Seriously, Folks: School Voucher Proponents Need to Get Real
“Why not do the ultimate thing a scientist (which she claims to be) would do : test your hypothesis?”
Some folks have, of course:
“Choice may not improve schools, study says
Report on MPS comes from longtime supporter of plan
A study being released today suggests that school choice isn’t a powerful tool for driving educational improvement in Milwaukee Public Schools.
But more surprising than the conclusion is the organization issuing the study: the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, a conservative think tank that has supported school choice for almost two decades . . .
“The report you are reading did not yield the results we had hoped to find,” George Lightbourn, a senior fellow at the institute, wrote in the paper’s first sentence . . . .”
Look, it would be wonderful if vouchers turned out to be some great way to harness the power of the market to provide a good education for substantial numbers of disadvantaged kids. But there was never any reason to think they’d actually work this way, and studies to date, as far as I understand, offer no reason to think they do.
Again, it would be nice if some of the folks pouring so much energy and passion into voucher advocacy could spare some for actually proven practices, like (say) reducing class size.
