I enjoyed Carlos Rotella’s New Yorker profile($) of Arne Duncan, but I think this mischaracterizes what’s really going on:

In the fight over education in America today, there, roughly speaking, two major camps: free-market reformers, who believe that competition, choice, and incentives must have a greater part in education; and liberal traditionalists who rally around teachers’ unions and education schools.

This is a common formulation; Dana Goldstein used similar terminology in the Randi Weingarten profile she published last year, writing that “The self-designated ‘reformers’…believe, broadly speaking, that free-market principles applied to public schools will improve student achievement, especially in low-income communities of color.” It’s understandable–many policy debates can be described along the free markets vs. government axis with a fair degree of accuracy.

But the “reformist” camp, such as it is,  really consists of three only partially overlapping ideas that are collectively pretty far from a true free-market orientation. First is the standards, testing, and accountability movement embodied in NCLB. This is about as far from a free-market approach to education policy as one could imagine. True, there are few bones thrown to choice and markets in the SES and intra-district choice provisions of NCLB, but at its heart this is about the federal government exerting power over state and local government-run districts and schools on matters ranging from curriculum to assessment to staffing. Second is the strong mayor/chancellor mode of urban school reform. Again, this is about vesting more power in a central government authority and holding him or her politically accountable for bringing order to unruly, dysfunctional systems. Michelle Rhee, for example, is a reformer but not a free-market reformer; she’s using the full power of the DC government to exert her will.

Third and finally, we have charter schools, which obviously have significant market elements. But here I think we have to make a distinction between how charter schools were originally sold and how they’ve played out in the real world. Charters are a long way from a classic free market. There are no price signals or ownership shares to be bought and sold. New entrants are dependent on public funding and accountable to public authorities. People often tout the virtues of charters in terms of creating market competition for students, with all that implies about the way firms operate in a market environment in terms of efficiency and providing a diverse array of services to customers and all the rest. But I think this misunderstands the biggest benefits of the charter movement. The best thing  the charter school idea did wasn’t to impose market discipline on KIPP or on the traditional public schools that KIPP is competing with for students. It was simply to allow KIPP to exist in the first place. That’s all, and that’s more than enough. Charters, it turns out, are just a way of allowing non-profit organizations to run really good public schools, in an environment that shields them from the horrible bureaucratic and political problems that plague traditional school systems. If that creates virtuous competition, bonus, but if not, it doesn’t undermine the case for charters.

This matters because people tend to have strong pre-established biases, both pro and con, when it comes to things that are described as “free market reforms.”  And that’s not what’s actually going on in the public education debate. To the extent that there’s an axis or continuum of some kind, it is, as Checker Finn cogently explains in this recent essay, between those who embrace the traditional “single best public school system” idea, with a strong emphasis on school and teacher autonomy, and those who, in a variety of ways, do not.