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rangements might well mean smaller governmental expenditures on schooling, yet higher total expenditures. It would enable parents to buy what they want more efficiently and thereby lead them to spend more than they now do directly and indirectly through taxation. It would prevent parents from being frustrated in spending more money on schooling by both the present need for conformity in how the money is spent and by the understandable reluctance on the part of persons not currently having children in school, and especially those who will not in the future have them in school, to impose higher taxes on themselves for purposes often far removed from education as they understand the term.2
With respect to teachers' salaries, the major problem is not that they are too low on the averagethey may well be too high on the averagebut that they are too uniform and rigid. Poor teachers are grossly overpaid and good teachers grossly underpaid. Salary schedules tend to be uniform and determined far more by seniority, degrees received, and teaching certificates acquired than by merit. This, too, is largely a result of the present system of governmental administration of schools and becomes more serious as the unit over which governmental control is exercised becomes larger. Indeed, this very fact is a major reason why professional educational organizations so strongly favor broadening the unitfrom the local school district to the state, from the state to the federal government. In any bureaucratic, essentially civil-service organization, standard salary scales are almost inevitable; it is next to impossible to simulate competition capable of providing wide differences in salaries according to merit. The educators, which means the teachers themselves, come to exercise primary control. The parent or local community comes to exercise little control. In any area, whether it be carpentry or plumbing or teaching, the majority of workers favor standard salary scales and oppose merit differentials, for the obvious reason that the
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2 A striking example of the same effect in another field is the British National Health Service. In a careful and penetrating study, D. S. Lees establishes rather conclusively that, "Far from being extravagant, expenditure on NHS has been less than consumers would probably have chosen to spend in a free market. The record of hospital building in particular has been deplorable." "Health Through Choice," Hobart Paper 14 (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1961), p. 58.

 
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