School Vouchers
Results from the third year of DC’s voucher program are in–and they’re very positive. Going to a voucher school improves student performance (half grade increase in reading) and parent satisfaction, at a lower cost than public school education–about a fourth as much, actually. This is impressive when you consider the short amount of time the program has been around, the transition shock of moving to a new school, and the fact that since few people get vouchers, you don’t push competition-fueled change system-wide.
You’d think this would be great news for Obama’s education reform. He’s set himself up as a results-oriented pragmatist on education, willing to support things like vouchers if the evidence was there. Well, here it is. And if you’re willing to look outside of the U.S., Columbia, Chile, Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands all have extensive experiments in school choice. All tend to be pretty positive.
Instead, we’re getting a Congress that’s denying poor residents of D.C. the same right that Obama and Biden take for granted with their children. We’re passing something like $100 billion in education stimulus that throws more money at a rotten system. If there’s anything we’ve learned from education research, it’s that you need to reform the system, not subsidize failure even more. It’s also something to take away from Obama’s speeches on education reform–which are great. But it would be even greater if that rhetoric was actually matched by action.
