That goal now seems within reach.

Both the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers recently stepped forward to lead the charge, and 46 states are already behind them. The day may soon come when every student in the country is expected to master the same material at the same age.

Let's hope that day never comes.

The quest to homogenize standards and testing has always rested on a misunderstanding. According to Duncan, "standards shouldn't change once you cross the Mississippi River or the Rocky Mountains," because the kids "are no different from each other." In one sense, he's right. There's little reason to believe that New York children are intrinsically smarter or slower than those of Colorado, on average.

But averages don't take tests. Kids do. Even if students' average academic potential were the same in Texas and Vermont, the individual children who make up those averages would still be all over the map. To claim that all the children in a single large family could progress through every subject at the same pace is a stretch. To claim this of every child in a whole neighborhood is preposterous. To claim it of every child in a nation of 300 million people is the premise of national standards.

Children are not interchangeable widgets. It does not serve their interests to feed them through learning factories on a single, fixed-pace conveyor belt. Some pick up reading quickly and easily fly through ever more challenging texts. Others find reading a chore, progressing more slowly even when encouraged by supportive families and talented teachers. To demand a single pace for all students in all subjects is to simultaneously tie together the laces of the fleet and kick out the crutches of the slow.

Not only is it impossible to create a single set of standards that would serve every child equally well, such standards would fail to significantly improve our schools. High external standards have never been the driving force behind human progress.

The tremendous leap in Olympic athletic achievement of the past 40 years was not achieved because the organizing committee told competitors to start swimming faster or jumping higher. It happened because Olympic athletes are competitors.

The same thing is true across every sector of our economy. Cell phone makers have not relentlessly improved their products because of national mandates. They've done it to attract customers away from their competitors. Amazon did not diversify its business and create the Kindle because a consortium of Internet vendors demanded it, but because Amazon sought to beat its competition.

The progress we've seen in one industry after another, just as in athletic pursuits, has been the result of competition - something that our education system has sorely lacked. At the dawn of the 21st century, three quarters of American children are still assigned to schools based on where they live, by bureaucrats who have never met them. Stellar public schools cannot grow and take over less successful ones. Ineffective public schools have little fear of losing students to competitors because they have no real competitors - they enjoy a monopoly on $12,000 per pupil in public spending.

I published a paper in the Journal of School Choice collecting every scientific study I could find comparing public and private school outcomes. These scores of findings span the globe and cover everything from academic achievement and cost-effectiveness to parental satisfaction. And they favor competitive market school systems over state-run monopolies by a margin of 15 to 1.

If our goal is to help all children maximize their potential, we won't achieve it by shackling them together with their age-mates and forcing them to march in lockstep through the curriculum.

Instead, we must emancipate them from the confines of rigid age-based grading, allow and encourage them to progress as quickly as they are able, and oblige schools to compete for the privilege of serving them.

Odds are you haven't heard much about it, maybe because of the deafening health care clamor, but it would do something pretty big, ending the 44-year-old Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program--which uses federal bucks to back tens of billions of dollars of student loans from private lenders--and replacing it with lending straight from Uncle Sam. In other words, it would destroy what little chance there was of student loans being constrained at all by economic realities.

"First, we saw a drive toward complete government takeover of our nation's health care system," lamented ranking Education and Labor Committee member Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., during deliberation over the bill. "Now, we see government seizing control of student lending, forcing the private sector out and welcoming in a mountain of public debt."

Contrary to what Kline suggests, guaranteed lending is about as close to a free market as a biplane is to the Starship Enterprise. Under FFEL, Washington guarantees lenders--including Fannie's cousin, Sallie--a profit on student loans, reimbursing them almost completely on defaults and paying big subsidies. Making matters worse, legislation was enacted last year that lets the feds more or less directly finance FFEL loans if lenders can't access sufficient funds through private capital markets.

So SAFRA's major problem isn't that it would kill guaranteed lending. It's that it would replace it with federal direct lending--which currently amounts to about a quarter of FFEL's size--and completely cut out private capital markets, making Uncle Sam your sole choice of lender. With the government acting as lender, there is no reason for economic realities to constrain student loans.

This is especially troubling because too many people are pursuing degrees. About a third of college students take at least one remedial course, only 56% graduate within six years and 29% of Americans have bachelor's degrees even though only a quarter of American jobs require them.

