I’m a fair-weather football fan. The only gridiron lore I can recite is based on the two NFL seasons that permeated my fickle consciousness (the same seasons that my home team—the Seattle Seahawks—went to the Super Bowl). More committed football fans will remember the 2014 season as the one in which the New England Patriots won the AFC championship game while fighting off rumors that the team’s storied quarterback ordered the deflation of footballs to gain an unfair advantage against the Indianapolis Colts.
In the same spirit of Mike McShane’s NFL analogy to open his forum essay with me earlier this week, I see the “Deflategate” saga as a reminder that all athletic competitions depend not only on players and referees but on the rules governing fair play. Victory means little if one team is allowed to cheat. Referees exist to ensure the rules are enforced. Is the system perfect? Of course not. Any committed football fan can point to a list of bad calls. But no football fan would suggest the solution to bad calls is to eliminate the rules.
Like an athletic competition, the rules that govern transactions between consumers and producers are integral to whether markets operate efficiently and produce good results for their participants. If you buy groceries, use seatbelts, or put your infant child in a crib, you have benefited from rules designed to promote a safe food supply, reduce fatal injuries in car accidents, and ensure parents don’t have to learn through experience that their crib poses a danger to their sleeping child.
We don’t have to imagine a world without rules like these, for that world existed not very long ago. Upton Sinclair famously documented the consumer hazards of the meat-packing industry before the advent of the Food and Drug Administration in The Jungle. Pioneering consumer advocate Ralph Nader electrified the public with his story of how car companies’ refusal to install seat belts cost thousands of American lives.
Thankfully, the brave advocates and policymakers who fought for these consumer protections during the 20th century didn’t have the leaders of the modern education choice movement whispering in their ears about how regulation is only a “millstone around the neck” of the good people selling their wares. Even if they had, they probably would have ignored them in the face of overwhelming evidence that competition alone would not help consumers secure the things that their health and wellbeing depended on.
Mike and I agree that America has a shortage of good schools and faces serious challenges to addressing this problem. I’ve had a front row seat to these challenges for more than a decade in conversations with parents, teachers, principals, entrepreneurs, and system leaders—all motivated people and most eager to see children succeed. Anyone who suggests these challenges can be solved by “regulation” shouldn’t be taken seriously.
But today’s school choice advocates travel in their own version of this dangerous hyperbole. They pretend that regulation is a recipe for consumer harm, serving only to handcuff the benevolent entrepreneurs who have something to sell. They suggest, without evidence, that any effort to impose common standards or metrics—either to inform consumer decision-making or assess the results of private-education choice initiatives—will only serve to undermine consumers’ pursuit of the very educational benefits that taxpayers and policymakers want to support. They point to the failures of the test-based accountability movement to achieve all its supporters hoped as “proof” that markets can succeed where these efforts failed.
I decided to write about Milwaukee’s story after spending six long months watching (and sometimes debating) the leaders of the modern education choice movement say these things while increasingly worried about how their ideas were playing out in the real world for the children and families they purport to want to help. During my reconnaissance mission, I learned about LifeSkills Academy, the Milwaukee-based private school that closed in the “dead of the night” only to be reincarnated not once but twice in Florida where its owners continue to benefit from taxpayer dollars without evidence of public or private value. I learned that Florida added nearly 900 private schools to its voucher program between 2010 and 2020 (see the reports at the bottom of this page) that no longer exist and that 61 percent of children who participated in that program left in two years or fewer, in some cases returning to the very public schools they had sought to escape.
I was scandalized by these observations not because advocates made, as Mike says, “overly rosy predictions”; to be an advocate is to be hopeful about the future. No, I was scandalized because advocates seemed to be willfully ignorant of the past.
In her 1983 book Sudden Death, civil rights leader Rita Mae Brown coined the now often quoted phrase, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” My plea to today’s private-education choice advocates and their supporters in states is simple: Don’t repeat Milwaukee’s mistakes, learn from them. Milwaukee’s experiences with private education shows how children and families can be harmed by the unconstrained impulses of entrepreneurs—some of whom lack either the good intent or preparation needed to be in the business of running a school. It also shows that regulation can protect consumers from the most unscrupulous elements of private schooling without quashing opportunities for new, good schools to take root.
