Alex Massie Alex Massie

Choice Matters: Education Division

There are some policy ideas that one supports while recognising that they may come with costs, in some cases considerable costs (eg, drug legalisation, open borders, etc etc.) But I confess that I remain mystified by the ferocity with which so many people oppose something as seemingly uncontroversial as school choice.

Because it’s not as though school choice doesn’t already exist. It does. But you have to be reasonably well-off to either pay for your kids to be educated in the private sector or pay the mortgage premium to move house to be inside a leading state school’s catchment area. Neither of these strike me as illegitimate choices (though logically opponents of school choice ought, I think, to oppose them too) and the entire point of the pro-school choice movement is to extend the privilege of choice to those families who do not currently have the means to choose their kids’ school themselves. This seems such a basic point to me that I must, I suppose, be missing something given how frequently opponents of school choice accuse its proponents of wanting to help the rich at the expense of the poor.

So, for example, in the comments to this post Ben writes: “The contortions that soi-disant libertarianism needs to go to in order to justify taking money from 9-5 workers and giving it to priests, mullahs and other oogedy-boogedy merchants for the pretended benefit of the children of the rich would be comical if I didn’t think they were actually serious.” This, alas, is incoherent drivel, since we’re talking about empowering, not disempowering “ordinary” people. There’s no robbery or illegitimate transfer of funds in a voucher programme. On the contrary, it’s a means of “giving” money to “9-5 workers”.

Then there’s Seb, who says: “Education is like health care.

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