Michael Lind Tells It Like It Is

about public education, and how the reforms are nothing but a bunch of crap.

There isn't any "choice" anyway for parents. The schools ALWAYS are the ones that pick the students, and they generally pick off the top students. This has always been the case with private schools, especially nonsectarian ones.

As we know, Milton Friedman came up with the voucher bullshit as a way to circumvent Brown v. Board of Education.

Lind:

You might think that the debate about educational reform in the U.S. would therefore be about how we can spend more money overall on public education; how the federal government can increase its share of public K-12 funding from 10 percent to 50 to 80 percent; and how to raise public school teacher educational credentials while substantially raising public school teacher salaries.

Instead, the American conversation about educational reform goes, in effect, like this: “In order to compete with countries like South Korea and Finland, we should completely ignore what they do in achieving superior education results, and indeed do the opposite. Instead of copying what works abroad, we should remodel our K-12 system along the lines suggested by libertarian theorists at the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, even though no successful foreign country today or in the past has ever based its educational system on anything remotely resembling what those market utopians propose.”

In the last generation, conservatives managed to drag the Overton Window away from reality because attacks on U.S. public education as a total nationwide failure (rather than merely a failure in some high-poverty neighborhoods) served the interests of two right-wing constituencies: libertarians, who know, without examining any data, thanks to Friedrich von Hayek and Ayn Rand, that all public services can be done better by markets if privatized, and Southern Protestant fundamentalists who want their fellow to subsidize their anti-Darwinist separatist subcultural schools, by means of tax-funded vouchers.

Bingo. Remember, Lind used to be part of the traditional Republican right until he had a falling out with the late bloviator William F. Buckley over Pat Buchanan.