My colleague Kevin Carey earlier commented on how school voucher proponents are attempting to redefine what “success” and “failure” mean in school reform. Apparently it’s now a trend. Writing in today’s NY Times, Charles Murray acknowledges the academic failures of the Milwaukee school voucher program, but says it shouldn’t be about academics anyway. The mere fact of more parents having a choice is good enough for him:

Our children’s education is extremely important to us, and the greater good doesn’t much enter into it — hence all the politicians who oppose vouchers but send their own children to private schools. The supporters of school choice need to make their case on the basis of that shared parental calculation, not on the red herring of test scores.

Right. In exercising individual choice, people don’t factor in the greater good because their own interests come first. They tend to drive more than they should because they don’t pay the true cost of pollution, road maintenance, or congestion. They don’t recycle because it’s not in their financial interest to do so.

Schooling, on the other hand, is about the common good. It matters to me if my neighbor’s children are well-educated, if they know how to do basic math, if they can interpret the latest scientific findings, and if they can understand the rhetoric of politicians.

Choice, in and of itself, is not the end-all that Murray would like. Before laws requiring children to stay in school to a certain age, many parents would exercise their right to not educate their children. They needed their children working in the fields or factories, but we as a society felt this wasn’t such a good thing. Embracing the choice ideal without focusing on basic academic skills would also lead to parents exercising their right to choose schools that taught values that many of us would not support. We already have Jewish and Islamic charter schools; would Murray be happy with his tax dollars going to schools that were explicitly devoted to a cause and which did not have some common academic standards uniting them? Somehow I doubt it.

Voucher advocates are grasping at straws. They hailed the results of the DC Opportunity Scholarship because parents were happy, but ignored the fact that students themselves were no happier, did not work any harder academically, and did not feel any safer. It’s illustrative of the state of the school voucher debate that a proponent like Murray can take to the pages of a major newspaper and declare vouchers don’t work, but that we should have them anyway.

Update: Just to be clear, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, the program Murrary is writing about that was recently evaluated and found to produce no affect on student achievement, is for private schools only. Charter schools were not included in that evaluation. The title on the piece, “Why Charter Schools Fail the Test,” is inaccurate, and Murray does not help clarify this issue by mentioning charters seven times, often in conjunction with vouchers.