Organizations affiliated with the Children s Scholarship Fund offer privately funded scholarships to students in 35 cities nationwide, and 1.25 million children have applied for 40,000 scholarships annually. Because the number of parents applying for scholarships far outstrips the available funds, scholarships are usually awarded by lottery, permitting an ideal controlled experiment to test the effects of school choice on student achievement. D.C. After two years, African-American students using the scholarships to switch from public to private schools scored between 4 and 10 percentile points higher in math and between 4.5 and 8 percentile points higher in reading than similar students who did not receive scholarships. This improvement was sufficient to eliminate one-third of the test score gap between blacks and whites. The results are in.
School choice works.
What they don t tell us is that such high tuitions are not typical. Examples from a few states support this inference. Fundamentally, school choice critics confuse the means with the end. The goal should be a quality education for all American children not the perpetuation of any particular method of providing education. To achieve that goal, government should enable parents to purchase education from the most effective providers, public or private.