Another sad consequence of moving entirely to direct lending is that it would likely crowd out what little non-governmental lending currently occurs. Many lenders would likely have to shutter their non-government arms if they couldn't continue participating in much bigger, federal lending operations.

All that said, this is hardly the destruction of capitalism. But then there's what this bill wouldn't do.

SAFRA supporters assert that transitioning from guaranteed to direct lending would save $87 billion over 10 years. That is doubtful. The cost of quintupling the volume of direct lending is, at best, tough to predict, and bureaucracies have a strong, inherent tendency to grow. Still, there should be some savings. But SAFRA wouldn't give it to taxpayers, or dedicate most of it to paying down the nation's staggering deficit. Instead, any saving would be spent.

Among numerous recipients, SAFRA would direct $47 billion to Pell grants and require that grant amounts rise annually at the rate of inflation-plus-one-point. That would assist low-income students better than federal loans, but also set an ever-rising floor under which schools would never lower tuition prices, negating its value.

Next, SAFRA would send about $9.5 billion to community colleges; $2.5 billion would go toward improving facilities, and the remainder toward grants intended to push schools to improve their program-completion and job-placement rates. But don't get your hopes up: Community colleges could qualify for the money simply by providing "student support services" and implementing "other innovative programs"; that's legislative jargon for "free money."

And much to the ivory tower's chagrin, Congress has other groups it wants to pay off. So $8 billion is slated to go to early-childhood education and $4 billion to repairing and modernizing not just public college buildings, but elementary and secondary schools as well.

Finally, roughly $10 billion is supposed to go toward reducing the federal government's deficit, a ludicrously small figure considering that it recently surpassed $1 trillion for fiscal year 2009 and the SAFRA bill supposedly creates savings without causing current beneficiaries any pain. If all the proclaimed savings don't appear, the last two words in "Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility" become an even bigger joke.

All of which explains why SAFRA is flying below the radar. Yes, bigger things are going on in Washington. In the end, what seems like a transformative bill might be nothing but business as usual. But for students, "business as usual" is not affordable any longer.

Given that many states have already instituted pre-K programs, or are committed to doing so, this paper proposes model early education legislation aimed at maximizing their chances for longterm success. The Early Education Tax Credit aims to sustain any potential preschool benefits and establish a solid academic foundation for later success. The program would improve the quality and efficiency of preschool options by harnessing market forces and would pay for itself by using savings generated from the migration of students from public to private schools in grades K–4.

The Early Education Tax Credit approach is unique in meeting the demands of activists for expanded access to high-quality preschool, meeting the needs of children and the preferences of their parents, and meeting the goal of increased educational freedom — all while keeping the budgetary impact low or positive.

• Policy Analysis no. 641 with appendices on the model legislation (PDF, 874KB )
• Policy Analysis no. 641 without appendices (PDF, 744KB )
Appendices on the model legislation:
• Appendix A: The Early Education Tax Credit Act (PDF, 78KB )
• Appendix B: The EETC in Action (PDF, 32KB )

However well-intentioned, their effort isn't just futile; it's also counterproductive.

Far from being an engine of wealth creation, the education system is bleeding the economy to death. The U.S. spends 2.3 times as much per pupil in real, inflation-adjusted dollars as it spent in 1970, but the return on this ballooning investment has been less than nothing.

Student achievement at the end of high school has been flat for nearly 40 years, according to a recent study by the Education Department, while the graduation rate fell over the same period, according to a report by James Heckman, a Nobel laureate economist.

If the efficiency of U.S. public schooling had merely remained at its 1970 level, the country would enjoy the equivalent of an annual $300 billion tax cut.

The productivity collapse in education is more than staggering; it's unparalleled. Can you name any other service or product that has gotten worse and less affordable over the past two generations? The reason you can't is that no other field is organized as a state-run monopoly.

The general argument against monopolies is well understood and accepted. A concrete case study might drive home the point that monopolies are just as harmful in education as in other fields.

Markets Vs. Monopolies

Earlier this year, I sifted through the 2008-09 budget for the District of Columbia, summing up all K-12 education spending, not counting charter schools. It comes to just under $1.3 billion.

The latest audited enrollment count for the district is 44,681, putting per-pupil spending in the nation's capital at about $29,000. Meanwhile, fewer than half of the students who enter the ninth grade in D.C. go on to graduate four years later.

