You write: (Ponderosa): ” ‘I believe that we as a people ought to take responsibility for what kids learn; we shouldn’t leave it to chance or the whims of individual parents.’
And the pony should come with a prince or princess.”

You again raise an issue which four participants (Tracy, MThead, me, and now you) have tried to get defenders of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel’s exclusive position in receipt of the taxpayers’ K-12 education subsidy to address. Their silence is deafening. It does not take 12 years to teach a normal child to read and compute. Much vocational training occurs more effectively on the job than in a classroom. State provision of History and Civics instruction is a threat to democracy, just as State operation of newspapers would be (is, in totalitarian countries). People do not become more intelligent, more altruistic, better-informed, or more capable (except in their enhanced access to tools of violence) when they enter the State’s employ. Quite the contrary; guns attract thugs. So why imagine that State operation of school will enhance school system performance?
In The Open Society andits Enemies, Karl Popper observed that academics are often “dictators in piocket edition”.

Eduardo Zambrano
Formal Models of Authority: Introduction and Political Economy Applications
Rationality and Society, May 1999; 11: 115 – 138.

“Aside from the important issue of how it is that a ruler may economize on communication, contracting and coercion costs, this leads to an interpretation of the state that cannot be contractarian in nature: citizens would not empower a ruler to solve collective action problems in any of the models discussed, for the ruler would always be redundant and costly. The results support a view of the state that is eminently predatory, (the ? MK.) case in which whether the collective actions problems are solved by the state or not depends on upon whether this is consistent with the objectives and opportunities of those with the (natural) monopoly of violence in society. This conclusion is also reached in a model of a predatory state by Moselle and Polak (1997). How the theory of economic policy changes in light of this interpretation is an important question left for further work.”

Are you arguing that most parents are too stupid to make good school choices?

Yes, I think most parents who would bother to make a choice would take into consideration the perceived quality of the school. It might not be the only consideration. It might not be the one which in the end determines which school. Perhaps the parent wants a school near their place of employment or a school with a great football program.

The point is they will bring some sort of judgement to bear on the choice. and I’m taking an educated guess that many parents would turn to the same data we use now when deciding where to buy our homes.

And no, that is not why I’m for school choice. I consider school choice to be a constitutional right. Whether I like it or not. I just happen to like it.

And the pony should come with a prince or princess.

We disagree about the evidence. Read the ppost in Jay Greene’s blog to which I linked (above). The preponderance of evidence supports statistically significant improvement in standardized test performance with vouchers. Further, the same level of standardized test performance at lower cost is an improvement. This was not “cherry picking” (like “disingenuous”, “cherry picking” is a gone-to-college way to call someone “liar”). Greene collected all the random-assignment studies he could locate.

One large cost of the US State-monopoly school system which appears on no balance sheet is the opportunity cost to taxpayers of the foregone evolutionary improvement in educational systems improvement.

Malcolm – I think you are looking at the “working paper” version of the paper on Sweden’s vouchers. I’m looking at the one that was actually published. It’s not clear to me that they used TIMSS, since they say they used two small parts of “a standardized national achievement test”. (pg. 361 of the published version) TIMSS is a standardized international achievement test. I haven’t read the paper cover to cover, though, so maybe they clarify at some point.

As for the voucher research, let’s not do too much cherry picking. There’s quite a lot of research of voucher experiments in the U.S. that show either no gains or only very slight gains after voucher implementation:

On Milwaukee
On Cleveland
On vouchers generally
I’d mentioned D.C. research previously.

I actually don’t feel particularly strongly about vouchers one way or the other, and wouldn’t strongly object to their implementation, but there’s just no evidence they’d improve educational outcomes much. It’s a big mistake for voucher advocates to premise their advocacy on major improvements to education quality, because vouchers won’t deliver on those promises. There are much stronger arguments to be made about cost effectiveness, which actually *are* supported by the bulk of the data. Once you look at the totality of the research, however, it’s clear that vouchers in the U.S. either do not improve educational outcomes, or improve them only very slightly. I don’t see the point of hyping them up.