Jay P. Greene's Blog

A Century Foundation researcher searching for evidence.

(Guest Post by Jason Bedrick)

ICYMI, our JPG blogger buddy Greg Forster has a new piece up at Education Next debunking a report from the Century Foundation that claims — based on mere conjecture and an ostrich-like ability to bury one’s head in the sand regarding the research — that school choice supposedly increases ethnic segregation.

The Century Foundation has published a report by Halley Potter that claims private school choice will increase ethnic segregation in schools. Although the text of the report constantly invokes words like “evidence,” “studies” and “data,” its conclusions are actually defended almost entirely by appeal to a lengthy recitation of hypothetical, ideological speculation. The report’s actual engagement with empirical research is as scanty as it is misleading. A real review of the evidence shows that private school choice has never been found to increase segregation and often seems to have provided a more integrated classroom experience.

There are a number of serious methodological challenges involved in empirical research on how education policies affect ethnic segregation. I wrote about them at some length in a report for EdChoice a while back. For example, some data don’t permit causal conclusions; some methods of comparison are unfair because they compare elementary grades to secondary grades inappropriately. Reviewing all of the empirical research on school choice last year, I found that 10 studies had been conducted that examine the relationship between school choice and ethnic segregation in some respect. Some are causal, some descriptive; all shed some light on the question. Nine of those studies found that school choice provided a more integrated classroom experience, one found no visible difference, and no empirical study had ever found that a school choice program made ethnic segregation worse.

That is the empirical evidence. Nine out of the 10 studies that have been conducted report positive findings on the actual, real-world impact of school choice programs when it comes to ethnic segregation.

The Century Foundation report mostly ignores the evidence, giving a distorted take on just two of the empirical studies on the effects of school choice on segregation. As Greg notes:

If you dig very, very deep into the report, you do eventually find a discussion of empirical studies. But this doesn’t mean the report gets much better, for Potter examines only two of the 10 studies that exist – and she has described them in a misleading way.

Looking at longitudinal studies in Milwaukee and Louisiana, she describes them in a way that will leave the impression that the results were negative for school choice: “In both cases, programs were used primarily by black students and generally did not exacerbate segregation in public schools; however, students using vouchers did not gain access to integrated private schools, and segregation in private schools actually increased.”

Now, even that misleading description would be enough to call into question the huge mountain of hypothetical, ideological speculation that occupies the overwhelming majority of Potter’s report. However, a more precise description of these two studies would look even worse for Potter, because it would look good for school choice.

The Milwaukee study found the voucher program made no visible difference to segregation, at least during the period under observation. It is the only such study ever to find no visible difference. Other studies in Milwaukee using different methods have found more encouraging results, though because of methodological restrictions, none of these studies can be considered a final word. The longitudinal study’s null finding is not as encouraging as a positive finding would have been, but the nightmare world of increasing school segregation promised by Potter’s lengthy speculations apparently did not come to pass in Milwaukee.

As usual with Greg’s work, I recommend reading the whole thing.

Sadly, the Atlantic ran an entirely uncritical piece parroting the Century Foundation’s “findings.” I’ve reached out to both the Atlantic and the Century Foundation yesterday–and again today–to share with them all the evidence that they ignored, but they have thus far continued to ignore both me and the evidence. I’ll update you if that changes.

(Guest Post by Lindsey Burke)

Tulane’s Doug Harris found himself at a crossroads in the Austin American Statesman earlier this week, writing:

The school-reform movement stands at a crossroads. One camp wants unfettered free markets, while charter school leaders and others want to offer families choice and preserve meaningful oversight and accountability.

We’re certainly at a crossroads, but road signs look very different from where I stand. I see one road that leads to parents empowered to choose education options that work for their children, with schools that are held directly accountable to those parents, and another road (perhaps it winds through New Orleans) that puts up regulatory barriers on school choice options and creates no genuine accountability to speak of.

Who Knows Best? Families vs. Bureaucrats

Harris argues in the Statesman that “free markets don’t make sense for schools” because “families expect schools to do a lot of things for their children — teach academic skills, social manners and good values — most of which families don’t have good information about.”

But is it true that families don’t have good information about these facets of schooling? Or, to put it differently, that the government is in a better position to evaluate and make decisions about these difficult-to-quantify outcomes?

Markets produce voluminous information about goods and services that answer the questions consumers are actually asking about a particular product. The oft-referenced ESA Yahoo message board that families in Arizona established after the introduction of the education savings account option in 2011 is a good example.