To put that profligacy in perspective, the private schools serving D.C.'s 1,700 voucher students charge an average tuition of $6,600, according to a recent Education Department. After three years in the program, voucher students read more than two school years ahead of a randomized control group of their public school peers.

That is, the voucher program yields substantially better results at less than one-quarter the cost.

For those unfamiliar with the D.C. voucher program, it is the one that President Obama has decided to phase out, despite his stated goal of pursuing education reform that's effective and efficient.

The massive productivity advantage of private-sector education is not unique to Washington, D.C.

For the Journal of School Choice, I tabulated the international scientific research comparing public and private-sector schooling. Across time, countries and outcome measures, private provision outshines public in the overwhelming majority of cases.

More important, the least regulated, most marketlike education systems show the greatest margin of superiority over monopoly schooling. In literature on education, 59 findings show that markets outperform school monopolies. Not a single study has found a monopoly school system to be as efficient as a market system.

Free The Schools

Once upon a time, America could afford to sustain a parasitic school monopoly, fecklessly throwing billions more dollars at it decade after decade despite its failure to improve. That time has passed. Now that the economy is in a deep recession, the perpetuation of that monopoly puts our economic future at unacceptable risk.

Many policy proposals are on the table that could inject market forces back into the field of education, bringing to it the same long-term productivity growth that has been the norm in other fields.

Some states already have such programs operating on a tiny scale, such as Illinois' modest tax credits for families' own education costs, and the tax credits in Florida, Arizona and Pennsylvania for donations to K-12 tuition-assistance organizations serving low-income families.

The first states to combine and expand these programs on a grand scale will become magnets for businesses in search of better-educated workers and lower taxes, leading to an economic and educational boom. The states that don't will continue to burn in the budgetary hell created by monopoly schooling, needlessly jeopardizing their children's economic and educational futures.

It's time to bring the field of education into the fold of the free enterprise system.

What all but four governors signed onto is the Common Core State Standards Initiative, a joint effort by the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers to create national reading and mathematics standards. But the movement didn't start there – it's been around for years, powered by the simplistic notion that one national bar must be better than fifty state standards.

"We need national standards, and assessments to measure them," U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently opined. "The idea of having 50 states designing their own standards is crazy."

Crazy? Really?

There's no compelling evidence that national standards are the key to excellence. What advocates typically point to is that almost every nation that beats us on international comparisons has national standards. But, then, almost every nation that does worse than we do has such standards. And Canada has no national standards but does very well on international exams.

How about the theoretical case?

There certainly isn't a good one based on how standards would be set. Whether done by states alone, states together, or Washington, the decisions would ultimately fall to politicians, people whose primary concern is their own political success, and that means placating the folks with the greatest motivation and ability to influence education politics: the teachers, administrators, and others whose livelihoods come through the schools. And those people, rationally, would prefer to have the lowest possible standards imposed on them.

That said, there are several advantages to having individual states in charge, though they are slight because the main pressure at all levels is to keep standards low.

When each state is responsible for its own standards there is at least some pressure to keep benchmarks high; caring parents, or companies in search of a better educated workforce, might gravitate toward high-standard states. And when states stand alone, their leaders can't adopt poor standards and use the fact that they are common as an excuse.

Perhaps most important, in a diverse nation it's simply more logical to have multiple standards. Children have very diverse aptitudes and interests, making it ludicrous to believe that they should all be moving at the exact same pace, at the exact same age, on the exact same subjects.

Of course, much of the recent impetus behind national standards has little to do with evidence, or any sort of inherent national-standards superiority. It's about No Child Left Behind, the federal education law that perfectly illustrates how political reality creates educational folly.

NCLB, for a refresher, acts tough by requiring all students to be "proficient" in mathematics and reading by 2014, but tells states to define what "proficiency" means. That practically begs states to set proficiency at rock-bottom levels, keeping federal bucks coming and schools out of hot water.

The national standards crowd, of course, says that NCLB's problem is that it touts a single goal without setting a single standard. But that's just a symptom of the law's underlying disease: Like all laws, NCLB was designed first and foremost to help the politicians who passed it, and that makes protecting politically potent special interests paramount. So even if NCLB had set a single standard, it would have had no teeth.

But if national standards don't offer any real hope, what are we to do?

