As an orthopedic surgeon, you wouldn’t expect me to write about school choice. But some things “light my fire” and one of them is school choice. As someone who has benefited greatly from higher education (I’ve had 31 years of education including my orthopedic training), I understand the importance of getting a good education.
I grew up in the era of good public-school education when teachers unions didn’t exist. Today, the public schools have declined significantly as teachers unions have prevented school districts from firing bad teachers. The result is many students suffer from a poor education. This can be the difference between prosperity and poverty for many low-income students.
The Covid pandemic focused the nation on public school education as many children suffered from closed schools. The private and parochial schools re-opened long before the public schools, which were kept closed by demands of the teachers unions. This disparity between public and private schools highlighted the school choice movement and now it is gaining great momentum. The school choice issue has become a significant determinant in many elections as more and more low-income Democratic parents realize that school choice is the key to their children escaping poverty.
But there are limitations to the progress made thus far by school choice. Roland Fryer, writing in The Wall Street Journal, thinks he knows the reason. He says, “School choice is sweeping the nation. But school choice as we know it won’t fix the American education system. The movement must return to Milton Friedman’s vision of unfettered competition, which no existing school-choice program achieves. Friedman wanted parents to have the autonomy to select the optimal educational environment for their children, unbounded by geography or income brackets, and to take their full allotment of education funds with them.”
Fryer believes school choice advocates must be bolder and refuse to settle for half a loaf. The underlying problems in U.S. education demand it. Despite being the world’s most prosperous nation, the U.S. ranks 36th in math and 13th in reading on the 2018 Program for International Student Assessment, a poor showing driven in part by racial achievement gaps. Despite decades of initiatives to close those gaps, black and Hispanic students lag behind their white peers in academics, graduation rates and college enrollment. The structure of American education is the culprit. We ask a system designed for standardization and conformity to innovate, personalize the educational experience, and address longstanding societal failures.
There is no doubt the existing school-choice system has helped thousands of families. But millions are waiting, and current choice programs operate within the same inadequate framework. Increasing choice on the margin through partial vouchers, magnet school or other measures has yielded disappointing results because of an imperfectly competitive market. Real competition doesn’t mean entering a lottery to attend a charter school or providing vouchers worth only a fraction of public-school funding.
This has led to mixed results in school-choice programs. While some charter schools have dramatically outperformed public schools, such as the Success Academy of New York City, others have done no better than public schools. A 2018 Wall Street Journal analysis of Milwaukee’s voucher system found that “voucher students, on average, have performed about the same as their peers in public schools on state exams,” and that vouchers seemed most effective at the schools that accepted the fewest of them. The District of Columbia’s voucher program, according to a 2013 study, improved high-school graduation rates but had uncertain effects on reading achievement and no clear effect on achievement in math.
The transformation of American education is bringing a more competitive and diverse array of schooling options for students. The most important development is the rapid expansion of education savings accounts, which 11 states offer. These accounts allow parents to channel public funds to a variety of educational services, from private-school tuition and microschools to tutoring and online courses, but they typically don’t match the funding provided to public schools. Even so, they are helping turn Friedman’s vision into reality.
In the interplay between ESAs and entrepreneurial zeal lies the revitalization of Friedman’s free-market vision for education. With more choices, parents are becoming informed consumers, prompting schools to refine their offerings. Fryer says, “If we can fully commit to free-market principles in education, we can create an education system that unlocks the talents of every student in our lifetimes. I dream of the day when the inadequacies in American education are consigned to history.”
I dream of that day, too.