Current and potential Empowerment Scholarship Account families of Arizona meet here and share ideas and resources for how to best acquire, keep and utilize the funding they need for their child’s individual education.

This is an informal, unaffiliated parent information group where we hope to share ideas, questions and information with each other as we make exiting, individual educational decisions for our special needs, military, D/F school, foster/adoptive children and grandchildren.

Although we list the official ESA website and may share many resources here, we are an informal group of parents and grandparents and are unaffiliated with any formal government or private organization.

As Julie Trivitt and Patrick Wolf have identified in their work on school branding, Catholic schools created a ‘corporate brand’ that signals to parents engaged in the school selection process that their schools provide a religious education and academic quality. This type of branding provides informative shortcuts for parents as they work to choose a school that meets the needs of their child. And critically, when a brand fails to accurately reflect a school’s attributes or quality, inaccurate brands become “an instigator of programmatic attrition.”

Not only do parents have the most intimate perspective on the needs of their own children, but they also tend to be savvy consumers of education services and products, which is why parents leave a provider when brand promises are not met. Choice increases parental involvement, introduces parent-driven decision making, and produces consumer information that is far more detailed (and actionable) than accountability measures in place in a government-run K-12 education system.

By contrast, district schools provide answers to how students perform (the answer usually being, not too well), using blunt measures largely based on state and national tests, and do little if anything to hold those in charge accountable for underperformance. As Matt Ladner has demonstrated, although just three in 10 students in eighth grade in Texas public schools are proficient in reading, 92.5 percent of school districts received a “met standard” designation, with just 6.5 percent of districts receiving a “needs improvement” label. Who’s being held accountable there?

Yet in a market – say, a robust ESA market – consumers not only have more useful information available to make informed choices that meet the needs of their children, they can hold providers to account for not meeting promises. As Jason Bedrick has noted, “real accountability means being directly accountable to those who bear the consequences of your performance.”

Measuring Quality: But By Whose Measure?

Harris also goes on to question the wisdom of choice without the omnipotent hand of the government regulating accountability. “Even if free markets did work well,” he says, “it would be reasonable for policymakers to ask for some measurable results. It’s hard to think of another case where government writes checks to private organizations without checking whether taxpayers are getting anything for their money.”

First, ESA and other education choice funds do not go to “organizations.” Funds go to families, not schools. Schools certainly benefit, by only by way of parents taking their funds to schools that fulfill what they’re looking for. Likewise, food stamps are for the hungry, not grocery stores; Section 8 housing vouchers are for those who need shelter, and are not subsidies designed to prop up the apartment building industry.

Second, the government regularly writes checks to individuals for use at a variety of organizations without requiring either those individuals or organizations to meet certain government-imposed metrics. Grocery stores accepting food stamps aren’t held to higher standards than those than don’t, nor are food stamp recipients required to abide by any dietary guidelines or limited to a certain caloric intake. Contra Harris, this approach is the norm for nearly every entitlement and welfare program, including Social Security, SNAP, WIC, Section 8, and so on. As Jay has noted, the feds aren’t checking on grandma to see that she spent her social security money on vegetables or rent.

This is the norm in education policy as well. Pell grants to colleges require accreditation, but that is far from a measure of academic quality. Colleges that accept Pell grants are not required to administer national tests or any tests at all. Nor are they required to meet government-imposed benchmarks for graduation rates or any other quantifiable measures, let alone to harder-to-quantify ones like civic values or noncognitive skills.

Third, and more germane to the choice conversation, is Harris’s notion that government is needed to ensure accountability. Not only are government regulations in education a far inferior form of accountability than market driven mechanisms, but they can actually have the inverse effect of what was intended by regulation-hawks. And coming from Louisiana himself, where the high-regulation model is in place (requiring private schools accepting students on a voucher to take the state test and punishing “underperformers” by kicking schools that parents have chosen out of the options pool), Harris should acknowledge that the so-called accountability regulations have not lived up to their proponents’ promises and may have had the exact opposite effect of what was intended.

Heavy-handed regulations (a state testing mandate, among others) have discouraged the vast majority of private schools from participating, while likely encouraging lower performers (as indicated by student attrition from those schools prior to entering the voucher program) to join the LSP, willing to incur the regulations in order to secure a new funding stream.