What Governor Sanford has been urging for years: implement real public and private school choice. Let parents choose from among independent schools able to specialize in the needs and desires of unique children, and watch competition push standards ever-higher.

Unlike government standards-setting, this makes sense in theory. It's also backed by proof.

All but one of the ten random-assignment studies – the research "gold standard" – that have been conducted on choice programs have shown that at least some students whose parents could choose did better academically than those whose parents couldn't, and none did worse. The one outlier showed no significant difference between choosers and non-choosers.

Similarly, an exhaustive review of research comparing education systems around the world conducted by the Cato Institute's Andrew Coulson revealed that the more market-like the education system – the more consumer choice and provider freedom – the better the performance.

Finally, British researcher James Tooley reveals in his new book The Beautiful Tree that entrepreneurial private schools are not only abundant in the poorest villages and slums of the world, but are educating students much more effectively than are free public schools. Of course if they didn't, they'd go out of business.

So while the rest of the country follows the national standards craze, South Carolina is wisely steering clear of it. But the Palmetto State could do much better. It could finally implement full school choice, and be on its way to truly powerful education reform.

During the campaign, Obama said that if vouchers worked he would support them. The Education Department recently revealed that students who joined the voucher program in 2004 are now more than two school years ahead of their public school peers in reading.

In his initial budget, Obama declared that when it comes to education, we cannot waste dollars on programs that are inefficient. Average tuition at the voucher schools is $6,620, while the District is spending $26,555 per pupil this year on K-12 education.

So contrary to his promises, the president has sacrificed a program he knows to be efficient and successful in order to appease the public school employee unions. If he will do this for the NEA, he will do anything.

America finally has an "education president," and his name is Dennis Van Roekel.

Obama's overwhelming education focus has been on getting roughly $100 billion directed to education through the American Recover and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). But he and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, haven't just turned on the money hose. They've poured on the rhetoric as well.

"The time for holding us — holding ourselves accountable is here," the President told the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in March. "What's required is not simply new investments, but new reforms. It's time to expect more from our students. It's time to start rewarding good teachers, stop making excuses for bad ones. It's time to demand results from government at every level."

That all sounds great. But how do you make all that good stuff really happen?

The first thing you don't do is bail out massive inefficiency and failure, but that's exactly what Obama's ceiling-shattering "investment" is doing. Spending billions upon billions to save jobs in a system that's seen huge staffing increases, skyrocketing per-pupil expenditures, but student-achievement stagnation is not forcing reform, it's rewarding failure.

Ah, but there are reform requirements attached to all that dough! States have to promise to address teacher-quality issues, establish student-progress data systems, set "rigorous" standards, and help "turn around" bad schools. And states that seem to do a good job will be eligible for a slice of the $4.35 billion "Race-to-the-Top" fund controlled by Secretary Duncan.

But we've been hearing tough talk like this for decades and not a lot has gotten better. Is there much reason to believe that Obama will finally make the jump from rhetoric to real reform?

Nope. When government runs the schools political power is all that matters, and that resides with teachers, administrators, and other public-school employees. They have by far the most money and motivation to engage in education politics, and what's best for them is to get as much funding, and as little accountability, as possible. Considering how much cash Obama has already given them, the President seems well under their control.

Thankfully, there is a way to change the system so that power no longer resides with the very people politicians are supposed to be holding accountable. Instead of giving tax dollars to public schools, let parents control the cash. Enable parents to choose schools, and force school employees to respond to them. It's real reform that's been shown to work

Unfortunately, in his first one-hundred days Obama failed to fight for just such meaningful reform. The president did nothing to defend Washington DC's school voucher program, which provides real school choice for 1,700 education-starved kids. Indeed, what his administration did was worse than nothing: it buried a report showing vouchers' success just as Congress was debating the program's fate, and barred 200 children who had won vouchers from using them in the coming school year.

"It didn't make sense to me to put more students in the program," explained Secretary Duncan.

But here's what really doesn't make sense: spending unprecedented billions to save a hopeless system while letting real reform die. Unfortunately, such has been Obama's first 100 days.

The president is proposing education policies that are neither the most effective nor the most efficient means of achieving his laudable goals. He plans to expand Head Start and double funding for Early Head Start — federal programs aimed at preschool children. Though the president appears convinced that such programs can save many times what is spent on them, the evidence for that view is weak.

