Free More Money Than Brains by Laura Penny Page A

ones that focus on environmental education, the arts, or social justice. Charters also have powerful allies in the political centre. The Obamaadministration has promised increased funding for charter schools as part of its $4.35 billion Race to the Top program, one of the education components of the stimulus package.
    Charter schools are a relatively new idea. They exist somewhere in between public and private schools, as they are publicly funded but privately run. The first state to pass a law allowing charters was Minnesota, in 1991. By 2009, according to the Center for Education Reform, a pro-charter group, 4,578 charter schools were operating in the U.S., schooling approximately 1.4 million K–12 students. 5 In Canada, Alberta was the first province to allow charter schools, in 1994, and now has thirteen. No other Canadian province has followed suit yet, though Quebec, British Columbia, and Torontonia have for decades offered partial public funding to independent alternative schools.
    Those who support charter schools argue that they provide parents with more choices and that market competition will stimulate somnolent public schools. Allowing all manner of specialized schools, from the strictly religious to the just plain strict to the environmentally pious, further decentralizes the school system and cedes more control to local, parental, and private interests. This is precisely what school-choice advocates seek. To give just one cartoony example, John Stossel, in a 2006 ABC news special called “Stupid in America,” made a strong case for vouchers and charters as market solutions to the corrupt state monopoly on education. He said that a state-run school was as silly as a state-run grocery store. With out the prod of competition, your gub’mint grocer would doubtless peddle overpriced bread and curdled milk. Dittofor the sucky socialist schools, which had made American children stupider than Belgians.
    Stossel was pop-eyed with outrage.
Belgians were free to choose their schools. Their kids were smarter
. Chocolate-confecting, mussel-slurping semi-French Euroweenies were enjoying more choices than the future citizens of the freest, best country on earth?
Quelle horreur!
    While it is true that Belgians have a voucher system in which the funds follow the students, they also have a national curriculum and national standards, so it isn’t quite a market free-for-all like the riot of chip flavours in the snack aisle. Moreover, Belgians also have other educational policies, such as free early childhood education, that help account for their edge on international tests. The Belgian system, like many European systems, practises streaming, separating the vocationally inclined and the college-bound much earlier than Canadian and American schools do. Can you imagine the howls of indignation from self-proclaimed libertarians like Stossel if American educrats were exerting such sway over children’s career paths?
    Streaming and state-subsidized early childhood education are European in the bad way. They represent socialist interventions in family life, encroachments of the nanny state at its nanniest. School choice, conversely, is all about the power of markets. Defenders of school choice praise the market’s ability to satisfy proliferating particular niches. It is also about parent power, the firm conviction that Stossel’s audience – or severely normal Albertans or devout Christian, Jewish, and Muslim parents – know what is best for their children.
    Don’t get me wrong. I think parents certainly have the right to raise their children as they see fit, and that they love their children more than anyone else. But love does not qualify someone to explain cell division, long division, or the War of 1812. School-choice rhetoric is another case of feelings, such as parental love, trumping the nerdy expertise of the people who actually run the schools and teach the kids. Moreover, parental rights issues get legally murky