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 elman
v. Simmons-Harris, the school-choice case that was argued
before the Supreme Court on February 20, is the most important case
concerning educational opportunity since Brown v. Board
of Education nearly five decades ago. As in Brown, the
Court will address the educational fate of minority students. In
Brown the concern was that segregated schools denied minority
students access to a quality education, even if those schools were
equally funded and staffed, while in Zelman the concern is
that the lack of school choice denies Cleveland's mostly low-income
and minority students access to a quality education. And just as
the Brown Court relied heavily on social-science research
to arrive at their decision, the Zelman Court will be able
to rely on research that shows school choice improves educational
attainment for all students whether they choose to attend public
or private schools.
More privileged
families already enjoy school choice when they pay higher housing
prices to move to better schools in the suburbs or when they pay
tuition at private schools. Lower-income families, however, are
too often stuck in low-quality big-city public schools. These low-quality
schools can afford to take their students for granted because the
lack of choices available to those students assures the schools
that the students (and the money that comes with them) aren't going
anywhere. Choice supporters argue that only if low-income families
are empowered with school choice, with the ability to leave schools
and have the money follow their child, will low-quality schools
be provided with the incentives to improve.
The major opposition
to school choice comes from teachers' unions, which argue that neither
the students who receive vouchers nor those remaining in the public
schools benefit educationally. And, they contend further, the public
schools will be hurt if students and the resources that come with
them can leave. Just give us more money, they plea, and then we
will be able to offer a quality education. Never mind that per pupil
spending in the United States has tripled over the last four decades
in real dollars to $7,086 without any meaningful increase in student
test scores or high-school graduation rates.
Obviously,
schools need sufficient resources to provide a quality education,
but there is a growing body of research to support the common-sense
observation that public schools also need to be provided with the
incentives to use their resources well. For example, Harvard economist
Caroline Minter Hoxby has found that metropolitan areas with more
school districts exhibit higher student achievement at lower per-pupil
spending. According to Hoxby, metropolitan areas like Boston, with
a dozen public-school districts competing for families and tax resources,
provide the schools with incentives to offer a better education.
In metro areas like Miami, where the entire county is a single school
district, schools face less competition since families would have
to move to the next county to gain access to a different school.
Not surprisingly, students in these districts don't score as well.
My own Education
Freedom Index similarly finds that states with a wider range of
choices available to parents have higher public-school student achievement.
States with more charter schools, more subsidized private-school
options (through vouchers or tax credits), smaller school districts,
and less-regulated homeschooling options have higher scores on the
Department of Education's National Assessment of Educational Progress
tests.
In addition,
in Milwaukee, the city with the largest school-choice program, Hoxby
has found that school choice has significantly improved student
achievement in traditional public schools. She found that schools
that were more exposed to competition from the voucher program exhibited
greater improvements in student test scores than schools that were
less exposed. Rather than draining schools of necessary resources,
these studies suggest that school choice helps improve public schools
by providing them with incentives to use their resources more effectively.
The claim that
choice fails to benefit those who are able to choose a private school
is belied by a remarkably strong set of studies that show significant
benefits for voucher recipients, particularly low-income African-American
students. There have been five random-assignment school-choice experiments,
in Charlotte, Dayton, Milwaukee, New York, and Washington, D.C.
(Random-assignment, as in medical experiments, is the gold standard
of research design because it allows us to rule out with confidence
the possibility that better outcomes for students who received vouchers
were the result of differences in the backgrounds of students.)
Since the students were assigned to treatment and control groups
by lottery, the superior outcomes for voucher recipients are attributable
to the program since their backgrounds are otherwise identical.
Hardly any education policies have been the subject of even one
major random-assignment study, but school choice has had five such
studies. The positive outcomes from these five random-assignment
school-choice experiments have held up even after being analyzed
and reanalyzed by researchers from Harvard, Georgetown, Princeton,
University of Wisconsin, Mathematica Policy Research, and the Manhattan
Institute.
Just as the
decision in Brown hinged on the social-science evidence that
segregated schools were inherently unequal, the current school-choice
case may be similarly influenced. Given the strength of the evidence
that school choice improves the quality of long-stagnant public
schools as well as benefits the low-income minority recipients of
vouchers, there is good reason to believe that the Supreme Court
will find a way to uphold the constitutionality of choice programs.
If the Court does uphold school choice, we will have taken another
giant step toward the ideal of equal educational opportunities for
all children.
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