The Investors’ Business Daily newspaper is viewed as “exceptionally pro-economic individualism” with an editorial page that is “especially pro-capitalist.” But there is at least one issue on which the paper’s stance would be more at home in a politburo meeting than a capitalist publication: the federal No Child Left Behind law.

An editorial in yesterday’s edition opens with the assertion that the law is “far from perfect,” but that its “no-excuses approach to school accountability is worth keeping.” The NCLB’s “most fundamental flaw”, according to the IBD, is “the lack of credible national benchmarks for school performance. Without these, no reform has much of a chance.”

When I regained consciousness after reading that, I had to double-check that I was indeed reading the IBD and not the IBRP.

The editors of Investors’ Business Daily are telling us that Washington must set output targets for the education industry and that, without them, no reform can succeed. They would not make that recommendation for any other industry.

It seems that the IBD’s editors have bought into the myth that education is somehow different from all other human endeavors, and therefore not able to benefit from the market forces that have been responsible for the economic miracle of the last 200 years. Nothing could be further from the truth. As I summarized in my talk at our NCLB forum yesterday, there is overwhelming evidence that choice and financial responsibility for families, coupled with freedom, competition, and the profit motive for schools, produce by far the best educational outcomes on both an individual and a social level.

The research shows that markets are not only better at raising achievement overall, but also at diminishing the racial and socio-economic achievement gaps that have been created, to a significant degree, by the existing top-down monopoly system.

The IBD is right that accountability is crucially important in education as in every other human exchange. But simulated bureaucratic “accountability” has proven grossly inferior to real market accountability. Being able to leave bad schools and move to good ones at will is the only kind of accountability that produces real and sustained results.

The IBD’s editors not only should know this, they already do know this with respect to the rest of the economy. They need only recognize the fact that education and educators are part of the same reality that is discussed on the news pages of their own publication.