A while back, Reason Magazine’s Julian Sanchez blogged about what he saw as an inconsistency in my position on the Dutch national school voucher program. Though I missed his post at the time, it’s worth responding to.

Julian pointed out that I have bemoaned the stifling regulatory encroachment  besetting private voucher schools in the Netherlands, while also touting the superior academic outcomes of those schools.

What gives?

The answer is relativity. While Dutch academic performance is among the best in the world, that does not mean it is anywhere near as good as it would be under actual market conditions. The Netherlands competes with nations (like our own) suffering from morbidly obese government school monopolies. Their own system, with its modicum of parental choice and competition, is merely fat and out of shape by comparison. When they race, the Netherlands invariably comes out at or near the front of the pack. That does not mean it is the Carl Lewis of school systems.

The same can be said of the Dutch school system’s impact on social harmony. While it has advantages in this area over state school monopolies, it still has shortcomings when compared to market systems that do not rely on government funding of private schools to ensure universal access.

So, when I talk about the Dutch voucher program, I try to point out its shortcomings while also noting that – even though it falls short of a true market – it outperforms our calcified centrally planned school systems.

As Julian no doubt saw, I wrapped-up my earlier piece trumpeting the academic superiority of the Dutch system with the following caveat:

All this might sound like a sales pitch for introducing a Dutch-style voucher program. It isn’t. As it happens, research suggests that there are even better ways to reintroduce the benefits of parental choice and competition in education.

When everyone else is moving backwards, the guy who’s standing still seems like a high-achiever.