More Opposition To Empowering Parents

I continue to scratch my head over the vehement opposition of the Big Education bureaucracy and its allies to empowering parents with the ability to send their kids to the school that best meets their individual needs. Here’s part of a news release from the anti-choice group Public Schools First NC:

Vouchers are a failing proposition all around: they fail to help the students who most
need them, they provide little benefit for the students who do use them, and they drain
resources from the one public institution best situated to educate all children: the public
schools.

That’s quite a statement: “best situated to educate all children.”

Actually, no. From a recent report by Dr. Terry Stoops, JLF Director of Research and Education Studies:

While there is disagreement about the regulatory, political, and legal dynamics of voucher programs, there is a general consensus that school choice has a positive academic impact on participating students. According to the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, ten empirical studies of scholarship programs have used random assignment or experimental research design, the “gold standard” in social science research. Nine of those studies,including two that evaluated Charlotte’s Children’s Scholarship Fund, concluded that scholarship recipients hadstatistically significant increases in performance.

One yielded inconclusive results. In addition, more than twentystudies identified ways that scholarships delivered “spillover” benefits to traditional public schools.

And remember: Preschool families and college students receive vouchers to attend the private institution of their choice, so there is no reason to believe that vouchers are not suitable for K-12 schooling too.