A great Op Ed in today's Washington Post on the DC voucher program.  I want to highlight three important points:

a) most Americans enjoy "school choice" without ever thinking about it in those terms: If they don't like their neighborhood school, they can move to a different neighborhood or school district or send their children to private or parochial schools. Only the poor, who can't afford tuition or to move, say, from the District to Falls Church, are without school choice.

 

b) Mayor Adrian Fenty rightly is focused on reforming the public schools, with their 55,000 pupils. The small voucher program can't, and wasn't intended to, lessen the importance of improving those.

 

c) Strikingly, the report's authors found that the parents aren't just happy; they're involved in their children's education, and increasingly so the longer they are in the program, despite challenges related to time and transportation.

They also are demanding consumers. Parents visited an average of three schools before selecting one...

Yet the program may have a lesson for the larger reform, too, given that defenders of the District's troubled schools often place much blame on the absence of family input. It seems that parents -- when they are given choices, when they are provided with information to make those choices meaningful, and when they are treated respectfully as consumers of education -- take their jobs seriously, and participate more and more. It doesn't matter if they're poor or rich.

The third point is especially noteworthy.  It's long established that parents love having choice, but I've never seen data that shows how they change their behavior when given choice.  What a great rebuttal to the defenders of the status quo, who like to blame the victims (low-income children of color and their parents) rather than accept responsibility for the catastrophic school systems they're responsible for.

 

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Choices That Are Changing Lives in D.C.

By Fred Hiatt

Monday, May 21, 2007; Page A13

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/20/AR2007052001081.html?sub=AR

If it were up to the children and their parents, there'd be no question that the District's five-year experiment with school vouchers would be renewed for an additional five years or more.