Kevin Carey is a terrific writer. Indeed, he wrote a really outstanding essay on the promise of for-profit online education in The Washington Monthly last fall. But I must admit that I’m a bit puzzled by his take on Rick Hess’s post on the lackluster results of the Milwaukee voucher experiment.

Very sensibly, Hess wrote the following:

First off, 20 years in, it’s hard to argue that the nation’s biggest and most established voucher experiment has “worked” if the measure is whether vouchers lead to higher reading and math scores. Happily, that’s never been my preferred metric for structural reforms–both because I think it’s the wrong way to study them (see “Science and Nonscience“) but, more importantly, because choice-based reform shouldn’t be understood as that kind of intervention. Rather, choice-based reform should be embraced as an opportunity for educators to create more focused and effective schools and for reformers to solve problems in smarter ways. Whether any of that pays off is much more a question of quality control, support, talent, investment, infrastructure, and the rest than it is of whether or not a choice program is in place.

This strikes me as a pretty straightforward argument: choice-based reform at its best creates an opportunity for educational innovators to create new models, deploy new technologies, etc. The ultimate goal is to create a flourishing educational marketplace that goes beyond the binary choice of going to school A or school B. We also want to create markets for focused solution shops that, for example, focus exclusively on recruiting high-quality teachers, offering specialized math instruction, developing strategies for integrating technology in the curriculum. Some of this already exists. But the way that educational dollars are disbursed stymies the development of these specialized markets, and educational productivity suffers as a direct result.

(Consider, for example, a food marketplace in which you receive a large voucher that can only be spent at a single food facility — a combination supermarket-restaurant that served all of your food-based needs. Fast food, fine dining, cereal, arugula: once a year, you choose where you’ll get all of it. Or buy a house that is bundled with your single food facility. Would we have as diverse and competitive and productive a marketplace for food? As Americans have grown more affluent, we’ve seen an increase in private tuition services and other supplementary educational services. And that’s progress. But a great deal of value is locked in the money that is transferred directly to schools.)

To take just one of Hess’s examples, cultivating talent matters. And to cultivate talent, it helps to have better ways of allocating talent and rewarding talent, which might help induce more talented individuals to enter the labor pool. Hess’s argument, as I understand it, is that these are all interrelated systems, and that you can’t just create a voucher program and hope everything’s going to suddenly “work.” Choice is only part of the puzzle, albeit an important part that enables the others to take hold.

Carey sees this differently:

I’m having a hard time understanding the distinction here. Vouchers aren’t a teaching method or curriculum or instructional intervention. They are, as Hess notes, purely structural, shifting control over resources toward parents and widening the range of institutions that can receive those resources. Since “more focused and effective schools” are properly defined as “schools where students learn more” i.e. “schools with higher reading and math scores,” if vouchers didn’t result in more such schools then vouchers failed. One might argue that vouchers created the opportunity for educators to create such schools and educators didn’t take advantage of it, but what’s the difference? The whole point of structural reform is to change incentives and conditions; if the change was insufficient to create desired behavior then ipso facto the reform failed. A purely structural metric for evaluating purely structural reforms misses the point altogether.

This strikes me as really wrongheaded. It takes time for more focused and effective schools to emerge. Moreover, if they do emerge, as they have in Sweden under that country’s choice regime, they’d likely scale up as national franchises. Milwaukee is a great American metropolis. It’s not going to spontaneously generate the dense marketplace that you’d need.

Am I just recapitulating the argument made by advocates of state socialism — it didn’t work because we didn’t really try it? I don’t believe so, in light of the socialist calculation problem and other vexing challenges facing central planners. I can see how one might feel otherwise. I do caution us, however, against approaching this problem too narrowly.

The truth is that Hess’s arguments are a little too sophisticated for a binary debate. He has made an active effort to make educational reformers, particularly on the right, to go beyond a narrow focus on school choice, and instead to focus on the secondary markets and institutions that can make the broader educational system better faster.

This, by the way, is a good way to think of lots of complicated regulated markets, including the health sector and the financial sector. Choice is important, but it’s certainly not enough. It’s just that in those sectors, we don’t even contemplate restricting choice as severely as we do in the educational space.