Fairness: Market Mote and Government Beam

Harris then goes on to argue that a free market in education wouldn’t be fair:

In the average free market, wealthier people get higher quality items while low-income families get the lowest. That might be tolerated when we are talking about buying breakfast cereal at the grocery store — but not when we are talking about schools.

To reiterate the argument choice proponents have been making ad nauseam since 1955, this is exactly the system that is currently in place. Wealthier families can currently pay for private options that are higher quality or meet their needs better than their assigned public school, or can purchase a home in a district that reflects their education preferences.

One concern Harris voices that is a valid discussion to have is whether vouchers could create a price floor for tuition prices. This is another reason why ESAs have advantages over traditional modes of school choice. The ability of parents to roll over unused funds year-to-year and to direct dollars to multiple services and products and providers mitigates this issue to a large degree. But that’s hard to see if you refuse to acknowledge that ESAs are functionally different than vouchers.

At the Crossroads: Assessing the Evidence

Harris concludes his op-ed with one last argument about what the research supposedly says:

The research lines up with what basic economics predicts. Across many studies, students using vouchers end up with lower achievement levels than those in traditional public schools. The effects have been especially bad in states like Louisiana and Ohio, where voucher programs are most similar to Senate Bill 3.

Actually, the school choice literature shows an excellent track record, that the government regulatory approach should be envious of. There have been 15 gold-standard, random-assignment evaluations of private school choice programs. Ten of those found statistically significant increases in academic outcomes, three found no difference, and two were negative. Those two negative evaluations were both from Louisiana, and were likely due to the uniquely prescriptive regulatory environment in Harris’s Pelican State.

Harris is indeed right that the school reform movement stands at a crossroads: we can either overregulate choice in a way that limits participation and basically replicates the public system, or we can allow choice and innovation to flourish by trusting families. If we want something different, it’s time to take the road less traveled.

For those recovering from yesterday’s Purim celebration and for those who don’t know what they missed, here are some great Purim costumes:

(Guest post by Adam Peshek)

I saw this flyer the other day by a group called Iowans for Public Education and it just made sense. We need to create Park Savings Accounts (PSAs) in Iowa!

As you know, back in 2018 the voters of Iowa decided to make summer camp compulsory. And for good reason. Social scientists from across the state and nation told us of the summer Brain Drain – that time between May and late August when our children lose the knowledge they gained during the school year.

And all because of an outdated notion of “summer break,” which we all know was a centuries-old holdover from farming days. As parents went off to work in June, the unsupervised children they left were running amok – getting into trouble, getting hurt, running with the wrong crowds, and using their free time to experiment with drugs and alcohol.

Some kids even start listening to rock and roll music.

The social costs were skyrocketing. Luckily, Iowans decided to fix this problem by amending the state constitution to create universal summer camps for all:

The safety and well-being of students is of paramount interest to all citizens of this state. Therefore, the state shall make adequate provision for summer camps for all children within its borders. Adequate provision shall be made in a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free summer camps in local parks across the state.

Instead of funding individual students to pay for summer camps of their choice, tens of thousands of Local Park Agencies (LPAs) were created to manage the program. Large maps were taken out to draw circles around parks to determine which residences were to be zoned for which parks.

Beating Brain Drain, making good citizens, and preparing children for the challenges of the future is complicated work and you need qualified adults to do it. So, we created the park ranger licensing program to ensure the best quality adults were left with our children.

Money needed to pay for all of this is raised through state and local taxes and the average student gets $3,000 in services spent on them each summer. An LPA with 3,000 students in it would have a summer budget of at least $9 million. (The cost for constructing parks is not included in this amount.)

But the goal wasn’t to just build parks that people could choose to come if and when they wanted! We all agreed that summer camps should be compulsory. But we also admitted that requiring all students to go to summer camp at one locally-zoned public park is downright Orwellian! So, parents are given two other options.

The first option is called home camping, which allows parents to provide summer camp for their children as long as they submit documentation to the LPA detailing what activities they plan to provide. This is only an option for parents who can be home during the summer – and have the patience to do it. Despite being fairly commonplace in the 20^th Century, home campers soon became seen as a group of outsiders. I mean, how weird is it do to summer camp in your house?! What about socialization? What about proper standardized services approved by the experts in the state capital? It’s just plain weird.

The other option is for parents to pay for private summer camp. These used to be much more prevalent in the U.S. before states started passing laws to provide free summer camp for every student in every neighborhood across the country. Those that remain mostly fill a niche: providing religiously-oriented programming, catering to wealthy parents, or just providing an option for an unsatisfactory local park.

