Parents Can Attest: School Choice Works

School choice: It’s the hot issue in education reform right now, with presidential candidates arguing the impact of vouchers pro and con, ballot initiatives in California and Michigan and a new social science study showing vouchers boost the achievement of low-income African American students, followed instantly by howls from the public education establishment hotly disputing the data. All of which begs the question: If we really want to know whether school choice works, maybe it’s time we asked the real experts.

People like Juan Alvarez of West San Antonio, anguishing over the sexual harassment of his son. Or Roberta Kitchen of Cleveland, working to balance her career responsibilities with her role as a single-parent foster mother to five children. Or single mother Johnietta McGrady, also of Cleveland, who, when her oldest daughter goes to prison, finds herself raising her two grandchildren along with her own young son and daughter. Or Milwaukee’s Carol Butts, struggling to find a moral community capable of supporting her family’s Muslim faith. Or Pilar Gomez of Milwaukee, coping with the challenge of being a newly single mother of four. Or grandparents Leroy and Hattie Batts of San Antonio who, after raising six children of their own, adopt their grandson after the boy watches his father murder his mother.

Different families in different cities facing different challenges. Yet each has children who are benefiting from school choice, using vouchers--funded by public money or private donations--to send their children to private schools they otherwise could not afford. Living in cities where the public school graduation rates are, at best, just over half, these parents have little patience for promises of public school improvement and no time to wait for reform. For these families, vouchers are a life preserver. As Kitchen puts it: “Private school is what’s giving my children a chance.”

What would we learn if we looked at school choice from a parent’s perspective? Opponents of school choice say it’s wrong to use tax dollars for tuition at religious schools. They want to stop McGrady, a Baptist, from sending her daughter to the Catholic school where a teacher worked overtime to bring McGrady’s little girl up to grade level. They want to stop Butts from sending her four children to the inner-city Muslim school where shaping character matters as much as teaching reading, writing and math.

Opponents say vouchers are wrong because they benefit the “cream of the crop.” They want Alvarez to keep his son at the public school where a group of boys tried to molest him. They want the Batts to keep their psychologically traumatized grandson in the public school where he was foundering, instead of the Christian academy where, for the first time, he is learning.

Opponents of choice say voucher children succeed because their parents are active and engaged, constantly seeking the best education for each of their children. This charge is true. Some, like McGrady and Gomez, find time to serve as school volunteers; others, like Kitchen and Butts, have been parent activists at their children’s public schools. Given what we know about the positive impact of parental involvement, sound public policy should encourage parental engagement. School choice does.

Even so, vouchers aren’t a panacea.

School choice, for instance, will not turn all students into scholars. McGrady’s daughter Trinnietta has not become a stellar student in parochial school. She has, however, progressed from being a below-average student to an average student, an important improvement, given that the achievement scores of inner-city public school students typically decline each year they are in school. What’s more, 7-year-old Trinnietta regularly helps her 8-year-old nephew, a public school student, with his lessons during the McGrady homework hour.

Nor can school choice insulate parents from making choices they regret. As Kitchen observes of her own odyssey through public and private schools, “Just because a school is private doesn’t mean it’s perfect.” In fact, in the quest to find the right school for each child, some of the families have transferred their children from private schools to public schools; in the case of Gomez’s oldest daughter, three times.

The advantage of choice is that when parents are unhappy with a school, they can send their child elsewhere. Whether they’ve written a private school tuition check or simply house-hunted with a map of a desirable public school district, millions of middle-class Americans know what it means to have school choice. The question now, particularly for voters in California, is whether all families, regardless of income level, will enjoy the full range of educational options.