USA Today is Confused on Vouchers: It’s demand in a free market that drives supply.

USA Today knocks vouchers today on the basis of an unbelievably maddening canard about school choice in general and vouchers in particular:

Vouchers, which give students public dollars that can be used to pay tuition at private schools, are supposed to promote competition and improve schools. But they have never flourished as a national school reform because their logic contains a flaw. Vouchers don't create new, high quality schools.

Economics 101 would be helpful for the folks at USA Today. Vouchers aren’t meant to create new schools. They are meant to moderate the ills created by a government-run monopoly by marginally reducing the penalty parents pay for choosing private education.

It is difficult to get new businesses to enter the kind of market that characterizes existing school choice programs: entry barriers are huge, the potential customer base is small, profit is small or non-existent (most private schools are non-profit), and the very existence of the market in question is subject to frequent elections and political whims.

That’s not a recipe for entrepreneurship and skyrocketing supply. But supply has increased substantially in Milwaukee and elsewhere despite the severe handicaps of that education market.

And Utah’s law would have created the largest education market to date, although still restricted and at a massive disadvantage to public schools that receive much more funding per-pupil.