Anyone claiming that vouchers don’t affect public school performance would also have to address this new evidence.

1) Are you talking about charter schools? Because I have a hard time believing you’re talking about Minnesota’s tax deduction for private school tuition. Just checking for the sake of clarity - the issues are different with charter schools.

2) Do you have any data that would allow us to compare the number of students who are getting a worse education (because of their own bad choices) to the number of children who are getting a better education (because they were trapped in failing schools until they were given a choice)? Because I haven’t seen any data in Minnesota, but all the hard data in other places indicate that school choice provides a better education. See the research review section in this study:

http://www.friedmanfoundation.org/friedman/research/ShowResearchItem.do?id=10082

3) You don’t seem to have a high opinion of people’s ability to make choices for their children. I’ve already indicated that the data don’t support that. But even if we had no data, I would say that I would trust families to make better decisions for their children than a monopolistic government bureaucracy. How many parents would really choose a worse education for their children on purpose, just so their children wouldn’t have to work as hard?

4) You write “if the local community cares about education, the school will reflect that.” This assumes that there is no benefit from offering choices. We can just “make the school better” and then it won’t matter that you have no choice where you go. But different children have different educational needs that can be served better in different ways. No one school can be the right school for every child. And the evidence is pretty clear that competition for students creates positive incentives that improve all schools.

5) For that matter, why should my child’s education be held hostage to my community’s priorities? Suppose I live in a community that doesn’t care about education - say, a neighborhood with a lot of childless households that don’t want to pay high property taxes so that other people’s kids can have a better school. Why should my child’s life be crippled because my neighbors don’t value education?

Those who have been on the ground in Milwaukee for a couple decades definitely hoped that by now public schools there would have shown a more positive response. But as Forster notes (and Stern obfuscates) there has been some improvement and the research suggests it would not have occurred in the absence of choice. To many the logical policy response would be to expand options, increase the number of parents eligible for them, and try to close somewhat the large gap in fiscal support available to public schools vs. the alternatives that now exist. The fact that schools in the choice program have been able to grow and largely thrive at a fraction of the cost of public schools is striking.

It would be helpful if Stern stopped the bobbing and weaving and put forth a specific plan as to what he believes the Wisconsin Legislature and the Milwaukee Public Schools should do if, as he asserts, choice is not “working” as well as some had predicted. Would he reduce options? Increase them? Increase funding for choice schools? Reduce it? Mandate curricular “reforms”? The devil’s in the details. Stern is getting lots of attention for his Nixon to China moment but as Forster notes much of the attention is coming from media outlets and others who take pleasure in saying, “Hey look, Sol Stern says vouchers don’t work.”

Bottom line, if local community cares about education, the school will reflect that–and vice versa.

I’m slowly reconsidering my pro-school-choice stance…

In the 20 years of the modern school choice movement, since the Milwaukee voucher program was established, government control of participating private schools hasn’t been a problem in any school choice program. There are now almost 190,000 students attending private schools using vouchers and tax-credit scholarship programs, and so far 1) efforts to impose regulations on participating private schools have not been very ambitious in terms of the regulations they try to impose, and 2) even those efforts have largely failed to pass - they get proposed but they don’t get passed in the legislature.

In fact, over time school choice programs are imposing fewer restrictions on participating private schools, not more. That reflects the dramatic increase in the political success of school choice.

For more discussion of this issue, see the FAQ section of the publication “ABCs of School Choice,” published by the Friedman Foundation, and our recent report “Grading School Choice.”