Mr. Gummere is Headmaster of the William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia.
The independent school provides an excellent example of free enterprise. In a field in which the product (or a legalized facsimile thereof) is available to everyone at no charge, thanks to taxes, independent schools must offer something which the general public thinks worth buying.
Tax-supported government programs go on and on, even when inefficiently and wastefully managed. This is not to say that public education is thus managed, but it is to say that the lifespan of a private enterprise depends very much upon how it is managed. It operates efficiently, or it goes out of business.
The rules of tenure for teachers were established to protect professionals against politics, ignorance, and other sins of boards of public education whose members were sometimes incapable of intelligent management of schools. Teachers were also protected against spite, malice, prejudice, and similar evils. But everybody who knows anything about tenure also knows that it serves to protect the mediocre.
Tenure is not granted in independent schools (there are very few exceptions). It is hopefully (and for the most part rightly) assumed that the managing boards of such schools will not be a prey to the ills referred to above. Moreover, the feeling is that no employer should be compelled to continue the employment of people who do not measure up. Thus, the free market again asserts itself. The teacher’s protection is not that of legislation but of the knowledge that he is doing a proper job.
Independent schools serve the interesting and vital function of providing services, ideas, innovations with which state-supported schools are not free to experiment.
In the free market, consumers determine which goods and services will be bought. Producers of goods and services are thus compelled to make them at least as good as, if not better than, competing suppliers do, or go out of existence.
Independent schools offer such services; and upon their management lies the heavy responsibility for making good. The teachers do not have tenure; therefore, upon them lies the necessity of doing their jobs well.
Those associated with independent schools, be they trustees, administrators, teachers, staff, know all this perfectly well. All are free to work where they are for the kind of education in which they believe, or to go somewhere else. Thus, management, teachers, and staff must produce and cooperate conscientiously and satisfactorily.
Meantime, the public evaluates what is offered, and is free to buy or not. The fact that the public is buying, more and more, and contributing generously in campaigns for funds proves the capacity of independent schools to survive and grow in a market much of which has been pre-empted by government.
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Individuals Know Best
The truth is that many different things are most important, each of us having his own idea of their relative importance, depending upon the time and circumstances. Each of us tends to do what seems most important to him at the moment, and this accounts for all human creativity and production. With our creative and productive specialties we come to be important to one another, often in ways which could not be foreseen and which many of us may never clearly understand. This variability in the subjective judgments of the importance of things is the basis of all trade and voluntary cooperation, enabling each productive individual to gain peaceful possession and use of vastly more than he could ever hope to attain strictly on his own.
VICTOR JACOBSON, "Most Important," from Essays on Liberty, Volume IV