Don't buy School Choice Week.

• Author: Thomas, Paul
• Position: PUBLIC SCHOOL SHAKEDOWN - Brief article

As we seek ways to create better education, we should stop demanding that parents and students have choice, and start demanding that no parents or children should have to choose. This is the sort of real choice a free people can and should make.

Since School Choice Week slips into the wake of Martin Luther King Day we must also note that choice is a hollow call dedicated to the Invisible Hand and a pale hope that market forces may accomplish indirectly what a moral people can accomplish directly--as King confronted in the last days of his life:

"In addition to the absence of coordination and sufficiency, the programs of the past all have another common failing--they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else."

Private schools appear to be better mostly because they are selective (think of judging hospitals that admit only healthy...