You know I don’t know, at this point, how anyone could be surprised by the results of Sweden’s voucher system. We are now several decades into the modern education reform movement. Its history is a litany of failure, of vast promises and pathetic returns, of constantly over-promising and under-delivering. The charter school Deion Sanders started is a horror show? Why, it’s almost as if designing policy with the explicit aim of privatization and dividing public funds from public accountability is guaranteed to result in corruption. Who could have known.

I have been waiting for the steady accumulation of evidence, year upon dismal year of profiteering off of failure, to finally penetrate the elite consciousness. I imagine I will be waiting for a long time. You want to help kids, you want them to be better educated? Fine. Me too. None of this is working. It’s not working, and your credulity towards broken policy is the problem. Not the unions, not bureaucracy, not a lack of will. It’s the addiction to one of the greatest failures in the history of public policy. It’s the refusal to change in the face of the evidence. That’s the problem.