This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, December 21st, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

There are costs to any firm that wants to get bigger and scaling up schools that work well

face the same challenges.

If the private sector can franchise many of its successes,

why don't public schools take similar pockets of excellence within them

and extend those benefits to more kids?

Andrew Coulson, director of the Cato Institute's Center for

Educational Freedom, says the incentives just aren't there.

There are troubles for any business that wants to expand or scale up its production to franchise or have many, many different operations.

Ray Crock, the genius that he was, his contribution, at least one of them, was the ability to design

the firm, the individual McDonald's stores, in such a way that you could have a competent manager

and have that expertise across all of your stores. And in schools, in public schools anyway, you would think that

that would be possible to do, but there are troubles for schools that want to take a successful experiment and

mass produce it.

What are those troubles?

Well, that's exactly true. It isn't that we lack examples of excellence in public schooling. The problem

is that the examples we have languish and often fade away completely.

The typical example of this is Jaime Escalante who was the fantastic calculus teacher

at a public high school in East LA in the 1970s and 80s.

They made a film about him called Stand and Deliver.

Incredible teacher at one point the number of Hispanic students who were taking and passing the

AP calculus test at his school was a huge portion of the total number of such students nationwide. That's how good his program was.

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