Sara Mead over at The Quick and The Ed laments the one-note, “pro-voucher conservative insistence that choice will solve any and all educational problem one can imagine*,” including what she thinks is a phony “boy crisis.” The asterisk there is for sex ed – she is under the misapprehension that supporters of educational freedom want to make an exception here to force all children to be taught “abstinence-only.”
I really wonder whether Mead understands what choice in education means … it certainly doesn’t mean a state-mandated curriculum, conservative or liberal. A state mandated curriculum means no effective choice. That’s what we have right now, and choice in education is the way to change it.
The larger point here, though, is found in the utterly exhausted trope Mead trots out: our education problems can’t be solved with a “silver bullet” (she uses the hammer-nail metaphor, but you get the point).
Why don’t I try my hand at this: A single disease can cause many symptoms.
Brain cancer may cause debilitating headaches, but the cancer is the cause and the headache is a symptom of that disease. Some treatments of breast cancer might cause heart failure, but the cancer is still the root problem. If there’s no cancer, none of these problems exist.
The major educational problems in this country – poor student achievement, the achievement gap, low efficiency, high and climbing costs, social conflict, even discipline and safety – are not independent of each other. These problems are symptoms caused by the same disease: a government controlled and operated educational system.
Mead doesn’t understand how the mechanism of educational freedom can solve specific educational problems, and that’s too much to fully explain in a blog posting. A better way of putting it is that educational freedom is a mechanism that allows specific educational problems to be solved. This is the core difference between market and command and control systems.
I am not saying that in a system of educational freedom we would wake to find a Lake Wobegon America, where all children are above average, education costs nothing, and social ills have disappeared.
I am saying that the serious problems prompting all of our policy debates will be greatly mitigated by educational choice, and to an extent greater than under any other possible reform.
Government monopolies are very poor providers of all services, but they are especially poor providers of something as nuanced, personal, and value-laden as education.
The education industrial complex, Big Ed, is the disease. Educational freedom is the cure.