To return to schools. Did you know that it’s a bad thing for a school to be popular? Nor did I. But according to Scott Lemieux a voucher programme is pointless because it can’t save every child overnight and, anyway, there aren’t enough places at private schools in the first place. This rather conveniently ignores the fact that real school choice is not just a question of competition between private and state-sponsored schools but within the state sector itself.
Anyway, Mr Lemieux writes that:
A market in education wouldn’t function like other markets. Whereas more customers (within reason) for a department store mean more profits, more students for a school makes it harder to educate everyone, and places substantial demands on physical spaces that can’t be easily expanded. Even assuming that they provide enough money for students to have a genuinely wide theoretical range of private schools to go to, which in practice is unlikely, vouchers are only an effective solution for more than tiny numbers of students if there are lots of spaces in good schools for children to go to.
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