He Didn't Mean What He Said

Matthew Yglesias on the unfairness of no choice in schools for poor people:

This is part of what drives me crazy about debates around charter schools and “choice” in the United States. Every prosperous family in the Washington, DC metro area is exercising public school choice when they decide where to live. And competition between suburban jurisdictions to attract affluent residents and raise property values is an important force in the competitive delivery of social services. It’s only poor people who just get stuck living where they can afford to live (i.e., someplace with low-quality services) and going to whatever school happens to be there. You need to either increase the number of high-quality schools or else increase the capacity of existing high-quality schools. Otherwise, well-heeled parents will use their financial clout to buy access to them, and poor parents will be stuck with the schools they can afford.

This seems relative clear cut: the rich by virtue of being rich have a choice of sending their kids to good schools. The poor don't. The implication is, which is why charter schools and choice appear, that those kinds of choices for poor families will improve educational outcomes.

Freddie deBoer wrote:

Matt Yglesias pulls out his new hobby horse: rich people have more choices than poor people, charter schools increase choices for poor people (even if they don’t work!), and for this reason we should, I take it, undertake all the union-smashing ideas beloved of the reform movement.

This is, again, pretty clear and accurate. Today, Yglesias wrote:

A lot of school reform haters seem mighty impressed by this Freddie de Boer takedown of an argument about charter schools that I never made. So here, again, is my argument. The term “charter schools” doesn’t appear in it in order to clarify the point that this is not an argument about charter schools.

What follows is a description, as opposed to argument about, of how money allows rich people to live wherever they wan't.  Leaving aside the sophomoric "school reform haters" as shorthand for people who accept that the available evidence shows that choice and charter don't work, notice how his defense of his original argument requires stripping the argument out of the original post by denying the implication of his use of charter schools and choice in the original.

Unless Yglesias threw those words in there at random and now denies they were there at all, the serve an implicit claim that charters and choice would/could offer to the poor what the rich already have. Otherwise there is no argument just a tediously obvious description of how, you know, having money allows its possessors to buy stuff.

Lame.