Responding to research that finds school-voucher lottery winners from poorly-performing school districts in North Carolina do much better than the beleaguered kids who don’t get a winning ticket, Matt Yglesias makes the vital point:
This really can’t be said too often. The same is true in Britain: academies and free schools are likely to prove most useful in poorly-served areas, not in those happy parts of the country blessed with excellent state schools. It is, whatever its opponents claim, a policy aimed at the unlucky, not the already-fortunate.Note that this is consistent with charter skeptics’ favorite research finding that, on average, public charter schools are about the same as traditional public schools. Many schools and school districts are above average. If kids with low-quality neighborhood schools are able to attend charter schools that are about as good on average as average public schools, then those kids are going to see huge benefits. By the same token, you wouldn’t expect there to be a ton of interest in launching charter schools in districts whose traditional public schools are of above-average quality.
Similarly for all that the Prime Minister doesn’t talk about the Big society so much these days, the fact remains that it has more room to flourish in areas and communities presently under-served or disgracefully-served by local and central government. For it is there, not in affluent suburbia, that there is both the greatest need and the most potential for fresh ways of organising services and there that it is most likely that there’s a pool of under-exploited “social capital”.
Since these are not, in the end, mainly Tory strongholds it is quite possible that there’s a limited electoral upside to these policies for the Conservatives even if they are seen to work but that’s unimportant when set beside the potential benefits that may in time accrue from these ideas.
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