No one ever envisioned a need for another option. But after a few years, parents started to make decisions about buying houses near the best public parks, and home prices became correlated with the quality of a local park. Parents began paying $300,000 for a home in one part of town, even though the exact same home would be worth no more than $100,000 in another part. Young couples with small children began the trend of moving out of cities to the suburbs to be able to afford a quality local park.

But when you have to send your child to the park you live closest to, as a parent you’re going to do what it takes to get them into the best. Let’s face it – some parks are better than others. Some parks have discipline problems, disruptive children, or seem like embodiments of the summer camp movies we grew up with in the 1990s. A lot of public parks are great, but for whatever reason they were not fitting the interests or needs for each individual child zoned to attend them. And why would we expect this setup to produce this outcome?

Even if you could, local park managers don’t actually have a budget or the ability to choose their staff, they’re assigned by the LPA. Workplace rules are written by the LPA, with the help of the local park rangers union. These rules dictate everything from the structure of the day, the exact number of hours rangers are expected to work, and other prohibitions that keep managers from being able to change the structure of the day to fit what is needed. Rangers get paid based on how long they’ve worked for the park service, their level of education, and a few other variables such as cost of living.

The best park rangers have no interest being assigned to the most difficult parks. Why would they? The difficulty of the job isn’t factored into the set salary schedule. Even the most idealistic young rangers, who are dedicated to taking the tough roles out of a sense of purpose, are chewed up and spit out by the system. The institutional rangers don’t like them and the unions question their motivations.

Despite some positive benefits for the billions and billions spent, the compulsory summer camp program is still falling short on achieving the goal of keeping children safe and educated through June and July.

After a while, some of us looked around and thought, “why does it have to be this way?” Why are parents paying 200% more for a house just because of the quality of its zoned park? A lot of people actually like living in cities and don’t like the idea of having to move to ‘burbs just to give their kid a shot. Why are low-income families relegated to parks that seem antithetical to the mission of compulsory summer camp? It’s not like they can afford to move to Pleasantville. Why does the government have to be the only one involved with providing services?

People seem to recall a time when there were ways of dealing with this without the LPA. Why can’t students take the money that would have been spent on them in their local parks to one of those private summer camps? Would there be more of them if this was an option? Would they be cheaper?

I mean, there are summer camps in ritzy country clubs that provide the same services for less money!

This is why we should support lawmakers in their effort to create Park Savings Accounts. PSAs would allow you to get just the state share of what your local park would spend on your child. You could use this to pay for private summer camp and other summer enrichment alternatives. If you like your local park, nothing will change for you! In fact, since PSAs do not touch local funds, public parks will have more money per student.

Are PSAs going to fix everything wrong with our compulsory summer camp system? No, and we shouldn’t claim that it will. But it might do something very beneficial to the 4% of 5% of kids who need something different.

Archaeologists in Giza have just discovered an ancient document summarizing the social science evidence on the effects of freeing people from slavery.  Given that many people will be celebrating Passover next month, perhaps they should stop just repeating ideological talking points and consider what the evidence has to say.  Here is a translation of that ancient document:

The confirmation of Moses as leader of the Hebrews was a signal moment for the Exodus movement. For the first time, the Hebrews are being led by someone fully committed to making the end of slavery and departure from Egypt the centerpiece of the Hebrew agenda.

But even as ending slavery is poised to go global, a wave of new research has emerged suggesting that freeing people from slavery may harm the people who are freed. The results are startling — the worst in the history of the field, researchers say.

While many policy ideas have murky origins, ending slavery emerged fully formed from a single, brilliant promise Abram received from G-d, the literal godfather later to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics (check this?). G-d declared: “You shall surely know that your seed will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and they will enslave them and oppress them, for four hundred years. And also the nation that they will serve will I judge, and afterwards they will go forth with great possessions.”

The freedom idea sat dormant for nearly 400 years before taking root in a few places, most notably Goshen. As people began to experiment with ending slavery researchers were able to collect data to compare freed people with similar people who remained as slaves. Many of the results were released over the last 18 months.

The first results came in late 1446 BCE. Researchers examined the initial results of departing Egypt. “In mobility” they found, “freed slaves experienced a significant increase in wandering the desert.” They also saw a marked decline in food production, with Hebrews having to rely entirely on food assistance programs.

