Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Arnold Schwarzenegger says that the “two people who have most profoundly impacted my thinking on economics are Milton Friedman and Adam Smith.” The bulk of his piece is devoted to making the case for cutting taxes and regulations, in order to to attract new business to California. But right at the end of his piece, he drops this: “If schools are systematically underperforming, we will expand choice options for parents with charter schools and enforce public school choice provisions in the federal No Child Left Behind Act.”
It’s not clear that people have fully thought through the implications of the ”choice” provisions of Bush’s “No Child” legislation. Because the text of the legislation itself is incomprehensible, we can find out what it all means through this summary.
- If a school is identified for school improvement, corrective action, or restructuring, your district must provide all students in the failing school the option to transfer to another public school that is not failing, no later than the first day of the school year following identification.
- Districts must provide transportation required for a student to exercise public school choice under school improvement, corrective action, restructuring, or interdistrict choice offered as part of corrective action for a school.
- All children attending schools identified for school improvement, corrective action, or restructuring are eligible to exercise public school choice, but districts must give priority to low-income students (as defined by the district) if it is not possible to serve all students.
People who understand the real-world workings of local school districts, their enforcement, and their implications for property values, zoning, development, and a host of other issues that have no impact on DC political mavens, can only be amazed at the upheavals that this could eventually imply. The result is not, of course, genuine market competition but a subtle form of wealth redistribution. What we can know is that if a Democratic president had proposed that Washington DC forcibly prevent localities from establishing and guarding its own school-district lines, he would have been decried by most conservatives as a despotic centralizer seeking to eliminate the last vestiges of local control over education.
