Actually, it’s the Post’s education columnist Jay Mathews vs. the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation’s executive director, Robert Enlow, in a school choice debate being held at Edspresso.com. Robert gets the best of this exchange.
Jay is generally a reasonable guy, and so, naturally, supports school choice programs that allow families to easily choose the public or private school that best serves their kids. His two failings in this debate are: not grasping the transformative nature of a large scale market reform, and allowing his own sense of futility about the prospects for change to color the school choice movement’s real potential.
As do most journalists, Mathews confuses the existing niche of non-profit private schools, and existing tiny voucher programs, with the kind of vibrant, large-scale, significantly for-profit market that could arise under a well-designed statewide school choice program. I explained the difference in this blog post.
It’s also easy to sympathize with how tired Mathews sounds when talking about the futility of real reform in k‑12 government schooling. He’s been writing this beat for a long time, and change has been miniscule thus far. But what Mathews seems not to have noticed is that the school choice movement has been steadily growing, and steadily introducing and passing more programs over the past twenty years. For every battle-hardened veteran of the movement that is beginning to tire, there are several sharp new researchers, analysts, and campaigners coming forward to carry on the standard. Not just in the United States, but everywhere from England to India.
Utah may be the first U.S. state to implement a universal school choice program, but even if its program is reversed, another will follow. It’s inevitable. The status quo system will continue to consume more and more money without showing improvement, as it has done for generations now, and eventually people in one of our fifty states will decide they’ve had enough. Once one state tastes educational freedom, and reaps its benefits, the others will fall like dominos to the exigencies of economic and demographic competition.
Perhaps not tomorrow, or next year, but probably within the next ten or twenty, chunks of government school district headquarters will be sold for their historical value on eBay — like relics of the Berlin Wall. And public education will finally be delivered through a market system that can live up to its ideals, rather than by the moribund monopoly we’ve been saddled with for the last century-and-a-half.
