I want to thank Kevin Welner for giving the Cato Institute's education people some pub, and I'm heartened that he thinks our ideas have a lot of influence with the Romney folks. As far as I can tell, though, they don't. Why? Because if they did, Gov. Romney wouldn't be offering federal open-enrollment, voucher, or even "neovoucher" proposals. He would be calling to get the federal government out of education, which is exactly what I and my colleagues have long advocated.

Do we like school choice? Absolutely, because logic and mounds of evidence strongly suggest that it works. But that does not mean we want the federal government to impose or "incentivize" it.

There are myriad reasons for this, even though it requires resisting the powerful temptation to have the federal government impose a policy we like in one fell swoop rather than going through the hard work of having individual states and districts adopt it.

First and foremost, we oppose federal involvement because the Constitution doesn't give Washington authority to meddle in education outside of its 14th Amendment duty to prohibit state and district discrimination, and its jurisdiction over federal lands and DC itself. To press for what we know to be unconstitutional just because it would be politically easy would be to subvert the very rule of law, that which protects us from the arbitrary -- and as the Founders understood, very dangerous -- rule of men.

But the reasons for keeping Washington at bay are not simply legal or to avoid an oppressive dictatorship.

The fact of the matter is that no one person or group of people -- even those of us at Cato's Center for Educational Freedom -- are omniscient, or even close to it. There are lots of things we don't know, and we all make mistakes. That's why it is never wise to give broad authority to a central government, even if it is utterly benevolent. If it does something wrong everyone goes down, and the human tendency is to do lots of wrong things. It is this understanding that backs the "laboratories of democracy" concept of states. Individual states can try different ideas, but others are free to steer clear of those that fail and run with those that work.

But aren't state governments and districts prone to the same human failings as Washington, not to mention the same special-interest driven politics, misalignment of political and educational incentives, etc.?

They certainly are, which is why education policy people at Cato support school choice generally and education tax credits -- which crucially do not involve public money -- specifically. Given the numerous reasons that government fails, as well as the need for the specialization, competition, and innovation that government quashes, we understand that education would work much more effectively if government didn't control the schools. But it is far better to let fifty states control their own education systems -- including getting to experiment with their own school-choice delivery mechanisms -- than to empower the central government to dictate one policy for all.

Yes, education analysts at Cato like school choice. But we're also big fans of federalism and the Constitution, and when it comes to federal policy those things must come first.

In my comment below, I wrote that Mr. Romney is staring at a menu of choices "written by the Catos and Friedmans of the world." In fact, the Cato website has a short piece stating their disagreement with the Romney voucherization approach: www.cato-at-liberty.org/gov-romney-federal-incentives-mean-federal-power/

While Cato is firmly in the 'get the government out of education' camp, their preferred approach is neovouchers -- tax credit policies used to divert public money to private schools. These policies differ from conventional vouchers in that the actual dollars never make their way into public coffers.

It was encouraging to see ed reform being talked about in this campaign season. We agree that school choice is where Mitt Romney and President Obama’s education plans differ the most and believe that it could be a defining issue in the campaign. Here’s what I said last week after the Romney plan was released:

“Both candidates are now firmly fighting for the education reform moral high ground. But it is school choice, which the Black Alliance for Education Options and others consider the true civil rights issue of our time, where Romney and Obama differ. Here in D.C., Governor Romney has defended the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. Today everyone from parents to the Washington Post are urging President Obama not to kill it. This indeed could be the defining issue of the 2012 presidential campaign – whether our next President is courageous enough to buck the status quo and truly embrace a bold reform agenda that puts parents interests ahead of special interests. We salute any leader who does just that.”

Those of us who are approaching (or well into) middle age remember the old days of Republican demands for a limited federal role in education and Democratic promotion of civil rights protections and compensatory programs. One could make a good case that this balanced world started to wobble on its axis during the Clinton years or even during the elder Bush or Reagan years. But it was NCLB that really stood the world on its head. In an illustration of bipartisanship at its worst, both parties relinquished their commendable core values and produced a transformation of American education that, more than a decade later, continues to befuddle students and educators.

In the new political world, the Republican approach is not to reduce the federal role in education – it’s to reduce the public role in education.

