I have often been tempted to denounce school choice so my empirical research finding that it has positive academic effects would be taken more seriously. It works for Cecelia Rouse and Martin Carnoy.

Regarding the documented research evidence, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s lead education reporter dismisses it as coming from people who “favor” choice. She instead relies on flawed data from the state’s education bureaucracy, headed by an individual who believes the expansion of choice is “immoral.”

Perhaps Greg and Friedman could re-issue his study by “Anonymous” (on blank paper) and send it to the Journal Sentinel.

The reason that’s important is that every poor sap who posts on this blog can relate to the experience of having people’s eyes glaze over when you mention public education policy. Most people, most of the time, don’t want to be bothered. Even parents, as can be proven by how *few* parents know what, even yet, a charter school is. Moving reform agenda items to the national level means the reach of the discussion is expanded and more people are made aware that there is a controversy.

In fact, I believe NCLB has failed, RttT isn’t doing much better and both failures are calculable.

The public education lobby still has a great deal of power but more then that the public education lobby has coordination. They can concentrate resources at points of vulnerability and win even though, against the potential power of their uncoordinated opposition, they’re not that powerful. The public education lobby, due to that coordination, can “get there fustest with the mostest” and win.

The solution is to stretch them to the breaking point and national level policies like NCLB and RttT do that both directly, by requiring opposition response at the national level and indirectly by, as I wrote above, helping the uncoordinated opposition effect a degree of coordination that previously wasn’t in evidence.