School Choice is a Great Choice

90% of American students go to public school every year. The remaining 10% go to private, charter, or homeschool. Many families and kids agree that public school isn’t the right fit for everyone, but unfortunately, most can’t afford to go to a different school. However, what if I told you there was a solution? The solution is school choice, and many states are making strides to implement it.

To start off, what exactly is school choice? This program allows parents to take all or a portion of the public school funds allocated to their child and apply that money to an alternative to their neighborhood school. That could be public, private, charter, or even homeschool. This program has many benefits, as I will discuss.

The first reason that I would like to point out as to why we should add school choice is because it drastically increases students’ test scores. According to EdChoice, 85% of studies nationwide agree that school choice positively affects students, schools, or state budgets. Another study done by researchers at the University of Arkansas found, in the most comprehensive study done to date, that school choice students saw their reading scores increase by 27% and their math scores by 15%, respectively.

You might ask, how does school choice make students’ test scores better? Similar to other industries, competition has been shown to produce better results, and this concept is carried into education. In 25 of 27 studies and the latest peer-reviewed meta-analysis, the results show when students have the choice to attend private school, the competition between public and private schools leads to better public school outcomes. To put it simply, because private schools started performing better, the nearby public schools were forced to improve their results to keep their students.

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Lennie Jarratt, Project Manager for School Reform at the Heartland Institute, stated, “Free markets offer a much better way to hold educational institutions accountable for their failures. Under this model, inadequate schools lose money or are forced to close after consistently failing to perform… Why should we reward terrible schools with an indefinite stream of tax dollars?”

Secondly, school choice allows intelligent and talented children who come from lower-class areas to attend better schools that would usually be off-limits because of their parent’s incomes and where they live. The schools these students often come from have fewer teachers, fewer resources, and fewer opportunities for their kids to succeed. The DC Voucher program is an excellent example of this, as a lot of the students within the program come from lower-income neighborhoods. The voucher program led to an increased graduation rate of 21% overall and 28% for female voucher students. Most of the parents inside the voucher program also stated that they felt that the school their kids went to was better than their public school option. Another example, EdChoice, an education non-profit, commented saying, “The empirical evidence shows that choice improves academic outcomes for participants and public schools.”

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Along with the fact that 72% of Americans WANT school choice according to a 2022 Real Clear Politics Poll, it should be evident that we should implement this ingenious solution to help our failing school system.

Another benefit of school choice programs is that it leads to an increase in student diversity. According to the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans, a study of Louisiana’s voucher program found that their school choice program declined racial segregation. It is a great accomplishment in a state with 34 school districts under federal desegregation orders.

If all of this isn’t enough to convince you, here’s another point, we’re already doing school choice programs in higher and lower education, and it’s working. The government already financially supports college students in the form of Pell Grants, the GI bill for veterans, in Head Start for preschoolers, and the parents and students decide where to attend, not the government. So if it’s already working everywhere else, why should K-12 be the outlier?

If school choice really does help the students, why isn’t it mainstream across America? Those who disagree with me would say because it draws money away from the schools. However, this claim is misleading, because money isn’t the problem to begin with. The system is the issue. Private schools, oftentimes with far more resources than public schools spend less money per student than the majority of government-run schools. In fact, Washington D.C. is spending $20,000+ per student, whereas the average tuition for private school is $12,000. We don’t need more money, we need school choice.

The sentiment that education dollars belong to the school misses the entire point of what the dollars are designed to support. In fact, the money should belong to and follow the students to the education destination of their choice. When the government grants a student loan to go to college, the student chooses the college they want to go to. Choosing a certain university over another doesn’t steal money from another, it allows the student to have direct control over their educational needs and goals.

In conclusion, we need to implement school choice nationwide to help our students and our school system start to move in a positive direction. Not only will it increase test scores, but it will also help all schools through the process of competition. No one says all of this better than Milton Freedman, Noble Prize recipient. He says that school choice would result in a “great widening in the educational opportunities open to our children.”