More Than "School Choice" Needed

How much of a difference do the current initiative on school choice make? Not much, according to Frederick M. Hess.

[C]harter-school enthusiasts, including President Bush and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, have touted the remarkable work of the high-performing KIPP Academies and the new teachers recruited by Teach For America. However, these entrepreneurial ventures are gnats alongside the $550 billion a year behemoth that is K-12 education.

The fact is that most Americans aren’t too riled up about school non-performance. They prefer in-school reform to any radical changes. “School choice” is a nice slogan, but if we are talking about real improvement in education we are talking about entrepreneurial challenge to the status quo.

Ultimately, supply-side dynamism isn’t about “choices;” it’s about Darwinian selection and creative destruction.

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Vibrant markets in any sector require entrepreneurs, adequate capital, skilled employees, entrance to markets, and so on. Creating good new options requires opportunities for entrepreneurs to enter the field, obtain resources, recruit talent, try new approaches, develop new products, compete fairly, and benefit from their successes. Choice fosters entrepreneurship only to the extent that it promotes these opportunities.

And right now, as told by Judith Kleinfeld, there is the huge problem of the underperformance of boys in school. Here’s one shocker statistic:

White Twelfth-Graders of College Educated Parents Scoring "Below Basic" by Gender and Subject Subject Male Female Reading 23% 7% Writing 25% 6% Mathematics 19% 17%

Can this really be true? One quarter of the white sons of college graduates are reading “below basic” in the twelfth grade? That means that one quarter of the sons of white college graduates are basically illiterate.

It it is true we need more than “in-school reform.” We need an education revolution led by radical entrepreneurs.