Even economist James Heckman, whose work has influenced President Obama's thinking on the subject, is far more guarded. In 2007, Heckman identified three small preschool programs from the 1960s and 1970s that studies suggest have more than paid for themselves in lower subsequent welfare and criminal justice costs incurred by their participants. But Heckman cautioned that "a much more careful analysis of the effects of scaling up the model programs... has to be undertaken before these estimates can be considered definitive."

His caveat is well justified. The "Perry preschool" study which yielded the highest estimated return enrolled just 123 children. There is good reason to doubt that it can be replicated by the federal government nationwide. A large body of research on other Head Start programs finds that while they sometimes offer short term academic benefits, these generally disappear by the elementary school grades. The largest review of this literature, published by the Department of Health and Human Services, looked at more than 200 studies and concluded that there was no lasting academic advantage to participation in Head Start.

If spending on Head Start and other federal education programs had produced widespread, significant benefits since their inception in the mid 1960s, overall student achievement and graduation rates should have risen over time. The achievement gap between children of high-school dropouts and those of college graduates should have narrowed as well, because most federal education programs are targeted at disadvantaged students. None of these things occurred.

According to the National Assessment of Education Progress, the best available measure of academic trends, U.S. seventeen-year-olds score no better in math or reading today than they did nearly forty years ago. In science they perform slightly worse. The gap between children of dropouts and children of college graduates is unchanged in reading and science, and has decreased by only one percent in math. According to Heckman himself, the high school graduation rate peaked a few years after Head Start was passed and has declined by four or five points since then.

For these disappointing results, the federal government has spent roughly $1.85 trillion dollars on education programs since 1965. So while some small local preschool programs may have generated lasting, significant effects, the federal government cannot be counted on to reproduce those effects on a national scale.

If the president really wants effective, efficient programs, he should look at Florida's scholarship donation tax credit. Under this program, businesses can contribute to non-profit scholarship organizations that subsidize private k-12 tuition for needy families. For each dollar they donate, the businesses owe one fewer dollar in taxes. Last December, Florida's own government accountability office found that this education tax credit saves $1.49 for every dollar it reduces tax revenue. That is three times the largest return on investment for the preschool programs cited by Heckman —and it comes from a policy that is already serving 23,000 students statewide.

Giving at-risk children access to private schooling has been repeatedly shown to improve their educational attainment. Economist Derek Neal has found that Catholic schools raise the graduation rate of urban African Americans by 26 percentage points, and more than double their chances of graduating from college – even after controlling for differences in student background between the sectors. Half a dozen other scientific studies echo Neal's findings. Researchers from the U.S. and abroad also point to higher test scores for students when they attend private rather than public schools, after controlling for student and family background, as I report in a forthcoming global literature review in the Journal of School Choice.

While it would not be constitutional for the president to pursue a national school choice program, he could greatly accelerate the growth and adoption of such programs around the country by throwing his support behind them. He would not be the first Democrat to do so. Florida's scholarship tax credit was expanded last year with the support of one third of the state's Democratic caucus.

The D.C. voucher death sentence is a disappointment for the movement and a tragedy for the children. However, the elite reaction to this school-choice defeat reveals how far school choice has advanced. Support for school choice has mainstreamed, and it's only a matter of time before the political barriers are brought down.

The fate of the D.C. voucher program captured widespread attention in recent weeks as news of the Congressional hit job became known. And rather than a strict conservative/liberal face-off on this traditionally free-market issue, we saw a surprising amount of school choice support from mainstream, even center-left, sources.

The Washington Post, for instance, led early with an editorial denouncing the poorly concealed effort by Congressional Democrats to kill school choice in the District. In a second editorial, they asked that Democrats save their "phony concern about the children" and admit it's all about politics and paying off the teachers unions.

The Chicago Tribune followed with full-throated support of D.C. vouchers. A paper that expressed, in its endorsement of Obama, "tremendous confidence in his intellectual rigor, his moral compass and his ability to make sound, thoughtful, careful decisions" notes the rank hypocrisy of a President Obama who sends his own children to an expensive private school while kowtowing to the unions in his opposition to school choice for those without independent means.

In a surprising turn, even Arne Duncan, secretary of education in Obama's administration, publicly opposed taking vouchers away from kids in the program.

