A philosopher many decades ago called it “The Miracle of Paris.” Each morning, the good citizens of Paris would jump out of bed, scurry around town, working and playing and scheming and consuming – and then they would all go home. The miracle? Everyone would have food; everyone would be fed. In the midst of seeming chaos, with no master plan, no constipated government intervention, all would be sustained, in a vaguely Libertarian Garden of Eden.

One can quarrel with the notion of the magic of the marketplace, but there is something to be said for the seeming chaos that brings buyers and sellers and capital (human and financial) together in one big, unholy mess to sort out value and cost and utility.

Armies of social service types, singing in three-part harmony, remind us that there are hapless victims in all this, but in the aggregate, we sustain ourselves in reasonably good fashion.

For an example of a market that offers up all the chaos, but little of the benefit, look no further than Massachusetts public schools in general, and the Boston schools in particular.

To be sure, the little munchkins wake up each morning, spring out of bed, and go about their business – but their choice of where to “work,” or where to shop for educational services, is limited by government fiat – government with little instinct for or interest in the value that might come from competition for educational goods and services.

In the aggregate, the region is sufficiently wealthy and educated so as to not manufacture hideous public education, but, as a new study reported in November, most Boston high school graduates who enrolled in college in 2000 never graduated.

The hideous, basket-case, urban-nightmare schools remain embarrassing, but there is little in the way of marketplace pressure to improve performance.

Passion Problem

“Charter schools,” a mediocre, but worthwhile effort to bring a semblance of competition to the sluggish public school monopolies, have been given hostile, grudging, limited support in Massachusetts – with a severe cap on the number of schools and a waiting list in the tens of thousands.

With the prod of extra federal stimulus money, the legislature may empower local school districts to shut down miserable public schools and permit more charters – but what is lacking in all this is true enthusiasm; a true public commitment to choice, to competition, to the messy business of letting the market work its magic.

The school voucher experiments in such spot as Milwaukee and Cleveland and Washington, D.C., essentially give kids in miserable schools a ticket out-of-town – sufficient money, at least in theory, to open public and private doors to a better education.

The father of “school choice” in its voucher form, the late Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman, did not initially envision such a program being limited to the poor kids. A market is a market, he thought; give every family the power to go shopping for education.

As a practical and political matter, Massachusetts would be the 50th state in the union to ever authorize such a thing; local school board egos are too strong, as are the teachers’ unions. The monopolists appreciate the monopoly.

The current proposals to increase the number of charter schools and allow the state to engage in unfriendly takeovers and shutdowns of lousy local public schools offer up more style than substance.

In a system as crippled by union power and local authoritarianism and lack of energy as public education in Massachusetts, a top-down, carefully orchestrated, meek “reform” package wouldn’t accomplish much in the short term, if ever. It is that messy energy of a real marketplace, where state and local school money would follow the students, wherever they choose to go, that would constitute effective “reform.”

Gov. Patrick and legislative leaders have been all over the place on reform, ranging from dive-under-the-desk status quo; to meek reform, while looking over their shoulders at the teachers’ unions; to gung-ho rhetoric about a major revolution that will never actually happen.

An essay on school reform coalitions in the current issue of Public Policy Journal suggests that “significant policy reform typically requires political muscle that can push innovations in the face of concerted resistance.”

That doesn’t describe the school reform environment in Massachusetts.