Mitch Daniels' Surprising Defense of the Public School System
Now that I've criticized major elements of Mitch Daniels' education agenda, I thought I'd highlight by far the most interesting statement he made at AEI today, because it breaks in a significant way with typical conservative, free-market school reform rhetoric:
"You cannot often enough affirm your commitment to the public schools. As I said, 90 percent of Indiana kids are in public schools today. I think even with the new option that's in place [private school vouchers], it'll always be close to that. I really believe that; I would be surprised if it's not. Therefore, there's a huge responsibility, and we should all share a commitment, to make the public schools better all the time. Semantically, it's probably important to talk about school improvement. Reform means different things to different people."
There's a humility here that is typically lacking among proponents of private school vouchers and other free-
