The Healing Balm of the Free Market - Not

I think the market rocks. I'm a capitalist, through and through. However, just because I like the hammer doesn't mean that everything is a thumb.

Charter schools' troubled waters

DESPITE promising us a compass, charter schools have hit another shoal. More evidence says they are no better than public schools.

''Proponents of charter schools have a deregulationist view of education that says the marketplace leads to better schools," Lawrence Mishel, president of the nonprofit, nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute, said over the telephone. ''The facts of the matter suggest that this view is without merit."

Mishel and three other university researchers from Columbia and Stanford universities are authors of the forthcoming book ''The Charter School Dust-Up." The researchers reviewed federal data and the results from 19 studies in 11 states and the District of Columbia. They found that charter school students, on the whole, ''have the same or lower scores than other public school students in nearly every demographic category."

And it's not just because we haven't given enough time to the idea or haven't let it play out so they can mature into full blown capitalistic power houses of education.

In a politically charged environment where the White House and many governors, including Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, are pushing charter schools, the authors found that federal data ''fail to confirm claims that the performance of charter schools improves as these schools accumulate experience." Charter schools four years or older ''report lower scores than new charter schools."

I read the above on the heels of finding this interesting gem from the Left Business Observer in an excellent post by Scott on the correlation between freedom and economic growth.

Running the numbers on the report's measure, the improvement in the index vs. GDP expressed in 1995 U.S. dollars, produces somewhat better correlations (.33, to be precise). But that's still very far from impressive; the improvement in the index can explain statistically less than 10% of GDP growth - ignoring the fact that growth itself probably explains some of the improvement in the index. An analysis of the second chart by the naked eye would conclude the relationship is as good as random.

Now, the point of this post isn't "Hey, freedom sucks!" or "Wow, doesn't the market blow! Let's become communists.". The point is that freedom isn't a sack of magic beans and the free market really isn't like sprinkling magic pixie dust.

Strangely enough, it takes and awful lot of actual thought and a lot of effort and investment to even screw up as bad as the government does. And if you don't even do that, you screw up even worse than a pack of unionized, tenured, liberal biased teachers sucking on the public teat.