Andrew Coulson, of Cato and co-author of the 2007 study End It, Don’t Mend It: What to Do with NCLB, has an eye-opening piece published at TCS Daily on school choice and the right’s gradual abandonment of school choice in deference to centralization as an antidote to the problems plaguing our education system. His argument, in direct refutation of Sol Stern’s City Journal essay on the limitations of choice, states that the effects and success of school choice (on public schools) is impaired by the multitude of restrictions placed upon it. It’s convincing:
Milwaukee’s voucher program has indeed helped many children, but it also falls far short of a market. First, it is capped at 22,500 students. That’s too little to justify large-scale R&D investment by education entrepreneurs. If the market for computers were limited to 22,500 customers, Microsoft, Apple, and Dell would cease to exist. Private schools must also accept the voucher as full payment, but such price controls are almost universally derided by economists as counterproductive. If it were not for the fact that electronics manufacturers could once charge $1,000 for a DVD player, it would never have become possible for the units to sell for $30 today.
Coulson’s piece forced me to really examine the crux of Stern’s argument, specifically being that choice is not a panacea.
“Choice is a panacea,” argued education scholars John Chubb and Terry Moe in their influential 1990 book Politics, Markets and America’s Schools. For a time, I thought so, too. Looking back from today’s vantage point, it is clear that the school choice movement has been very good for the disadvantaged.
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Yet social-change movements need to be attentive to the facts on the ground. Recent developments in both public and Catholic schools suggest that markets in education may not be a panacea—and that we should reexamine the direction of school reform.
This is the problem. Of course choice isn’t a panacea, but not because it is incapable of providing a badly needed shot-in-the-arm to American public education, but because markets in education can no more be considered a unified concept than ‘being diplomatic’ or ‘choosing your friends wisely.’ While all these might be considered correlates to a positive end, they do not and inherently cannot guarantee success. Just as over-wrought diplomacy can embolden enemies and wisdom is relative, the mere establishment of school choice cannot be expected to perform as some kind of magical elixir. Instead, choice is the step into entirely new territory, rewriting rules and opening unexplored avenues; how can something so myriad be capable of conforming to the definitions of panacea?
Meanwhile, Stern and other impatient conservatives are throwing up their hands in defeat, and look to the implementation of centralized standards like NCLB as the cure for our national woes. Never mind, of course, that NCLB can be credited with very little beyond further sticking the Federal government where it ought not. And although many profess faith in school choice, one can’t help but wonder how tightening top-down benchmarks will lend itself to markets in education. Perhaps they assume, and probably rightly, that if public schools get any worse, a mass exodus will do more for the choice industry than if the NEA spontaneously dissolved.
