School Choice Works, So Why Can't Parents Have It?

School Choice Works, So Why Can't Parents Have It?
 

May 29, 2015

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted with permission from Investor's Business Daily

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Education Reform: As school choice initiatives around the country gather steam, a slew of new reports suggest what many reformers have said all along: It works!
On Friday, Nevada's legislature sent a universal Education Savings Account Bill to Gov. Brian Sandoval for signing, the second major piece of school choice legislation to reach his desk.
No word yet whether he'll sign the bill, but he should. It's a school-reform no-brainer.
Indeed, school-choice proposals are becoming increasingly common as state and local governments seek ways to improve the performance of failing schools without spending more money.
Too often it's a tough sell, given the powerful opposition of teachers unions and anti-choice liberals, both of which like having a monopoly on your children's education. They've maintained school choice doesn't work, costs too much and is unfair to kids who stay behind in public schools.
A raft of new studies, however, shows that's not the case.
Enrollment in school-choice programs is surging across the country, from 29,003 in the 2001 school year to 245,854 in 2013.
"In the United States today, 56 different school-choice policies exist in 28 states plus the District of Columbia, and the number of choice policies has approximately doubled every four years from 2000 to 2012," wrote education analyst Patrick Wolf on the Heritage Foundation's Daily Signal blog.
This is the market speaking to the nation's most pernicious monopoly: education.
Parents want choice because choice means better education for their kids and, over time, better lives.
Wolf cites as an example Washington, D.C.'s Opportunity Scholarship Program, the only federally sponsored plan that gives kids in public school the option of attending private school instead.
That program has been viciously attacked for supposedly robbing public education to give the best students a chance at a private education. Yet it was so popular with poor parents that demand far exceeded supply. So a lottery was held.
Heritage studied what happened to those who won the lottery — that is, won Opportunity Scholarships — and those who didn't. What it found was stunning: Students with a scholarship graduated at a rate 21 percentage points higher than those without.
The data were conclusive: "In scientific terms, we are more than 99% confident that access to school choice through the Opportunity Scholarship Program was the reason students in the program graduated at these much higher rates." Wow!
Or as President Obama told the Chamber of Commerce in 2010, "Graduating from high school is an economic imperative."
Isn't it strange, then, that he opposes school choice?
The study also found the program more than paid for itself. After factoring in all costs and benefits, $2.62 was returned for every dollar spent. What public program can be said to have any kind of return like that? None. And each graduate saved the U.S. $260,000 due to higher taxes paid on higher earnings and lower law-enforcement and welfare costs.
Nor is D.C. a special case.
We began talking about Nevada. But school choice is growing countrywide. And where it's been put in place, it's been highly successful.
For instance, 11 of 12 random assignment studies found "statistically significant positive outcomes for students who won a spot in school voucher programs," notes the Cato Institute's Jason Bedrick. Those outcomes included higher reading and math scores.
That's not all. About those fears that private schools "rob" public schools of funding, they too seem unfounded. In 22 of 23 empirical studies, students at the public schools also improved their performance after school choice began.
Why? Competition, which improves all things.
Our current education model based on the economic monopoly of a monolithic, union-run, publicly funded school system is defunct. Parents know this. Those who don't are the dinosaurs who perpetuate it.