Matt says that this post by Sara Mead on vouchers is excellent, but I’m having trouble seeing what he sees in it:

As anyone who loves the critically acclaimed but criminally underviewed Veronica Mars or Friday Night Lights knows, market success is not always synonymous with product quality. There are good reasons to believe that markets alone, in the absence of good information and public accountability, won’t allocate children and resources to the schools that do the best job educating them. When public funds are used for public education, there is a public oversight responsibility to ensure that the schools receiving those funds—private, charter, public, what-have-you—meet basic standards of safety, quality, and student performance. That requires a public oversight role—some kind of quality-based entry barrier for participating schools, some kind of test-based accountability for student performance, the ability to prevent schools that consistently produce poor results from accepting voucher students—that most voucher proposals, in practice, lack.

I find it kind of amazing that people make this argument with a straight face. Many urban public schools today do not “meet basic standards of safety, quality, and student performance.” Indeed, when we’re talking about any subject other than vouchers, the left is usually the first to emphasize that, albeit with different proposed solutions. Moreover, this is an example of what Julian aptly calls the progressive version of the intelligent design fallacy: the idea that the only way to achieve a given goal is to have someone specifically planning for it. There’s no guarantee that any given school under a voucher regime will have high standards. But there are good reasons to think that in practice, accountability to parents will prove a stronger spur to improvement than “accountability” to education bureaucrats several miles away in a district office, or thousands of miles away in Washington.

I found Mead’s next argument just baffling:

Which brings me to what I think is really the more significant limitation of voucher proposals: Vouchers are all about allocation of children amongst spaces in existing schools and do almost nothing to expand the supply of high-quality options. Spaces in existing schools are inequitable allocated, with poor kids having much less access to good schools. But more basically, the problem is that there’s a severe shortage of high-performing schools in the geographic areas in which disadvantaged kids tend to be concentrated. Any serious approach to improving education for disadvantaged youngsters needs to create a lot more good schools in the places where these kids are.

I’m not sure where she gets the idea that vouchers are “all about” allocating children among various schools. Let’s keep in mind here that largely due to fierce opposition from teachers’ unions, the original Friedmanite vision of universal school choice has never been tried in any state, or even metropolitan area. There have been numerous attempts, most notably in California, but they’ve all been killed. The Milwaukee program, which I believe is currently the largest in the country, until last year served only 15,000 children. Others are even smaller. The DC voucher program only offers space for about 1500 kids, and Cleveland’s program enrolls around 5000 kids. With such a tiny market, it should hardly surprise us that few entrepreneurs have chosen to participate.

Nevertheless, the contention that no new schools have been created—or that those that have been created are “fly by night”—is simply false. I had the opportunity to tour two voucher schools in Milwaukee last year. As you’ll see from the link there, one school added about 700 seats to accommodate voucher kids, and the other was a brand new school with a couple hundred kids built to serve voucher kids. Neither was a fly-by-night organization. Now, the tour was organized by a pro-voucher organization, so there was doubtless some cherry-picking involved, but even if those two schools were the only ones that added capacity, which seems improbable, 900 new seats is a significant addition for a program that only served 15,000 kids in total.

Moreover, let’s keep in mind that most of these choice programs have been in a precarious position for most of their short lives. The DC program is only 4 years old and it’s far from clear it will be renewed. Florida’s choice program was struck down by the courts recently. And until 2002, every choice program in the country was under a cloud of constitutional questions. Should it really surprise us that these tiny, politically precarious programs haven’t seen a lot of entrepreneurs rushing in to start new schools?

I find progressives’ hostile attitude toward school choice quite baffling. Matt mocks my old boss David Boaz for inflexible dogmatism, yet it’s Matt’s side of the voucher debate that’s being dogmatic. They’re the ones loudly proclaiming that vouchers won’t work while they fight tooth and nail against any serious trial of the idea. I have yet to see anyone suggest any serious harms that would come out of school choice. The worst-case scenario seems to be that we’ll waste a bunch of money on some under-performing schools. Given that we’ve done that over and over again on all manner of educational reforms, why do our “pragmatic” progressive friends devote so much more political capital to resisting any serious trial of this one?