Replacing School Choice with Govt Mandates

Recently, Diane Ravitch, former Assistant Secretary of Education, penned a piece explaining why she no longer supports school choice. Her new pet education reform? A comprehensive national curriculum for all students.

Diane Ravitch, former Assistant Secretary of Education, recently penned a piece in the Wall Street Journal explaining why she no longer supports school choice.  Her new pet education reform?  A comprehensive national curriculum for all students.

What we need is not a marketplace, but a coherent curriculum that prepares all students. And our government should commit to providing a good school in every neighborhood in the nation, just as we strive to provide a good fire company in every community.

Yikes.

Surprisingly, for someone who wants to wind down all our experiments in school choice and hand back control to public-sector unions in exchange for educational Bonapartism, she's getting a respectful hearing from conservatives.  Which is fair enough; Ravitch has been involved in this debate for a long time, and she knows her data.

Ah, data.

One wishes, in vain, that education reformers would take their noses out of the test score tables and draft curriculae and talk about whether parents have a right to educate their children as they see fit... or not.  It would be good to know.  That's all.