Coulson also doesn't seem to like being described as an "extremist libertarian." That word--extremist--is not one that I use lightly, particularly given modern connotations. But here's the mission statement of Cato's Center for Educational Freedom, which Coulson directs, in full:
Cato's Center for Educational Freedom was founded on the principle that parents are best suited to make important decisions regarding the care and education of their children. The Center's scholars seek to shift the terms of public debate in favor of the fundamental right of parents and toward a future when state-run schools give way to a dynamic, independent system of schools competing to meet the needs of American children.
Working toward a future when state-run schools give way to an "independent" system is, by my reading, advocacy for the destruction of public education as we know it. If that's not an extremist position within the context of education policy, I don't know what is.
On a personal level, I'm actually fairly sympathetic to the libertarian perspective. But it's not the only perspective I value, and it has limits. The struggle for a single-perspective organization like Cato is staying principled while retaining efficacy and legitimacy. In other words, while it's all well and good in theory to stick to your intellectual and ideological guns, as a rule most people don't like being objects of scorn and ridicule, or (if they're in the think tank business) having the doors to the corridors of power slammed in their face. So they make compromises to stay part of maintstream conversation. Cato's education policy proposals reflect this.
There is, after all, a coherent, principled libertarian position on public education: There shouldn't be any. People managed to become educated for millenia with out massively expensive state-run school systems, one might argue. There's plenty of precedent for the market providing education to those who want to pay for it--roughly 10 percent of K-12 students are are in private school already. Without public schools, religous and non-profit organizations would also step in to fill the void. Freeing up all that tax money would redirect capital toward more productive purposes, increasing economic output, creating new jobs, and giving people more money they could use to purchase education, which would be more effective and less expensive due to the salutory effects of market competition. Some children would get less, but some children get less of lots of things--books, computers, travel--already. That's the way of the world. And this way parents would have greater incentives to work and provide for their children's education, rather than depending on the state to do it for them.
The problem with this position, of course, is that it's deeply un-American and basically absurd. It puts you in the door-slamming-and-ridicule position described above. So Cato has to make provisions for giving all students an education while eschewing the most sensible way of doing so, which is to raise money through taxation and spend it through government support of public schools. Which is not to say the current model can't stand improvement; I happen to think it's too bureaucratic and inhospitable to innovation, excellence and parental choice. But you can fix these problems without losing the essentially public nature of schooling.
But since Cato's extremist libertarian principles run the opposite direction, it ends up having to create a nightmarishly complex set of tax credit policies that would require parents to annually piece together some combination of credits and "scholarships" granted by various purely theoretical non-profits, instead of just enrolling their child in a good, free public school nearby.
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