The same universe as what? My argument doesn't rest on some idea of the way things used to be. What are you smoking that makes you think name-dropping NCLB or RTTT is a convincing argument? What does the current affordability of college have to do with whether standardized testing at the K-12 level helps charter schools? (For the record, I think an awful lot, and maybe a majority, of college degrees are currently overpriced, and students are suckers for taking out big loans to pay for them.)

Charters are judged -- even more harshly -- based on results of these standardized tests. The fact that there's a mechanism to set up charter schools when the public schools suck has nothing to do with the fact that governments have long tried to, and still do, push private schools into the margin. Government's efforts to do so make a mockery of the AC's claim that this social-media snooping debacle was caused by "the philosophy that the free market will be the best solution in every walk of life".

Why in the world do you think that standardized testing is good for, or inherent to, charter schools? Standardized testing long predates charter schools. Standardized testing -- and standardized curricula, which is what Common Core is really pushing -- are in many ways an antithesis to charter schools. Charter schools are successful to the extent that they can distinguish themselves from what their (public or private) competitors offer. If all schools have the same material and the same tests, and those mandated bits cover as much of the school year as Common Core says they must, then charter schools will have precious little to distinguish themselves with. Besides, charter schools are at best a hybrid between private and public education. They're good in that they generally let parents choose a school for their children, but bad in that they are much more accountable to the existing public-school bureaucracy rather than to parents.

The primary way that government has (very intentionally) pushed private schools to the sideline is by using fairly uniform taxes, usually in the form of property taxes, to pay for the public schools. Anyone who wants to send a child to a private school has, until the very recent phenomenon of school-choice vouchers, had to pay twice: Once for public schools, and once for the private school they choose for the child.

There are special needs kids who can't just click through a test on a computer screen -- blind children are an obvious example, and anyone with dyslexia needs special accommodations for the test to accurately measure skills beyond reading comprehension. Anything more complicated than a multiple-choice question -- for example, being able to get partial credit for showing work in a math or science problem, or any essay question -- tends to be very hard to grade by computer. Setting up computer-focused course materials takes extra work, and if that doesn't amortize over enough classes, it is wasted effort. How often does the course material need to be reworked, do to changes in the available hardware and software platforms? Does the computerized curriculum mean that schools in the inner city, rich suburbs, and rural areas all need to have their students follow the same curriculum, or is there any room to tailor to local needs and abilities?

There certainly is a lot of budget that is wasted or abused in public schools, and bureaucracy and teacher's unions contribute much to that, but good solutions are not always as simple as they seem from the outside. If they were, we'd see more success stories of how a plucky reformer (with backing from the right school board members or whomever else) was able to turn a failing school around and deliver improved results for notably less money.

What part of one level of government coercing another level of government to adopt new educational standards, and then both of them together working to select a contractor to do these extra things (that even the government realizes it's too incompetent to run on its own), all while pushing private schools to the sideline, reminds you of a free market?