Elite opinion matters; it is the foodstuff of mass public opinion. And it is of particular importance when the composition of elite communication begins to shift.

The academic guru of mass opinion, University of California Berkley professor John Zaller, explains that public political opinion can, to a large extent, be explained by the flow of elite messages. Public opinion shifts or settles in response to the relative intensity and stability of opposing flows of liberal and conservative communications. When elites are polarized, the public polarizes according to political awareness and values.

When elites unite on mainstream issues, the public's response is relatively nonideological and lopsided. School choice is progressively mainstreaming, slowly but surely moving from a polarized elite debate to one where the intensity and support is weighted in favor of school choice.

When an issue that used to be considered free-market fringe is embraced as a moral litmus test for politicians by liberal editorial boards, the issue-argument has been won. That's certainly not to say the policy war has been won, but an important battle toward realizing that goal has been.

The opposition's intensity and moral certitude is bleeding out one program at a time. School choice is no longer an abstract proposition; faces and lives are attached to the 24 private school-choice programs in 14 states and the District of Columbia. In the past four years, four education tax-credit programs have passed that serve at least low-income children.

School choice is popular and becoming more familiar to the public every year. An Education Next/Harvard PEPG survey found that even 53 percent of current and former public school employees support education tax credits and only 25 percent oppose them.

And support for choice, especially education tax credits, is becoming increasingly bipartisan. Florida's donation tax-credit program became law in 2001 with the vote of a single Democratic legislator. Last year, a third of statehouse Democrats, half the black caucus and the entire Hispanic caucus voted to expand that program.

New or expanded tax-credit initiatives were signed into law by Democratic governors in Arizona, Iowa and Pennsylvania in 2006. That same year, a Democrat-controlled legislature in Rhode Island passed a donation tax credit and a Democratic governor and legislature in Iowa expanded the tax-credit dollar cap by 50 percent in 2007.

Last year, six states moved a school choice bill through both chambers and five more passed a bill through one chamber. Georgia passed a universal donation tax credit program, and Louisiana passed both a voucher program and an education tax deduction.

School-choice opponents might have won the battle over vouchers in the District, but they are losing the larger war. They have inadvertently revealed what's truly at stake; not funding issues or public school ideology, but our promise to all children of a fair shot at success in life.

Choice opponents are on the wrong side of right and the wrong side of history.

Reading First will probably be best remembered for its conflict-of-interest scandal, in which paid advisors to the Department of Education profited from the policies they recommended. But if education reformers heed the lessons of Reading First's demise, it could end up doing more good for American schools than even its advocates imagined.

On its surface, the program seemed promising. The structured phonics methods it was intended to promote certainly have a proven track record. The National Reading Panel, created during the Clinton Administration, analyzed scores of studies and concluded that "systematic phonics instruction produces significant benefits for students in kindergarten through 6th grade."

So it came as a shock to proponents last year when a federal study revealed that Reading First had failed to improve student literacy. But as I noted in May 2007, it was naive to imagine that "a bureaucratic school system... could be made to adopt and consistently implement effective educational practices on a vast scale."

The fundamental problem is that nationally replicating and sustaining effective methods is tough. Very tough. Unless all the participants are committed to (and well trained in) those methods, they won't implement them effectively or persevere with them over time.

Countless studies have lamented how education methods that worked wonders when directly overseen by their developers proved to be unreliable when brought to scale. This pattern was already well known back in 1993, when president Clinton remarked at a White House event that the "people in this room who have devoted their lives to education are constantly plagued by the fact that nearly every problem has been solved by somebody somewhere, and yet we can't seem to replicate it everywhere else."

The failure of Reading First fits neatly into this mould.

But there are programs that have shattered it. From its inception in 1954, the Kumon chain of math tutoring centers has scaled up from 1 student in Japan to 4 million students in 45 countries. Other tutoring firms, such as Huntington and Sylvan Learning Systems, have also scaled up successfully.

What explains these dramatically different outcomes? Tutoring firms enjoy something that public schools lack: the combination of freedoms and incentives essential for replicating and sustaining success. Prospective tutors are free to apply for a job with whomever they wish. No government credential is required. Tutoring chains are free to hire whomever they want, to lay out their own training and performance standards, and to dismiss those who cannot meet them. Both tutors and managers have incentives to do their best, since their livelihoods depend on it. Every tutoring firm is constantly trying to find ways of improving its services, lowering its costs, or both, to avoid being squeezed out of the marketplace by its competitors.

