Beyond choice

School choice is not enough to transform education, writes Sol Stern in the new edition of City Journal. Stern once thought that choice really was “a panacea.”

Looking back from today’s vantage point, it is clear that the school choice movement has been very good for the disadvantaged. Public and privately funded voucher programs have liberated hundreds of thousands of poor minority children from failing public schools. The movement has also reshaped the education debate. Not only vouchers, but also charter schools, tuition tax credits, mayoral control, and other reforms are now on the table as alternatives to bureaucratic, special-interest-choked big-city school systems.

But choice may have hit the wall, Stern writes. There’s little evidence competition is doing much to improve big-city school systems. He thinks the school choice movement needs “a realistic Plan B for the millions of urban students who will remain stuck in terrible public schools.” Instruction is the key to Plan B, he suggests, contrasting Massachusetts, which has seen significant education gains, with New York City.

The Massachusetts miracle doesn’t prove that a standard curriculum and a focus on effective instruction will always produce academic progress. Nor does the flawed New York City experiment in competition mean that we should cast aside all market incentives in education. But what has transpired in these two places provides an important lesson: education reformers ought to resist unreflective support for elegant-sounding theories, derived from the study of economic activity, that don’t produce verifiable results in the classroom.

Via Education Gadfly, which also includes a reflection on the tendency of consumers to equate price with quality: Are high-priced private schools the equivalent of Two Buck Chuck?