Do Not Expect School Choice, Ever, From Left

The movement to roll back the government education monopoly has received a check recently with the decision of the Florida State Supreme Court, reported by Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters, that voucher programs are unconstitutional because they violate the requirement that the state provide

by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education."

It is infuriating, because you know in your heart that a liberal court could easily find emanations and penumbras in such a sentence to justify any number of liberal initiatives in education that cut against the grain of popular will expressed by the state legislature. For instance, they could say that the founders never meant “public school” to mean government monopoly school but any school sponsored, funded, or run by approved liberal non-profit foundations.

The fact is that the left will oppose school choice to the last illiterate child. In Britain, this logic is in the process of destroying Prime Minister Tony Blair’s education reform bill, as David Green reports.

In Britain, the sticking point is “selection.” Britain’s Labour Party left cannot abide the notion of schools selecting their own students. In part, this instinct is justified. Britain used to have a selection test at age 11 which determined whether a child would go to a college prep “grammar school” or a vocational “secondary modern” school. Every one has a tale of an adult whose life was ruined by the failure to make it to grammar school.

But there is a worse evil than selection. And that is monopoly government bureaucratic schools, the kind of schools we have in Britain and in the United States, utterly dominated by producer interests and utterly free from responsibility for outcomes. School choice changes all that and forces the monopolists to start serving the consumers. David Green shows how school choice is working in Sweden:

The voucher system has resulted in an increase in independent providers. Before the reforms, independent schools in Sweden accounted for less than one per cent of pupils and few of those received any government funding. According to the Swedish National Agency for Education, there were 565 independent schools in 2004/05, accounting for 11 per cent of the 4,963 schools overall. An independent study found that competition from independent schools has improved results in state schools. Moreover, it has been found that new independent schools are more likely to be established in areas of under-performing state schools serving disadvantaged children.

Well now. You mean to say that these evil voucher financed schools are actually seeking out the tough areas serving disadvantaged children? How could that be?

Then he goes on to tell how school choice is working in the United States.

All this is fine, of course. It’s good that we are slowly making progress on the school choice front. But meanwhile, millions of poor children are being left behind, while we slowly and fairly roll up the power of the governmente school monopoly.

The question is: Where’s the outrage? Our liberal friends have always specialized in the expression of outrage about social injustice. Interesting, isn’t it how the liberal lions fail to roar when the injustice benefits their core supporters, the vast and powerful education establishment.

Remember the old Sherlock Holmes story about the dog that didn’t bark? He didn’t bark because he knew the murderer.

But never mind that. Let us remember this. On school choice, we will win. The secret to winning has always been and always will be to win the hearts and minds of the mothers of America. Some day, un bel di for you opera fans, the mothers of America will wake up and realize they have been had. They will discover that they are angry, and they will tell their friends. And then it will all be over bar the shouting.