Colleen Hroncinch of Cato Institute's Center for Education Freedom tried this week to plug one of the pro-public education arguments that the Libertarian think tank runs up against when pushing choice. 

Do public schools serve everyone, she asks. She does not make a convincing case for her answer.

For starters, it defies logic to think one provider of any service could “serve everyone”—or at least, serve everyone well.

The fallacy here is that public education comes from "one provider." It does not. There are thousands of public school districts in the United States, each different from the others, each owned and operated by a different group of taxpayers. 

Hroncinch's real point is that children have different abilities, skills, preferences and styles, and have parents who also have a variety of values, goals and priorities. 

No wonder that even in the top-ranked district in any state, many parents choose other options for their children. It’s unlikely they would pay twice for education—once in school taxes and again in tuition—if their assigned school was serving their children well.

Two problems here. One is that of course some parents choose private schools even when public school is serving them well for reasons as simple as status and additional features that are beyond the financial reach of public schools. Have you ever seen the library at Philips Exeter? The theater building? There are plenty of colleges that would be happy to have such facilities. 

The other problem is the repetition of a Cato favorite line--the "pay twice for education" line, But nobody in this country, with the possible exception of the very very rich, pays once for public education. The implication here is if you just give me back my tax dollars, I can go spend them on the private education of my choice. But the math doesn't hold up, and of course it doesn't, because if it did we wouldn't have school taxes in the first place. My tax dollars do not pay for my children's public education--no, not even if you count up all the tax dollars I'll pay over my lifetime. My children's public education is paid for by my taxes plus the taxes of my neighbors.

Nobody who is sending their child to a private school is paying for their education twice.

Hroncinch's other point here is that the public system doesn't serve all students well, and a mountain of ink has been spilled examining to what extent this is true and why and what can be done about it. But what the public system has that a voucher does not is a legal obligation to at least try. The challenge for any education system is to educate students who, for a vast panoply of reasons, are hard (and expensive) to teach. As Robert Pondiscio put it in his book about Success Academy, “A significant tension between public schools and charter schools is the question of who bears the cost and responsibility for the hardest-to-teach students.” Public schools do not always solve the issue well, but voucher schools solve the issue by simply washing their hands of those students and sending them on their way to find solutions on their own. Public schools do not have that option; that's what their defenders mean by saying that public schools take everyone.

Hroncinch cites Baltimore's test scores as proof that they are not serving all students well. The irony here is that if they were all private voucher schools, they could bring those numbers up by simply refusing to serve low-scoring students at all. Not sure that would be an improvement.

Hroncinch spends a chunk of her piece citing examples of parents who got in trouble for finding ways to get their kids into a public school outside of the district in which they lived. The aggressive prosecution of this kind of stuff is inexcusable, but it's not proof that the public system does not serve everyone. Every one of those parents had a place reserved for their child in a public school; they just didn't want it. But again-- if they were trying to get away from the school set up to serve their child and they wanted to go to a private school, that school wouldn't have to pursue them through legal means. It could just reject them.

Hroncinch does address this part of the argument, sort of.

What about the argument on the flip side that private schools don’t serve everyone? It’s absolutely true. No individual private school can serve everyone—just as no public school can. But in the private sector, no provider claims to do that.

This is a false comparison. It's true no individual school of any sort can serve all students, because any individual school has finite space. But a public school system does promise to serve all students, and a voucher system makes no such promise. 

Hroncinch lists a whole list of various "private education providers," arguing that surely somewhere in all that families can find what they're looking for, that parents can "customize their children's learning experience." But that doesn't really address the issue.

No school, public or private, can serve everyone—just as no restaurant, grocery store, doctor, or car dealership can.

That's a pretty good analogy. Because these sectors of the economy don't serve everyone. Some people get to eat at upscale restaurants and some get to eat at McDonalds and some don't get to eat out at all. Some people get to shop at a big beautiful grocery store, some shop at a lousy little one, and some live in food deserts. Some people get top of the line health care, some get bare minimum care, and some die because they can't afford health care at all. Some people drive a new Lexus, some drive a used Kia, some ride public transit if they can, and some walk. 

None of these sectors serve everyone. None of these sectors are a model for how the public school system would ideally work.

Now we arrive at Hrincinch's final sentence.

The best way to “serve everyone” is to enable each individual student to have options.

Well, yes. But. A voucher system doesn't really get the job done. The major obstacles to education choice remain discriminatory policies of private schools and the cost. While vouchers pretend to address cost, they're too meager; either taxpayers have to foot the (very high) bill of paying the cost of students attending the school of their choice, or individual families have to do it themselves, which really isn't any better than telling poor families they can exercise choice by buying a more expensive house in a wealthier community.

That's before we even get to the taxpayers' stake in oversight and transparency of a voucher system, in not paying to send students to sub-prime pop-up schools that produce under-educated members of society. 

Voucher policies change the fundamental nature of the education system, turning K-12 into a younger version of our post-secondary system, where some folks go to great schools, some go to mediocre ones, some go to terrible ones, and some don't go at all. Some can afford it, some borrow huge amounts of money, and some don't go at all. 

Most of all, the voucher system eliminates any promise by society that we'll get your child a decent education. Certainly it's fair to argue that we have not always done a good job of fulfilling that promise, but deciding to just stop making the promise, to tell parents "You're on your own now, good luck"- that's a huge shift in how we do education as a nation, a shift that guarantees a tiered education system that reinforces socio-economic class even more than the public system we've got. 

It's the Friedman dream, the dream of a country in which education is a private commodity and not a public good, a personal issue and not a shared responsibility. It has been a persistent dream for some folks for years. I don't think very much of this dream, but the very least we can do as a society is have an honest discussion about it.