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Elizabeth Warren’s newly released education plan takes aim at the main source of federal funding for charter schools. It proposes abolishing for-profit charters. Bernie Sanders got there first, of course, but that’s no great surprise. You’d expect a socialist like Sanders to support pouring money into public schools instead of diverting funds to privately run charters. The “education reform” crowd presumably takes it for granted that Bernie is their enemy. But they experienced Warren’s embrace of his position as a betrayal. As vocal as Warren has been against monopolies, I'd have thought she would be against having one organization with 100% market share in an industry vital to the prosperity of Americans: K-12 education. I'd be wrong. — John Arnold (@JohnArnoldFndtn) October 21, 2019 I’m so mad about the Warren announcement because she claims to:

1) be pro choice

2) care about low income families

3) hate monopolies & wants to break them up

4) be driven by the Science- which is in favor of charters.

5) support equal funding for all kids @charteralliance — Seth Andrew (@SethAndrew) October 21, 2019 Warren was once on their side. In their coauthored 2003 book, The Two-Income Trap, Elizabeth Warren and her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, write: A well-designed voucher program . . . that paid nearly the entire cost of educating a child (not just a partial subsidy) would open a range of possibilities to all children. With fully-funded vouchers, parents of all income levels could send their children — and the accompanying financial support — to the schools of their choice. . . . An all-voucher system would be a shock to the educational system, but the shakeout might be just what the system needs. As David Brooks noted in a New York Times column pining for the days when Warren was less predictable, “This is exactly the argument that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos uses to support school choice.”

Defining Monopolies Are public schools “monopolies”? Or would they be if not for charters? This could be questioned on at least two grounds. First, “monopolies” are usually understood as enterprises that sell commodities without competition. Public schools offer education as a decommodified service. Second, regular private schools would exist even if charter schools did not. On the first point, let’s concede, at least for the sake of argument, that what matters for classifying something as a “monopoly” is the absence of competition. Whether the service being provided is funded by sales or taxation is a separate issue. The second point is a little trickier. The usual argument from charter advocates is that poor families don’t have a meaningful right to that which they can’t afford. One might wonder why the underlying principle about rights doesn’t lead these self-styled reformers to become leftists, but socialists aren’t going to quarrel with this particular premise. Given all of this, would charter-free public education be monopolistic, non-monopolistic, monopolistic-only-from-the-perspective-of-poor-families, or what? Here’s a better question: if a charter-free public education system would in some sense be a monopoly, would that be a bad thing?

The Limits of Anti-Monopoly Politics Trust-busting liberalism starts from the premise that competitive markets generally serve the public good better than any alternative. If you’re the sort of person who calls yourself a capitalist to your bones and you see an area where markets are manifestly not serving the public good, your first instinct is not to endorse public ownership but to find a way to make that part of the market more competitive. This instinct is so powerful that it’s applied in all sorts of areas where it makes no sense. For example, we’re seeing more and more calls (from trust-busting liberals and even from social democrats who should know better) to break up Twitter and Facebook, even though the nature of the services severely limits how much they can be broken up without losing their functionality. Simply separating Facebook from Messenger and Instagram, for instance, still leaves Mark Zuckerberg with extraordinary control over the flow of information. Really breaking up Facebook would mean having to keep track of which of your friends were on which mini-Facebook. Nationalizing the social media giants would solve the same problems more efficiently and also have the advantage of extending the First Amendment to social media. To those trained to shudder at the very thought of a “monopoly,” though, this might sound like a terrible idea. The public sector is already a large part of the economy. Adding monopolistic businesses to its portfolio would make things even worse . . . right?