School Choice Advocate Offers Steak Dinner

Are you an opponent of school choice? Do you know in your bones that taking money away from the “common school” will hurt kids? Do you have a pile of academic, peer reviewed studies sitting on your kitchen table that prove without a doubt that choice choice is “right-wing utopianism?” Now is your chance to teach the school choice shills a lesson and win a steak dinner!

School-choice advocate Matthew Ladner is offering on NRO a steak dinner to anyone who can

provide two random assignment control-group studies of the attitudes of parents who have actually used a private school-choice program showing anything less than substantial improvement in satisfaction with their child's school.

Actually he is offering more than that. “I'll even throw in drinks and dessert — the whole nine yards,” he writes.

Of course, nobody is going to be fooled by that. You can see that Ladner is really a mean-spirited conservative after all. A confident, non-conformist liberal would have offered steak dinners for two, not just for one. Anyway, the liberal would not have offered a bloody gunky mess of a steak dinner, but a fair-trade meal at a vegetarian restaurant.

This all started when

Jon Talton of the Arizona Republic... used a Sunday column to describe a school-choice program that passed the Arizona legislature with bipartisan support as "right-wing utopianism,"

Ladner was outraged. Why, he had shelves full of studies showing that school choice worked. Where had Talton come up with the notion that school choice was mere right wing vaporware? So he wrote a reply to Talton challenging him to back up his fighting words.

If within the week Mr. Talton can provide two control-group studies of the attitudes of parents who have actually used one of the private school choice programs showing something less than substantial improvement in satisfaction with their child's school, I will happily buy him a steak dinner at a downtown restaurant of his choice. I can produce a large number of studies that demonstrate the opposite, but two will do the trick for Mr. Talton.

Thus far, Ladner reports, Mr. Talton has not collected on his steak dinner. But perhaps that is because he is a vegan liberal and would not want to be seen dead in a steak restaurant.