As March Madness looms, so does the certainty that we will hear again about the many universities and colleges that fail to educate and graduate their “student athletes.” The use of uneducated, sometimes even illiterate, athletes to bolster the performance of college teams is rightly a scandal. The spread of this practice to high schools is sending up a warning flare, illuminating the dangers of school vouchers.

A recent article in the New York Times details how parts of the education system are being corrupted into a subsidiary of the sports entertainment industry. Interestingly, and to the credit of public high schools, the villains in the effort to grade students entirely on the basis of their athletic skills, without concern for their academic accomplishments, are in the private school sector.

At the university level, the corruption is widespread in the public as well as the private sector, but in high schools, it is the Lutheran Christian Academy, the Boys to Men Academy, and God's Academy that are sending star basketball players to Mississippi State, George Washington, Georgetown, and Texas-El Paso.

Under NCAA rules, a student who is unable to achieve the minimum score on standardized tests (like the SAT), can compensate with a good grade point average in academic subjects. So a new kind of private prep school has been created exactly for that purpose. In a short period, sometimes with little or no effort, a student can raise his GPA remarkably.

If all this were taking place within a school vouchers system that permitted lightly supervised parental choice, taxpayers would end up paying for the farm system of the sports entertainment industry (which includes college sports).

Advocates of school vouchers like to frame the issue as paternalism versus free choice. Why not give the poor the same options the rich have in determining where their children should go to school. As NYU Professor Joseph Viteritti, puts it, “[Not permitting vouchers for private schools] tells poor parents that they can choose the schools their children attend so long as they do not choose schools that the gatekeepers of public policy don’t want them to choose.” For Viteritti and other voucher advocates, opponents of vouchers are saying to poor parents that their choices for their children’s schooling is not to be trusted; leave those decisions to people with more income. But the issue is not the mistreatment of the poor, it is how to spend taxpayer dollars.

Education delivers a mix of outputs: skills, knowledge, values, and credentials are among the most important. Most parents and children want what society wants: an education system that produces good citizens who can read, write, calculate, and reason. But some parents and children want educational results that differ sharply from what the average taxpayer wants. Some want to focus on non-academic skills—like slam dunking—or narrow, confrontational values, such as religious or racial exclusivity. And since the average taxpayer is footing the bill for public education, it seems not unduly interventionist for the taxpayer’s representatives to see what each school is offering before opening the wallet. While most private schools strive to impart skills, values, and knowledge similar to what public schools aim for, in some instances this is not true.

The magic of the market—competing sellers all looking for a profit—is that it delivers what customers want at low cost. So a market in education can be expected to deliver what parents want, satisfying the various niches of consumer demand. In particular, when a credential—a good grade or a diploma—are in themselves very valuable, a smoothly functioning market economy can be expected to produce firms that deliver credentials. If there is demand for education in antisocial values, firms will arise to meet that segment of the market too.

The basketball academies are an example of successful market response to consumer demand. But they are not what society needs. We do not need hundreds of young men with their hoop dreams dashed, sitting on street corners because they are functionally illiterate.

The public sector certainly does not reliably deliver what society needs. Our public schools are not serving low-income families well. Other public services also have their problems. But the notion that the market will ride in on a white horse, sweeping away a horde of easily solved problems is ridiculous. As the basketball academies show once again, markets may deliver what people want, from methamphetamines to unearned grades, but that does not mean we should abandon our collective effort to improve on this outcome.

Bernard Wasow is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation.