Yglesias says the other day:

“The idea is that, well, no child should be left behind. It’s an essentially egalitarian aspiration — the school system should try to do well for the hardest to teach kids, included ones coming from difficult backgrounds and ones who simply for whatever reason have a hard time with school. The idea of “gifted” programs is basically the reverse vision — that the school system should focus on the easiest cases and push them to the highest level of achievement possible.

There’s not a stark either/or choice between the hard cases and the easy cases, but at some level you do need to make a decision about priorities. Insofar as we’re serious about educational equality, that will to some extent involve shortchanging the best and the brightest. Insofar as we’re serious about taking the most talented as far as they can go, that will involve shortchanging equity. The former strikes me as more desirable than the latter, especially for people who want to think of themselves as being on the left.”

I guess you could say I’m slightly peevish about the “you are a liberal, this is THE liberal position, therefore by transitive property, you MUST support it” form of argument. I mean I understand that if you’re reading TPMCafe, you’re presumed to be a liberalish sort at a liberal blog, so one can take the normative short-cut probably. But I suppose I don’t have to tell you at this point that I don’t find it persuasive.

But I guess if we retreated behind a Rawlsian veil we’d probably agree with Matt, and that is a pretty compelling argument that it is in fact THE liberal position. Nevertheless, I still think it’s a completely wrong way of looking at the issue.

If we as a society our going to make decisions concerning prioritizing scarce educational resources, it makes sense to me, for us to consider what kind of output we desire. Do we want to, for example, mazimize the number of future American Nobel prize winners and enjoy the fruits of the breakthroughs that our most gifted can achieve, or do we want to maximize the educational level of the median American worker? Both results have great value, and if we were to quantify them in terms of dollars, I’m not sure which one would prove to be of greater value to society. But I think these are the questions we should be discussing. And that devoting our resources to maximizing the future opportunities of our least educationally apt children for the sake of doing so, without examining the costs, is fuzzy-headed. Which may or may not be a liberal value. But as liberals we do acknowledge that society is not just a collection of disparate competitive individual maximizers, but that we live in a community where cooperation is also an important value. And that maximizing the strength and resources of that community is itself a liberal value.

And now I’m left to wonder whether this is a significant point, or if I’ve just been in DC for too long.