Cracking the Code on “Villainous” School Choice

Yesterday, over at The Huffington Post, education blogger Dan Brown – no relation to The Da Vinci Code’s author – posted a little homage to Democratic presidential candidates who have repudiated the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), toned down calls for teacher merit pay, and declared that all educators should be paid more. In other words, Mr. Brown praised candidates who boldly offered the same old, failed, “more money, thank you,” approaches to education reform we’ve been taking for decades. (NCLB is directly from that mold, but that’s not why Brown objected to it.) Indeed, Brown wrote that any presidential candidate who touted such bankrupt ideas is “inherently a champion of social justice.”

The absurdity of such over-the-top accolades, of course, deserves criticism. More galling, though, is how Brown characterized reforms that would lead to actual, transformative change:

If a candidate abdicates his responsibility to public education by offering superficial band-aids, or even worse, villainous profit-driven proposals like vouchers and privatization, then his true colors are seen.

"Villainous" school choice? Oh, come now, Mr. Brown! Advocating policies that have kept millions of poor kids trapped in bad schools while spending ever-greater sums of taxpayer money and protecting even atrocious teachers is the pinnacle of nobility, but parent-empowering school choice is villainous? It’s evil to let parents and children out of jail by enabling them to make their own educational decisions, but enlightened to keep them locked up and pay their jailers more?

One might not like school choice, but calling it villainous? Such dramatic, black-and-white characterizations might work for the other Dan Brown, but when it comes to educational reality, they just don’t make any sense.