This election season, I was reading political web sites and thinking about the best ways to help African Americans in this country and time and again I come back to one thing above all others: school choice.

I am sure blacks face barriers at many stages of life, but to me the fundamental problem is that they start life deep in a hole due to the crappy public school education they get. Large companies & top graduate and post-graduate schools are bending over backwards to admit blacks

But at some point they are all fighting over the same small percentage that by privilege or hard work or luck escaped the fate of most African Americans by leaving high school well-prepared

So often the problem of public education is portrayed as one of money, but many of the poorest urban districts have solid budgets, they just don't get good outcomes with it for a wide variety of reasons.

Incredibly, many of these districts are managed and led by African Americans all the way from school board through mayor and sometimes even to governor. I am sure there are many problems but the one I observe is that the leaders of public schools are selling out their kids.

In part they are selling them out to the unions, larding up school budgets with high-paid sinecures (HOW many vice principals do you have??) that have no involvement with teaching. But the biggest problem is that so many Progressives focus on credentialism rather than ability

In this framework, black leaders deem it more important for kids to get the credential, the diploma, than the learning itself, so the educational expectations are constantly dumbed down until everyone passes but no one is prepared to do anything at the next stage of life

This is really a catastrophe. The education philosophies and assumptions being applied to African American kids are killing the futures of whole generations of kids, but are helping to maintain power for those in charge.

We are past the point of reform from within. The only way to change this is the same way you break any other senescent monopoly -- with competition. Where such choice programs have been done well, children of color have benefited

I am not naive to the fact that in other times and places, school choice would merely have been a way to further segregate people of color, but I firmly believe we are in a time and place where this can work, and there are plenty of examples of having done so in local markets.

I will end with a note on my personal experience sending my kids to school. We benefited from Phoenix having a number of nationally famous charter schools (eg Basis) as well as reasonably-priced private schools (as well as a few stupid-expensive ones)

We did not pay a fortune to send our kids to private school k-8. What we got was a school that set very high expectations for the kids academically & had a process and teaching approach that delivered those results. They were always at least a year ahead of local public schools

I understand that private schools have a complicated reputation, and some of the bad things said about them can be correct. For one year I sent our son to a private school in the Seattle area that was very expensive & was populated with famous names

It sucked. What we learned from this was that there are two sorts of private schools -- ones like the one in Seattle which are private and expensive mainly because the rich whites in them want social exclusivity, and then ones like ours in Phx that are genuinely about education

The mistake most folks make when extrapolating to a school choice environment is to assume that private schools in that framework will all be expensive and exclusive. But that can't be right. Current private schools are a product for the current marketplace

The current marketplace is one where only parents who can afford to pay taxes for public schools, and then pay tuition again for a private school are likely to be customers. You can't compare the private schools now to what would exist under choice.

Here is the example I like to use. If the government gave everyone a Toyota Camry, then there would not be a lot of private auto companies selling $25-$35K mid-sized cars. Why bother? All we would see would be expensive cars like Mercedes and Porches to cater to people who

could afford to turn down their government car and buy one on their own.

There are plenty of examples, if one looks, of places where new types of private schools are arising -- Phoenix is just one example.

And to the extent there are abuses in the system, as there likely always are when private companies operate with government payments, then let's figure some rules out to rout around it. Worried about segregation? Perhaps we pay per pupil more if the school uses random admission

But the current system has failed miserably. The performance of black kids on SAT tests is like a positive cancer test telling us we have a dire problem. And the main response I see from the education establishment is to say we should eliminate the SAT.

In my mind, this is exactly as short-sighted as responding to a cancer diagnosis by saying that you just won't take any more cancer tests any more.