Frederick M. Hess's Blog
Even Cows Need Care and Feeding
by Frederick M. Hess • Apr 15, 2010 at 9:23 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
 Print |  Send |  RSS |
As I noted yesterday, I think my good friend Kevin Carey is mistaken in arguing that vouchers in and of themselves are a recipe for dramatically changing the incentives in education. Look, to take just one example, recognize that non-profits unable to offer discounts to families really have little or no cause to focus on squeezing down the cost of their services. Choice-based reform (vouchers, charters, what-have-you) certainlycan help to profoundly change the incentives in schooling, but that depends entirely upon questions of program design, regulation, and context.
It's a mistake to imagine that choice creates a self-executing change in conditions. Even if one graduated from Milwaukee's "half-measure" program to "full-on" vouchers, it's hardly a given that the ecosystem and scaffolding that underlies dynamic sectors would spring into place. When it comes to innovation and dynamism, the differences between Silicon Valley and Spring Valley, U.S.A., aren't that Silicon Valley is "freer," but that it (like Boston or Austin) has acquired over the decades an ecosystem of researchers, investors, social capital, networks, expertise, and the rest that can help surface, fuel, and sustain high-quality ventures. Experience with school choice (or, say, the AT&T divestiture back in the 1980s) has made clear that these ecosystems and
