aren’t a banker or a tradesman, it isn’t easy to read Cohen the Columnist. Banker & Tradesman isn’t sitting there in the grocery store, next to the tabloids announcing which politician is actually a space alien.
Banker & Tradesman isn’t sold in newspaper boxes; young boys don’t go running around Boston, shouting “Extra, extra, read all about it, Cohen the Columnist tells all in Banker & Tradesman about commercial real estate and mortgage rates!”
And it’s not like just anybody can go on line and read B&T. Your subscription check must not bounce – if you aren’t part of the B&T niche audience, you aren’t welcome.
We’ve all heard the stories of the desperate steps that outsiders have taken in pursuit of the Cohen column. Some of them wear gray suits and talk knowingly about foreign-initiated transfers, in the hopes that someone will offer up the secret password that allows them to subscribe.
In most marketplace scenarios, this set of circumstances would have the owners of B&T popping champagne corks. The customers are clamoring for a hot product (that’s me), demand exceeds supply, and prices will probably go up.
Of course, every market isn’t rational. Consider public education. In Boston, the prestigious, snotty, well-respected Boston Latin School sits there exuding competence and prestige and private-school ethos – all of which prompts suburban parents to sneak around, fibbing about where they live, so that their kids can attend Boston Latin.
Does Boston Latin, and the Boston public school system, welcome the new customers and build an addition on the school? Does the United States congratulate itself on the benefits of a robust education marketplace, where consumers are on the prowl for the best education, which will produce a new generation of smart kids who can grow up to be newspaper columnists?
No. None of that. The school system is disturbed. Ineligible kids will be tossed out like yesterday’s garbage.
Unwanted Scholars
Boston isn’t alone in this, of course. Even as we speak, the school system in Pascagoula, Miss., has put in place a protocol to snare parents who use false addresses to get their kids into the best schools. Sinners will be fined $1,000 or face 90 days in jail.
In the Hartford, Conn., metro area, several of the ring suburbs hired private detectives to identify students who sneaked across the border from the big, bad city to attempt to receive a better education. The shame. The horror.
To be sure, there is something to be said for sniffing out the interlopers who, in the cruel, cold analysis of such stuff, have not (as one school official told the Boston Globe) “invested” in the city schools with local property taxes and the like. But, is there not something distasteful about a process that discourages, that forbids families from obtaining the best education they can find – or, at the least, escaping from an educational environment that they know to be inferior?
In the Boston Latin case, one presumes the criminal conspiracy was hatched by neurotic, suburban high achievers, rather than desperate inner-city victims. But, so what?
One of the great misconceptions about the school voucher movement popularized by the late, great economist Milton Friedman was that he intended it to be exclusively designed to rescue poor kids from urban basket case schools. In fact, as the Nobel Prize-winning Friedman conceived the notion, the vouchers would be available to everyone, to create a real marketplace, with real competition, among schools.
The Boston area, like many urban areas, has patched together a hodgepodge of charter schools and “exam schools” and other alternatives to the local school on the corner – along with lotteries and complex “choice” eligibility standards that befuddle all but the bureaucrats who invented them. But it’s not like Wal-Mart versus Target, or Colgate versus Crest. The public education consumers are at the mercy of something that only pretends to be a market.
The last two presidents of the United States with school-age children didn’t have to sneak their kids into one of the less hideous of Washington’s public schools. Chelsea attended, and the Obama girls attend, the same exclusive private school. There is an education market for those whose checks don’t bounce.
