Kevin Carey offers a Civics 101 lesson on his blog. All I can say is that I want a new civics teacher because this one doesn’t even have basic facts right.
For example, Kevin writes that DC is “the one place in America without representation in Congress.” The people of Guam, Samoa, the Marshall Islands, U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico will be thrilled to learn that they’re not part of America or that Kevin has decided to give them representatives.
But this is a bit of a distraction from the main issue, which is whether charters are good because they are allegedly accountable while vouchers are bad because they allegedly are not. And here Kevin makes yet another bold, false assertion saying that vouchers schools are “currently unaccountable.”
In what meaningful sense are DC charters more accountable than vouchers? Both are subject to market accountability so that if they fail to perform to parental satisfaction they can lose students and the revenue those students generate. In this sense both charters and vouchers are far more accountable than D.C. district public schools, which receive ever more revenue even as they perform miserably and lose students. The only “currently unaccountable” schools are the district public schools, not the voucher schools.
But I imagine that Kevin only understands accountability to mean directly accountable to a public authority. Even with that narrow meaning of accountability vouchers are accountable because they are subject to Congressional regulation and oversight. Just watch the excellent hearings on DC vouchers held last week if you want to see what accountability looks like.
Perhaps Kevin has an even more narrow understanding of accountability, meaningful compliance with a particular set of rules regarding testing and reporting of results. But even then DC vouchers are truly more accountable. DC voucher students are required to take a standardized test and an independent evaluator is assessing whether students are benefiting from having access to the voucher program. It’s true that DC charters must report test results by school, but that doesn’t make them any more accountable. Knowing raw test results does not tell parents or public authorities whether those students would have done better had they not gone to that school or had access to the charter program. The only way to know that with high confidence would be with a random-assignment evaluation, which many voucher programs have had and charter programs almost never have.
By accountability maybe Kevin means checking boxes on some regulatory check-list regardless of benefit to parents or the public. Kevin would be right about that one. Charters do have more meaningless and even counter-productive regulation with which they have to comply in the false pursuit of accountability. The net effect of those mindless regulations is to undermine charter effectiveness and help preserve the unionized traditional district stranglehold. That’s the kind of false accountability that I’m glad vouchers don’t have.
(edited for typos)
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
On the subject of getting the facts right: Kevin seems to think that gay marriage is unpopular in Fayetteville. Has he ever been there?
I guess stereotyping others based on total ignorance isn’t always as bad as we were told it was.
I’m sure that Kevin would say that people in Fayetteville would simply oppose having laws imposed on them, but it is clear that he picks Fayetteville for his gay marriage example because he assumes that people here would find gay marraige particularly objectionable. I’d wager that gay marraige is far more likely to be approved in Fayetteville than in the US Congress. Fayetteville has had a Green mayor, just approved decriminalization of pot with 66% of the vote, and is similar to nearby Eureka Springs, which actually did endorse gay marraige. If you make false sweeping assumptions about mostly black communities you are called a bigot. It seems that if you do the same about mostly white, semi-rural communities you are called an astute DC think tank political analyst.
Well, I think it is also important for Kevin to have some evidence that DC residents are unhappy with the Opportunity Scholarship Program. I know of no such evidence. So, while they may not have voted for it directly, I don’t think it is something that they feel has been wrongly “imposed” upon them. I think the democratically-elected-by-the-residents-of-DC council also supported the establishment of the program.
What happened to the “Get Lost” post? I was just about to comment that Locke is the Smoke Monster is Essau.
This week’s Get Lost post is now online. It was delayed due to a massive discharge of electromagnetic energy when Jay drilled into a pocket of negatively charged exotic matter.
I warned him not to do it, but you know Jay . . .
Utilizing the Vulcan Mind-meld, I divine that Kevin means that if tax money goes to a private school then, by definition, it’s going to an unaccountable school.
But really, what’s the point of trying to guess? Either Kevin will pop loose with the rationale or he won’t.
If Kevin asserted that vouchers caused hair to grow on their recipient’s spleens would it be important to challange him? The casual, and unsupported, assertion that voucher-accepting schools are unaccountable plays well on the left side of the aisle because the left, the educational status quo-supporting left, is terrified of vouchers. They don’t really care in what manner voucher-accepting schools are unaccountable. All they care about is that they have a charge to hurl that sounds like it might have a some substance to it.
They’ll take up the mantra of the unaccountability of voucher-accepting schools without a lot of bothersome questions and repeat that mantra ad nauseum.
The real problem for Kevin and the rest of the supporters of the educational status quo is that the only way they win is if the public loses interest in vouchers. Their victory is in a return to the relative somnolence and apathy upon which the public education system has thrived and upon which it depends. They lose when vouchers are enacted. Tney lose when vouchers are defeated. They lose when vouchers are part of the public discussion. What Kevin and those with which he aligns are doing is just trying to keep a rein on the issue until the public tires and things can go back to their proper place.
If Kevin asserted that vouchers caused hair to grow on their recipient’s spleens would it be important to challange him?
Only if you believe, as Jay and I do, that:
1) Vindicating truth against buffoonish calumny is fun.
2) Having fun is important.