Education Choice is Working

It’s a neverending task. To demonstrate again and again that choice works in education.

Because the entrenched interests don’t want you to know. Because the entrenched interests want to continue to enjoy their sinecures and their privileges without accountability.

It’s a dog-in-the-manger attitude that we all are capable of. The desire to sit like a bump on a log, getting that check every month, but not actually being responsible for outcomes. Not being responsible to taxpayers, not being responsible to parents, not being responsible to students.

So here is David Green reporting on school choice achievements in the US and Sweden.

Yes. Imagine that! School choice is alive and well in Sweden! According to Green (emphasis added):

Since 1992, parents in Sweden who are dissatisfied with the local state school have had a right to send their child to an independent school and to receive state funding, now equivalent to the average cost of a place in the state system.

...

Controversial at first in Sweden, vouchers now enjoy cross-party support. They are even supported by the unions. The president of the Swedish Teachers Union has said that its members were "a little suspicious at first" but were now satisfied.

In the US school choice is also proceeding, on a very limited scale. Harvard researcher Caroline Hoxby has analyzed the results. She (emphasis added):

studied attainment by Milwaukee's pupils before and after the introduction of vouchers. She compared three types of school: those most subject to competition (with two-thirds or more of pupils eligible for vouchers); those subject to some competition (with less than two-thirds of their pupils eligible); and a group of other Wisconsin schools not subject to additional competition. Compared with the monopoly era before 1998, competition raised standards for everyone, and the bigger the risk of losing pupils to rival schools, the greater the improvement.

Of course, this is like comfirming that gravity works. We know that people work better when they are challenged by competition, whether it is boys competing in school, businesses competing against businesses in the global marketplace, or schools competing against other schools about town.

And anyone that doesn’t get it “just doesn’t care about kids.”