The Moynihan Challenge

Even if one doesn't believe that the data supporting vouchers (and charter schools for that matter) is compelling, given that we all know how awful the status quo is, shouldn't the hurdle for supporting experimentation be that we should be willing to try a wide range of ideas as long as there's no evidence that it does harm (rather than the current standard that there has to be absolute proof that it will be a huge success)? The article below captures this argument nicely:

The first person in the nation who can send me two random assignment school-choice studies showing significant declines in either academic performance or parental satisfaction will win a steak dinner. I'll even throw in drinks and dessert — the whole nine yards. You have one month to send the studies to http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/Mladner@goldwaterinstitute.org. Feel free to forward this to your anti-school-choice friends and invite them to play. The more the merrier.

If opponents of school choice can offer no proof to back their assertions, they deserve neither my steak nor anyone's confidence, leaving everyone to wonder: where's the beef?

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March 23, 2006, 7:38 a.m.
The Moynihan Challenge
Back up the hot air, win a steak dinner.

By Matthew Ladner

National Review

www.nationalreview.com/comment/ladner200603230738.asp

The late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.) related an insightful anecdote in his book Miles to Go. Senator Moynihan asked Laura D'Andrea Tyson of the Clinton Administration for two supportive studies justifying the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on a favored program.

Moynihan received two studies the following day, but after reading them, noted that both studies actually concluded similar programs had failed to produce any positive results. In response, Moynihan wrote the following in a letter to Tyson:

In the last six months I have been repeatedly impressed by the number of members of the Clinton administration who have assured me with great vigor that something or other is known in an area of social policy which, to the best of my understanding, is not known at all. This seems to me perilous. It is quite possible to live with uncertainty, with the possibility, even the likelihood that one is wrong. But beware of certainty where none exists. Ideological certainty easily degenerates into an insistence upon ignorance.

Pronouncements by school-choice opponents are rife with such ideological certainty. After columnist Jon Talton of the Arizona Republic, for example, used a Sunday column to describe a school-choice program that passed the Arizona legislature with bipartisan support as "right-wing utopianism," I publicly posed my own Moynihan challenge.