The next results came a few months later, in February, when researchers published a major study of civic order. They found large negative results in both idol worship and lawlessness. Former slaves who started as devout followers of G-d and then were freed dropped to forming a golden calf in a single year. Results were somewhat better in the second year, but were still well below the starting point.

This is very unusual. When people try to improve human behavior, sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail. The successes usually register as modest improvements, while the failures generally have no effect at all. It’s rare to see efforts to improve human behavior having the opposite result. Thethi Neferti, a professor at the Luxor Graduate School of Social Science, calls the negative effects “as large as any I’ve seen in the literature”

In June, a third freeing-slaves study was released by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank and proponent of ending slavery (but only if it produces good outcomes and there are sufficient regulations in place). The study, which was financed by the pro-freedom Hatshepsut Family Foundation, focused on a large ending slavery program in Memphis. “Subjects freed from slavery fared worse economically compared to their closely matched peers who continued as slaves,” the researchers found. Freed slaves often became share-croppers and experienced public discrimination, leading social scientists to conclude that they would have been better off on the plantation, where food was more reliably available.

Three consecutive reports, each studying one of the largest new freeing-slaves programs, found that ending slavery hurt people’s outcomes. Researchers and advocates began a spirited debate about what, exactly, was going on.

Meriptah Djedptahaufankh of the Brookings Institution noted that the performance gap between freed people and slaves had narrowed significantly over time. He argued that stronger incentives for masters to provide slaves with food, clothing, and shelter were proving effective. The assumed superiority of freedom may no longer hold.

Some freedom supporters observed that many farms in Memphis chose not to employ freed slaves, and those that did had recently experienced declining crop production. Perhaps the participating farms were unusually bad and eager for labor. But this is another way of saying that exposing freed slaves to the vagaries of private-sector competition is inherently risky. The free market often does a terrible job of providing basic services to the freed slaves — see, for instance, the lack of grocery stores and banks in many neighborhoods with former slaves.

Others have argued that the reliable supply of food is the wrong measure of whether ending slavery is desirable. It’s true that ending-slavery programs in Cairo and some others elsewhere, which produced no improvements in access to food, increased the likelihood of freed slaves experiencing dignity and autonomy. One study of freeing slaves in Giza found positive results for feelings of self-worth among freed slaves.

But research has also linked the availability of food to a host of positive outcomes later in life. And freedom advocates often cite poor food supply for slaves to justify freeing slaves in the first place.

The new studies about freeing slaves stand in marked contrast to research findings that well-regulated indentured servitude in Heliopolis and elsewhere have a strong, positive impact on the availability of food. But while freeing slaves and changing slaves to indentured servants are often grouped under the umbrella of “freedom,” the best indentured servant programs tend to be run by well-meaning aristocrats, open to all servants and accountable to public authorities. The less “free” that ending slavery programs are, the better they seem to work.

The new evidence on ending slavery does not seem to have deterred the Moses administration, which has proposed the departure of all Hebrews from conditions of slavery in Egypt. Moses’ enthusiasm for freedom, which have been the primary focus of his plague-bringing efforts and advocacy, appears to be undiminished.

(Guest Post by Jason Bedrick)

In the last couple weeks, the New York Times has cranked their effort to discredit educational choice policies up to 11. The formula is simple: downplay the positive findings from all the previous gold-standard research and focus instead on more recent studies from Louisiana, Ohio, and Indiana — two of which are not random-assignment studies and one of which hasn’t even been released (not to mention the likelihood that overregulation is hampering Louisiana’s voucher program). Sadly, this distorted narrative is spreading, but some are pushing back. Yesterday, Paul DiPerna of EdChoice and Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute each provided essential context for understanding the research on school choice.

In Education Next, DiPerna wrote:

Contrary to recent editorials in some major U.S newspapers, the empirical research on school choice programs is far more positive than not. Summaries of the effects of multiple programs generally show positive effects, as does a meta-analysis of gold-standard experimental research on school choice by Shakeel, Anderson, and Wolf (2016). Participating students usually show modest improvements in reading or math test scores, or both. Annual gains are relatively small but cumulative over time. Graduation and college attendance rates are substantially higher for choice students compared to peers. Programs are almost always associated with improved test scores in affected public schools. They also save money. Those savings can be used to increase per-pupil spending in local school districts. Studies also consistently show that programs increase parent satisfaction, racial integration and civic outcomes.

