This is about all you need to read from the recent Washington Monthly piece on school choice (Via Ezra):

In 2000, both California and Michigan offered referendums on voucher programs for all children in the state. The initiatives were defeated by margins of forty-two and thirty-eight points, respectively. Voucher supporters like to blame the defeats on well-funded teachers unions, but the law professors James E. Ryan and Michael Heise found that voucher supporters had outspent the opposition in Michigan, and both sides had spent about the same amount of money in California. They concluded that the decisive resistance to vouchers had come from suburban voters who feared that the programs would take money away from local schools and worried about the arrival of lower-income and minority students in their children’s classrooms.

To put this a little more starkly: suburban white people oppose vouchers because they understand it would make the education system more egalitarian. And they’re right. Which is precisely why liberals should favor them. Yet bizarrely, the the author of this article, Greg Anrig, seems to regard this as an argument against them.

The whole article is full of incongruous touches like that. We learn, for example, that the empirical evidence shows no significant difference between the achievement of public and private schools students in areas with vouchers. I haven’t looked at this literature closely, so I don’t know if that’s a fair-minded summary of it (I suspect not), but let’s assume it is. What we have, then, is a program that offers more choices to low-income parents, is extremely popular with those parents (the Milwaukee program has been repeatedly expanded to make room for rising demand), saves the state money (because the voucher is almost always for a significantly smaller amount than the average per-pupil cost of public schools), and seems to perform no worse than the more expensive public school option. In a rational world, a program that performs no worse than the program it replaced, is popular with its target audience, and saves taxpayers money would be regarded as a modest success that ought to be replicated elsewhere. Yet in the bizarro world of education policy, such the fact that voucher and public schools seem to perform similarly is taken as evidence that vouchers are fatally flawed and ought to be abandoned. It’s really odd.