What's so bad about public schools?

ONE OF THE great barriers to a discussion of poverty and social policy in the 1980s is that so few people who talk about poverty have ever been poor.

That's the first sentence from Charles Murray's thought provoking essay What's so Bad about being Poor? I can't help but remember that sentence when I read of former senator Bill Frist's new initiative - State Collaborative on Reforming Education (SCORE). Who attended yesterday's announcement? Well, Bill Frist of course. He didn't attend public school. He attended the most exclusive (expensive) private school in the city. His offspring? Not sure but I bet they didn't attend the neighborhood public school. It is the same school that Mayor Karl Dean sent his children. Phil Bredesen sent his son to a swanky private school in Nashville, one just as exclusive. Former mayor Bill Purcell's kid went to a magnet school. The academic magnet schools look nothing, demographically speaking, like neighborhood public schools. This year only one in four students in the lottery got a slot at an academic magnet. Many of the teachers and administrators in Metro schools opt out of the public system just as our president did when he moved to Washington D.C. Is this reality not a barrier to any discussion of school reform? For such people school reform is an abstraction. There is no intensity to enact the most basic reform, to empower all parents to act as consumers of education. If people like Bill Frist, Karl Dean, Phil Bredesen, and all Metro teachers and administators had to send their kids to the neighborhood public school you'd get real reform.

Don't even begin to tell me about programs that have "worked" elsewhere in terms of graduation rates or test scores until you make clear that a fundamental goal of reform is to expand parental choice. Those who believe in the power of programs miss the point. It is the power of a system that is important. On the one hand you have a thriving market system that serves affluent consumers and on the other a public monopoly system that enjoys a captive market, those who can't afford the market system. That system serves various interests.

Update: After checking out the SCORE website I have to say that the thrust and direction of the Frist effort is very good. It is a step in the right direction.