"Choice" is not always a straightforward positive.
One of the most frustrating aspects of the education "reform" movement as embodied by Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein and a host of Wall Street and other billionaires is the degree to which some people who should know better apparently don't know better. At
Balloon Juice, Freddie deBoer takes Matt Yglesias to task for just this, or, specifically, for his single-minded advocacy of charter schools in the absence of empirical evidence that they work. Yglesias argues that charter schools equal increased choice for poor people, choice is good, therefore charter schools are good. DeBoer absolutely dismantles him:
The Cliff Notes version: “rich people have more choices than poor people” is another way of saying “we live under capitalism.” Rich people are always going to have more choices because that’s the point of money. It is indeed the job of government to provide for certain material needs that the poor cannot procure for themselves. And the government should do the best job it possibly can. But government shouldn’t be in the business of artificially providing choice under the bizarre notion that just having choice is a virtue in and of itself, and it really shouldn’t be in the business of providing choices that can’t be proven to work.
Talking about choice as if it is a benefit regardless of the objective reality of whether the choices are beneficial is bizarre. And the idea that tax dollars should pay for that choice, in that absence of evidence as to why, is just a bridge too far. This seems like simple sense to me.
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I’ll ask again, as I asked in the prior post: why does this argument count against public education and not against any other governmental enterprise? Again, rich people have many more choices in transportation than poor people. Should the government fund a system of charter buses that perform about the same service as the regular bus? Where are Yglesias’s posts calling for such a thing? Or perhaps it’s a voucher model he favors. Should we allow any average citizen to withdraw his or her “share” of the public transit budget and use that money to purchase a car? If choice is so compelling, absent of any evidence that the choices being presented actually work, why isn’t Yglesias out beating the bushes for such a policy? Even this is a generous comparison: I’m quite sure that a Toyota can do as good of or better a job than the city bus. The jury is still out on charter schools.
Read deBoer's full post for much, much more on public education defunding efforts from charters to vouchers, full of gems like, "Education reform is where wonkery goes to die, where the good old college spirit runs aground on the reality of poverty and a racial achievement gap that just refuse to bow to the power of nice white ladies."