Here's Joe Biden — or rather, Joe Biden's online handler — trying to be clever:

Corey DeAngelis immediately shot back, as Jeremiah Poff reported yesterday, with, "Thank you for the accidental endorsement of school choice."

Biden was trying to bash Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) for considering other perfectly good options for high schoolers to get college credit, given that the College Board has decided to fight a big public political battle defending its inexcusable bow to anti-historical woke nonsense. Instead, Biden got owned for basically saying what every school choice advocate says. The logic of his statement dictates that school choice is the only answer.

DeAngelis, is absolutely right. Although government is good at taking and distributing money, it turns out it is not good at running schools at all. We have learned this lesson painfully over decades. Take Baltimore as an example. Despite billions thrown down the rathole, today there are 43 regular Baltimore public schools where fewer than two students in the entire school can do math at grade level. At 23 of those schools, zero students can do math at grade level — not a single one. These schools already receive $24,000 a year per pupil, so it isn't a question of money.

How do the students in those zip codes get a quality education? There is only one answer left: school choice.

As I note in this week's Washington Examiner magazine, the only rational response to the situation in Baltimore would be to fire every person involved in these 43 schools (and several more that might have just five or six proficient students) and replace them all with new blood. But given that union contracts make the rational response impossible, the next-best response is for the government to give up control of the schools to private organizations that can operate them competently so that children actually learn math.

At this point, opposition to school choice is basically a form of cruelty and racism without any rational basis. For how many more generations do the in this and similar failed school systems — most of them are black, let's not obscure that point — have to wait on empty promises to improve? I don't believe that systemic racism exists in most of our nation's institutions, but it definitely exists in our public school systems. What other explanation is there for a philosophy that says the public school model is more important than their ability to succeed in life?

Mostly non-white children are having their futures sacrificed so that some sclerotic teachers union full of incompetents can keep up a guaranteed job program for its members. To make matters worse, these children's institutionally-determined failure in life will be used 20 years from now as proof that everything is still racist. No, no — we just don't need a future like that.

Government-funded public schools will remain with us — I imagine mostly in the form of charters in poorer areas and regular public schools in ultra-wealthy zip codes. But more states are expanding school choice to include private schools as well, and it's the best thing that could possibly happen for the students in them. It turns out that government is great at funding schools, but the experiment with government-run schools has already come up empty. If this were a medical experiment, no scientific ethics panel would allow Baltimore Public Schools to continue, because it is doing permanent and avoidable damage to its subjects. This is true in cities everywhere, and it's time to fix it.

At this point, if you want children to succeed, you support school choice, and if you don't support it, then you don't want them to succeed.