Can you sell school choice to monopolists?
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
We’ve been tracking the increasing movement on the political left toward school choice.
Now, Arianna Huffington repackages school choice for the lefty crowd, connecting it to the health care debate by calling choice “single payer for education,” i.e. you choose the provider and government pays.
The association is distasteful, given that the pending government takeover of healthcare is a knife at the throat of our freedom. But if this is how some people need to think about it in order to see the point about school choice, that’s fine as far as it goes – in education, moving to a “single payer” system would be a step in the right direction, as opposed to a step in the wrong direction as with health care.
HT Eduwonk
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
She has some people up in a tizzy in the comments section. I am amazed at how many people just repeat the only union mantra. A lot of people in the unions though, so that probably has something to do with it.
The Brookings Institution/Urban Institute/CED study Vouchers and the Provision of Public Services includes several instructive essays on vouchers for various services. The differences between housing, nutrition, schooling, and health care relate strongly to the effectiveness with which vouchers can support public policy in these industries. Food Stamps and Section 8 housing vouchers work fairly well because few people make strong objections to the dollar value attached to the voucher and because recipients can take their vouchers into thriving markets in food and housing. The organized opposition to competition from current recipients of the taxpayers’ K-12 education subsidy forms the largest problem with tuition vouchers in the US. Another problem with tuition vouchers which we do not see with nutrition vouchers or housing vouchers is that the public pays a larger cost if parents misuse education vouchers for anti-social mis-education (i.e., radical Islamic indoctrination) than if a welfare recipient trades his Food Stamps for Chateau Thunderbird. The problem with medical care vouchers is that costs are theoretically near-infinite (everyone dies).
The State cannot pay for nutrition, housing, education, or medical care without a definition of “nutrition”, “housing”, “education”, or “medical care”, but then recipients and providers are bound by the State’s definition.
Across the board, unsubsidized, minimally-regulated markets will outperform State-monopoly providers of goods and services. Vouchers occupy a middle ground. Whether they are good policy depends on a comparison of the options.
I agree that universal tuition vouchers would move the current State-monopoly education industry in the right direction, and that universal medical care vouchers would move the currently competitive medical care industry far in the wrong direction.
Ol’ Arianna may be trying to hitch a wagon that’s in trouble, socialized medicine, to a suddenly frisky pony, education reform. In any case, I doubt she, or any lefties, will be able to co-opt education reform for their own ends. Education reform’s driven by mommies and daddies who have given up on the current system and with charters, and to a lesser extent vouchers, have a direction in which to move. The secondary constituency for education reform, reform-minded lefties, are being dragged in the direction of education reform, I believe, by those mommies and daddies.
It’s probably worth mentioning Democrats for Education Reform which is pretty obviously more “Democrats” then “Education” but hey, welcome to the party.
Also, an old-line lefty organization, the Citizen’s Committee on Civil Rights, has chimed in with support for education reforms like charters and vouchers.
Of course the big question is “where the heck are the Repubs?” By the time the national Republican party notices the education reform issue it’ll probably be fully sewed up by heretics from the Democratic party.
Milton Friedman always said “vouchers should have been a Democratic policy.” The natural underlying dynamic he was referring to is gradually asserting itself against union power.
I wonder why? I’d like to think all that “party of the workin’ man” eyewash didn’t fool Milt what with the Democrats predilection for American nobility like FDR and the Kennedys.
Well, he was a genius economist but he was never nearly as good a political analyst – but, that having been said, there *are* political forces in the Democratic Party that operate in favor of vouchers, as the current movement in that direction shows.
My observation is that those forces are of relatively recent vintage as the hollow promise of public education has been most meaningfully and inescapably felt in one of the identity constituencies the Democrats have carefully wooed over the years – blacks.
Gratifyingly, that puts the Democrats in the position, more and more, of having to choose between black voters and the NEA.
Not so gratifyingly the Republicans, of which I’m a card-carrying member, have brilliantly responded to this opportunity with an organizational “huh?”
What’s especially teeth-grindingly annoying in the situation is that the pro-charter/voucher Dems are, to a significant extent, pretty far over to the left. If some reform-minded Repubs approached them to coordinate their efforts to expand charter/voucher law what would they do? Throw in with the evile Republicans knowing the Repubs would share in the responsibility for doing what one of the Democrat’s coveted constituencies has indicated it really, really wants? Or not so as to deprive the Repubs the opportunity?
The reason that’s annoying is that the Repubs are in a position to dictate the timing of such a deal putting their political opponents in a difficult position. But will they do that? Not a chance.
I’m a card-carrying member of the party of shmucks.
Right, I think Friedman foresaw this development but expected it to come earlier than it actually did. Underestimating the political power of inertia was always one of his weaknesses.