> The school has a good reputation, so we'll pay money to send our kid there. Sounds like a rational choice to me.

Well, no. It's clearly a choice, but a rational choice is one where he costs and benefits are born by voluntary participants in the transaction who decide to accept or reject them based on maximization of their personal utility function with complete knowledge of all costs of and utilities that will be derived from the decision with an infinite time horizon.

No real decision actually did this, but many reasonably approximate it. But childhood education fails hard and almost every aspect. Opacity of impacts and the downstream effects and the fact that where here is choice, its third party choice on behalf of a party who is not in a good position to weigh the effects of a decision against heir own utility function are the main issues.

> . "Promoting charter schools exempt from the bureaucratic rules" is a perfectly reasonable step.

If the problem is too many rules, then you don't need limited special providers exempt from the rules, you need to remove the unnecessary rules entirely.

> > along with greater central accountability and regulation for traditional public schools

> If those schools are failing catastrophically, I don't see what's necessarily wrong with that.

If, as is the justification for diverting funds to private schools through vouchers and charters, the traditional public schools are “catastrophically failing” because of excessive central micromanagement, increasing central micromanagement of traditional public schools is exacerbating, not alleviating the problem. OTOH, if traditional public schools are “catastrophically failing” because of inadequate central management and accountability in the use of public funds, diverting public funds to private schools with less accountability and centralized management through vouchers and charters is monumentally stupid. But the same people advancing charters and vouchers have also been behind moves to increase centralized accountability and management of traditional public schools, and in fact have specifically linked those efforts to charter/voucher programs.

> The whole point is to enable an exodus to private providers, if the parents so choose.

Which would be problematic, even if it didn't involve policy designed to increase both the actual and perceived failings of traditional public schools, because it rests—even further than is already the case—quality of education on parental skill in evaluating quality of education, even if the vouchers were restricted to institutions which took them as full-cost with no supplemental required payment (which is sometimes not the case; voucher programs, and even more often tax credit systems, are often partial tuition subsidies which drive market clearing tuition up at private schools but don't make it an equal cost choice with public schools l), thereby entrenching inequality from generation to generation.

But in the real world, that's not the goal; the “if the parents so choose” isn't part of the goal, the goal is to in the near term deceive parents into the choice, and in the long term collapse public education entirely so that there is no choice.