A lottery to lose

IN THEORY it works perfectly. Rather than oblige parents to send their children to the nearest state-run or 'funded school, give them a voucher to be spent at a private school of their choice. 'The adoption of such arrangements', argued Milton Friedman in 1955, 'would make for more effective competition among various types of schools and for a more efficient utilisation of their resources.' As part of its recovery from Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed many schools in New Orleans, Louisiana undertook one of America's largest school-choice schemes. According to a new paper by Atila Abdulkadiroglu of Duke University, Parag Pathak of MIT and Christopher Walters of Berkeley, it has not gone well.*Increasing school choice is a favourite policy of Republican governors and state legislatures. Since the party's bumper election year in 2010 the number of voucher schemes has increased from 25 to 59, according to the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. The thinking behind this is sound: the well-off already exercise school choice by moving into neighbourhoods with better schools. Why not allow poorer families to do the same' Yet the...Continue reading
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