It’s true that recent studies have reported some initial negative effects on choice students’ test scores. The most sobering come from the rigorous, experimental evaluation of the Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP). The LSP has a different, much more restrictive regulatory framework for private schools than other choice programs. The negative results in math should be monitored, but it’s important to note that the evaluation is only in its second of seven planned years.

Broad perspective and context are essential. Negative initial findings in one or two locations, based solely on one performance metric, should not halt the creation or expansion of school choice programs in other parts of the country. Generalizing those findings across states is problematic because education is sensitive to state and local cultural, political, governmental and economic conditions. The many places where we have observed significant positive results from choice programs swamp the few where we have seen negative findings. We need to consider the complete research base and not disproportionately emphasize the most recent studies.

McCluskey also turned a gimlet eye on the studies that found negative impacts on test scores:

First, the vast majority of random-assignment studies of private school voucher programs—the “gold-standard” research method that even controls for unobserved factors like parental motivation—have found choice producing equivalent or superior academic results, usually for a fraction of what is spent on public schools. Pointing at three, as we shall see, very limited studies, does not substantially change that track record.

Let’s look at the studies Carey highlighted: one on Louisiana’s voucher program, one on Ohio, and one on Indiana. Make that two studies: Carey cited Indiana findings without providing a link to, or title of, the research, and he did not identify the researchers. The Times did the same in their editorial. Why? Because the Indiana research has not been published. What Carey perhaps drew on was a piece by Mark Dynarski at the Brookings Institution. And what was that based on? Apparently, a 2015 academic conference presentation by R. Joseph Waddington and Mark Berends, who at the time were in the midst of analyzing Indiana’s program and who have not yet published their findings.

Next there is Ohio’s voucher program. The good news is that the research has been published, indeed by the choice-favoring Thomas B. Fordham Institute. And it does indicate that what the researchers were able to study revealed a negative effect on standardized tests. But Carey omitted two important aspects of the study. One, it found that choice had a modestly positive effect on public schools, spurring them to improve. Perhaps more important, because the research design was something called “regression discontinuity” it was limited in what it was able to reliably determine. Basically, that design looks at performance clustered around some eligibility cut-off—in this case, public schools that just made or missed the performance level below which students became eligible for vouchers—so the analysis could not tell us about a whole lot of kids. Wrote the researchers: “We can only identify with relative confidence the estimated effects…for those students who had been attending the highest-performing EdChoice-eligible public schools and not those who would have been attending lower-performing public schools.”

That is a big limit.

Finally, we come to the Louisiana study, which was random-assignment. Frankly, its negative findings are not new information. The report came out over a year ago, and we at Cato have written and talked about it extensively. And there are huge caveats to the findings, including that the program’s heavy regulations—e.g., participating schools must give state tests to voucher recipients and become part of a state accountability system—likely encouraged many of the better private schools to stay out. There are also competing private choice programs in the Pelican State. In addition, the rules requiring participating private schools to administer state tests are new, and there is a good chance that participating institutions were still transitioning. Indeed, as Carey noted, the study showed private school outcomes improving from the first year to the second. That could well indicate that the schools are adjusting to the change. And as in Ohio, there was evidence that the program spurred some improvements in public schools.

Both blog posts are worth reading in full, but the main point is this: the research literature is generally positive. The few negative findings are disconcerting and should cause education reformers to think critically about policy design, but the literature still generally finds that students exercising school choice tend to perform as well or better than their district school peers, they’re more likely to graduate high school and enroll in college, they’re less likely to be involved in crime, and all these positive effects come at a much lower cost per pupil to the taxpayer. Additionally, the overwhelming majority of studies find that choice programs have a modest but statistically significant positive effect of the performance of district schools.

Educational choice remains a win-win solution.

If D.C. wants to push school choice, it should make the D.C. voucher universal. Let D.C. clean its own long-neglected house and leave the states in charge of their own education systems.

As I told the New York Times in a story that ran today:

Greg Forster, a fellow at EdChoice, a research and advocacy organization that promotes school choice options, said that while he welcomes more support for the idea of school choice, he wants the issue to remain a state responsibility. “We have achieved a lot of victories at the state level by building bridges,” Mr. Forster said. Having Mr. Trump as an advocate “is a bigger problem for the school choice movement than it is a blessing, in my book,” he said.

He added that there is “no need for a federal push for school choice” because the options are increasingly gaining ground, leading to 61 private school choice programs in 30 states and the District of Columbia.

See also.