That is the first lesson of Reading First: no matter how good a curriculum or method is, it cannot be reliably disseminated nationwide without the freedoms and incentives of the marketplace. After 150 years of experience with state-run schooling, we can point to a long succession of pedagogical fads, and to some genuine if isolated successes, but nothing to rival the sustained scale-up of the leading tutoring firms.

The second lesson of Reading First is that the White House and Congress change hands on a regular basis, and the new occupants often have different preferences on education policy. It was a virtual certainty that Democrats would kill Reading First upon taking power, whether or not the program was successful, because they perceive it as a fundamentally conservative, traditionalist program. It was a triumph of wishful thinking over political realism for conservatives to imagine that the methods they wanted to promote in public schools would survive their tenure in power.

The rise and fall of Reading First should stand as a cautionary tale for would-be education reformers of all political stripes. Today's legislators should remember that they will not always hold the balance of power, and so politicizing pedagogical methods and curricula is a recipe for an endless tug-of-war over our schools. They should also recognize that no bureaucratic system will ever be able to innovate and scale-up effective methods in the way that competitive enterprises do on a daily basis. Wishing otherwise will not make it so.

Of the 1,700 students, starting in kindergarten, in this private-school voucher program, 90 percent are black and 9 percent are Hispanic.

First the House and then the Senate inserted into the $410-billion omnibus spending bill language to eliminate the $7,500 annual scholarships for these poor children after the next school year.

A key executioner in the Senate of the OSP was Sen. Dick Durbin, Illinois Democrat. I have written admiringly of Durbin's concern for human rights abroad. But what about education rights for minority children in the nation's capital?

Andrew J. Coulson, director of the Cato Institute (where I am a senior fellow) supplied the answer when he wrote: "Because they saw it as a threat to their political power, Democrats in Washington appear willing to extinguish the dreams of a few thousand poor kids to protect their political base."

Teachers unions are a major part of that base. Among those demanding that Congress kill the voucher scholarship program was the largest teachers union, the National Education Association.

Two of the kids affected by the action, Sarah and James Parker, attend Washington's prestigious Sidwell Friends School. Their scholarships will end with the next school year. The classmates they'll be leaving will include Sasha and Malia Obama. The Obama children, of course, do not need voucher money to avoid Washington D.C.'s failing and sometimes dangerous public schools.

As New York Times columnist David Brooks noted, the congressional Democrats even refused to grandfather in the kids already in the voucher program, "so those children will be ripped away from their mentors and friends ... ." President Obama, he added, "has, in fact, been shamefully quiet about this."

Doesn't Obama at least have something to say publicly to those children and their parents when his own Secretary of Education Arne Duncan opposed the congressional shutdown of Opportunity Scholarships?

Said Duncan (New York Post, March 6): "I don't think it makes sense to take kids out of a school where they're happy and safe and satisfied and learning. I think those kids need to stay in their school."

Duncan suggests that donors provide financial assistance through graduation to those kids stripped of their Opportunity Scholarships. Perhaps our "education president," from his continuing royalties from the sale of his books such as "The Audacity of Hope," might help out.

One of the recipients of the Opportunity Scholarships, teenager Carlos Battle (VoicesOfSchoolChoice.org) said that in a D.C. public school she'd "have to think more about protecting myself than about learning."

As for the Sidwell Friends School, its headmaster, Bruce Stewart, told the Wall Street Journal that the school has welcomed the OSP students. He said that when parents get more educational choices for their children, their kids and the whole community benefit.

Virginia Walden-Ford, executive director of D.C. Parents for School Choice, offered an excellent suggestion for members of the White House press corps:

"I'd like to see a reporter stand up at one of those nationally televised press conferences and ask President Obama what he thinks about what his own party is doing to keep two innocent kids from attending the same school where he sends his?"

I wish Jay Leno had thought to ask Obama that question.

In a March 2 editorial, the Washington Post — not a conservative newspaper —summed up the Congressional Democrats' scholarship shutdown in these words: "It's about politics and the stranglehold the teachers unions have on the Democratic Party. Why else has so much time and effort gone into trying to kill off what, in the grand scheme of government spending, is a tiny program?"