Power and Order
It's School Choice Week and all the usuals have to check in, and I've been trying to read the work of the more serious choice advocates. And that would have to include Andy Smarick.
Smarick's entry at the Rordhma Institute blog is School Choice: The end of the beginning in which he would like to suggest that charter-choice systems are a done deal, and he has a lesson from his years of pushing choice that he wants to share:
But probably the most important lesson I’ve learned over the last fifteen years—the reason why school choice progress moves so slowly—is this: An education system without school choice makes perfect sense from the point of view of central administrators.
Thas's probably true in the sense that it's true to say that I married my wife because she smells nice-- it's true, but a rather incomplete picture. Or to phrase Smarick's observation another way-- we have the traditional pubic system we have because the trained professionals who have devoted their adult live to working in the ed biz have, in their constant work at growing and testing and refining, have settled on several best practices. Smarick might as well complain that the only reason that surgeons like to operate on tables instead of floors is that it makes it easier to operate safely and accurately.
Smarick observes that a centralized authority for a large cityful of students (like most people in the ed debates, Smarick is really talking just about large urban school systems) is efficient and sensible, except when it isn't.
When there’s a single school operator, it’s a big problem if it’s not good at CURMUDGUCATION: Power and Order: