More about Education: To Banish Others or Reform Yourself?

On Thursdays, Moldovan national radio broadcasts live Parliamentary sessions. Today the topic of hot debates was education. More specifically, something should be done regarding an continuously increasing number of private institutions providing educational services of low quality in unacceptable conditions (e.g. overcrowded classrooms, basement location, unsanitary conditions, lack of teaching materials, etc) One proposed way to solve this problem, which materialized in a draft law, is to banish all private educational institutions.

At least for me, this is an unacceptable policy solution. Banishing private service providers is a "traditional" way of removing the symptoms of a problem, rather than the true causes! The reason why we have so many institutions that provide unsatisfactory services is because the government fails to enforce its own laws and regulations. Instead, the government should raise standards, improve its monitoring and enforcement functions, punish its own employees who engage in corrupt practices (like issuing licenses to ineligible or poorly performing institutions), and raise public awareness regarding the quality and importance of education. On the other end, the employers will make their own decision regarding the preferred schooling of their workforce. The ultimate consequence of such actions is that poorly performing providers of educational services will vanish in a democratic, market-driven way. The government will have done its job, and the market, too.

Probably I'm not the only one who thinks that this is a much more challenging solution to the problem, since it involves various individual interests. Once the issue has been raised, here is an opportunity for the Moldovan government to implement a truly democratic, Western-type reform. However, all it takes is that ever-missing political will.