Public Education’s Silver Bullet
School reformer Terry Moe argues that technology will finally accomplish what vouchers never could.
With the public-school documentary tearjerker Waiting for Superman stunning audiences from coast to coast, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty losing his re-election bid largely because of his support for education reform, and NBC devoting an entire week of prime-time coverage to the nation’s ongoing K–12 crisis, many Americans are newly focused on the negative impact teachers unions are having on student performance. Terry M. Moe has been considering the problem for more than two decades now.
Moe, a professor of political science at Stanford University, has been one the most intrepid critics of the unions ever since his first book, Politics, Markets, and American Schools, came out in 1990. Co-authored with John Chubb, the book offered a devastating account of how unions thwart reform and trap children in a dysfunctional education system. Chubb and Moe made an emphatic early plea for school vouchers and parental choice. “We believe existing institutions cannot solve the problem because they are the problem,” they wrote.
The book “rocked the education world,” as the Chicago Tribune put it in 1990. The conservative