TEACHER'S PET.

TEACHER'S PET. That would not be Jonah Goldberg, whose recent article recommending the end of public schools led Ezra to point out that many of Goldberg's preferred alternatives don't do even as well as the public schools in Washington, D.C. And those public schools are indeed not doing well as Goldberg states:

HERE'S A GOOD question for you: Why have public schools at all?OK, cue the marching music. We need public schools because blah blah blah and yada yada yada. We could say blah is common culture and yada is the government's interest in promoting the general welfare. Or that children are the future. And a mind is a terrible thing to waste. Because we can't leave any child behind.The problem with all these bromides is that they leave out the simple fact that one of the surest ways to leave a kid "behind" is to hand him over to the government. Americans want universal education, just as they want universally safe food. But nobody believes that the government should run 90% of the restaurants, farms and supermarkets. Why should it run 90% of the schools -- particularly when it gets terrible results?Consider Washington, home of the nation's most devoted government-lovers and, ironically, the city with arguably the worst public schools in the country. Out of the 100 largest school districts, according to the Washington Post, D.C. ranks third in spending for each pupil -- $12,979 -- but last in spending on instruction. Fifty-six cents out of every dollar goes to administrators who, it's no secret, do a miserable job administrating, even though D.C. schools have been in a state of "reform" for nearly 40 years.In a blistering series, the Post has documented how badly the bureaucrats have run public education. More than half of the District of Columbia's kids spend their days in "persistently dangerous" schools, with an average of nine violent incidents a day in a system with 135 schools. "Principals reporting dangerous conditions or urgently needed repairs in their buildings wait, on average, 379 days ... for the problems to be fixed," according to the Post. But hey, at least the kids are getting a lousy education. A mere 19 schools managed to get "proficient" scores or better for a majority of students on the district's Comprehensive Assessment Test.

It's possible that bad bureaucrats are causing some of these problems. But Goldberg fails to point out another reason, and that is the poverty level of Washington, D.C. Poor families are unlikely to send their children to private schools. Poor children come to school saddled with more problems than children from more affluent families. To gather a large number of poor children into one public classroom is not going to create an easy educational experience for the students or the teachers. Comparing the achievement levels of these children to those of children going to private schools fails to standardize for the income differences. It also ignores the fact that private schools can refuse students they don't want to have but public schools have no such luxury. This means that school comparisons of the sort Goldberg wants to use suffer from selection bias. (To give an example of this bias from the field of higher education, Harvard is good at least partly because its incoming students are good. )