Meanwhile, the Democratic approach – or at least the Obama administration’s approach – is to adopt a slightly less extreme version of the Republican platform. In key areas, there’s not a lot of daylight between Obama’s education policy and the 2004 education platform of George W. Bush (http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2004/08/27/01gop_web.h24.html). Yes, Obama has granted AYP waivers, and he opposes private school vouchers. But in other ways, the current administration has taken the W football and run another 20 yards down the field. Keep in mind, for instance, that those AYP waivers are effectively granted only after states agree to additional high-stakes uses of students’ test scores (http://www.ed.gov/esea/flexibility).

Pity, then, Mr. Romney. By the rules of the game, his task is to run on an education platform to the right of Obama’s. Like a dog breeder restricted to options more furry than Schnauzers and lower slung than Basset Hounds, he’s staring at a menu with almost no choices. And it’s a menu written by the Catos and Friedmans of the world.

The Romney campaign has dutifully insisted that there’s ample room to the right. Sure, Obama’s administration favors high-stakes testing, but we can demand even more. Sure, Obama’s administration has blamed teacher unions for standing in the way of its favored reforms, but we can blame them for all sorts of additional stuff. Sure, Obama’s administration favors increased school choice, but we can step on the accelerator even harder: let’s voucherize Title I funding!

Of course, when both candidates are drawing from the Republican playbook, the awkwardness can work both ways. One amusing incident recently happened when Obama’s campaign slammed Romney’s statements about class size being unimportant (“what planet does he live on?” they asked). Although the Obama folks could easily back up their criticism by pointing to decades of research about the importance of class size, the campaign had the little problem that Arne Duncan has also minimized the importance of smaller class sizes – several times.

Romney’s campaign had some fun with that (http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/05/obama-romney-classroom-size-education-arne-duncan-white-house.php).

Yet this would all be substantially more amusing if our kids weren’t being injured by the relentless and bipartisan march away from the nation’s past commitment to public schools. The Title I voucherization plan is part of a larger push for privatization and profitization in lieu of schools as democratically governed institutions serving the public interest. This Romney plan would exert federal leverage on states to change their own laws in ways that the citizens of those states would otherwise reject. In some states, the constitutions themselves would likely have to be amended.

Such a trampling of past Republicans principles of federalism might be defensible if the justification went beyond … “why not try” something new. It doesn’t. And it’s time we stopped experimenting on the nation’s most vulnerable children. They need reform, but they need reform designed and proven to actually increase their opportunities to learn.

So yes, this is indeed “school choice mania,” but that’s now the status quo. The two parties are committed to one-upping each other, and each round of their game pushes us all further and further into the same crazy corner.

As Jay Mathews perceptively observed over the weekend, and as others of us have been pointing out for a while, the Obama-Duncan team didn't leave a heckuva lot of education-reform terrain for Mitt Romney to occupy except for variations on the theme of vouchers. And occupy it he has done. But "voucherizing Title I" is not a new idea. I recall working with Bill Bennett on it—and Reagan then proposed it—a quarter century ago. Getting such a major change enacted would, I think, hinge not only on Governor Romney reaching the Oval Office but also on a GOP sweep in both houses of Congress. But getting it fully considered is well worth doing.

As America nears the half-century mark with Title I, we can fairly conclude that pumping all this money into districts to boost the budgets of schools serving disadvantaged kids hasn't done those kids much good, though it has surely been welcomed by revenue-hungry districts (and states). Evaluation after evaluation of Title I has shown it to have little or no positive impact, and everybody knows that the NCLB version of Title I hasn't done much good either. It has, however, yielded an enormous number of schools that we now know, without doubt, are doing a miserable job, particularly with disadvantaged kids, but we're having a dreadful time "turning around" those schools. One may fairly conclude that Title I in its present form isn't working and probably cannot.

So why not try strapping the money to the backs of needy kids and letting them take it to the schools of their choice? This would help them escape from dreadful schools. It would make them more "affordable" for the schools they move into. It would remove one of the main barriers (the non-portability of federal dollars) that discourages states and districts from moving toward "weighted student funding" with their own money. And it would certainly go a long way to change the balance of power in American education from producers to consumers.

Of course it is fraught with vast technical and implementation challenges. Big changes always are. And it's probably unwise to force it on states that really don't want to do it. But why not at least let those that want to try it? That's how welfare reform came about. Why not education reform?