Education Reform - Is School Choice Enough?

Sol Stern says "School Choice is not enough":

During the 15 years since the first voucher program got under way in Milwaukee, university researchers have extensively scrutinized the dynamics of school choice and the effect of competition on public schools. The preponderance of studies have shown clear benefits, both academically and otherwise, for the voucher kids. It’s gratifying that the research confirms the moral and civil rights argument for vouchers.

But sadly—and this is a second development that reformers must face up to—the evidence is pretty meager that competition from vouchers is making public schools better.

His article set off hot debate in the City Journal. Most of the respondents defended the fact that school choice programs have no failed per se, they just haven't overcome political objections and opponents, but when implemented do show benefits to schoolchildren. Jay Greene defends choice by showing the gains made in achievement due to choice programs:

Clive Belfield and Henry Levin at Teachers College, no friends of school choice, conducted a systematic review of over 200 analyses in that literature, concluding: “The above evidence shows reasonably consistent evidence of a link between competition (choice) and education quality. Increased competition and higher educational quality are positively correlated.”

There are two questions: Who decides the key factors in a child's education? And what is the right way to instruct children? School choice is a structural reform to enable better decisions about instruction, but the instruction methods are ultimately what determines how well kid's do. Education happens in the classroom or more exactly, in the mind of the child. No education reform changes anything unless it changes what happens to the child.

The Weekly Standard reported on the debate:

The school choice movement correctly recognized that the quasi-monopoly powers that school boards and teachers' unions exercise over public education is an anachronism in a society increasingly built around consumer power. Their mistake, however, was in thinking that you could be agnostic on what these schools ought to be teaching. ...
You can't be indifferent to the curriculum, E.D. Hirsch argues in his response to Stern. Without making content an explicit part of your education agenda, you abdicate to some third party--bureaucrats, textbook writers, political activists--control over what is actually taught every day. That's not only what parents really care about, it is the thing that matters most to educational achievement. "Grade-by-grade core substance of the curriculum is what schooling is," Hirsch writes.

The gains in learning from school choice are due in large part to the fact that the monopoly school systems, hostage to agendas beyond the best instruction of children, hostage to education fads and fancies, are not doing their job right. To attempt to fix the instructional failures in the system directly is as difficult as attempting to fix it structurally with choice. One can be pessimistic and assume neither can succeed, or one can be realistic and consider that making progress on one path will help make progress on the other. More school choice will expose more clearly the differences between flawed and working instructions.

Ultimately school choice deserves support for reasons more fundamental than markets and incentives. School choice is about getting parents involved in the education of children. Parental responsibility cannot be exercised without a level of parental choice, and parental involvement in a child's education correlates with higher achievement. We need to treat education as a parental responsibility, and one that parents delegate and decide, not as a Governmental responsibility that bypasses the parents.