School choice is the best option

If a customer is dissatisfied with the products or service he receives from a business, he is free to express that dissatisfaction by taking his business elsewhere. It's difficult to find a single person who won't shop at such-and-such store or eat at this or that restaurant because of past problems. If enough customers avoid a particular business, that business closes its doors or makes major changes to entice customers back. If only it were that easy with government programs that fail to make the grade.

The most visible - and because of that visibility the most criticized - government program is public education. And although it's a tradition in this country, public education isn't the only game in town. Private schools of all kinds have long existed alongside public schools. The question often raised is, which is better, which provides better education and better prepares students for the real world. And the answer is, it depends.

There are many factors that have a role in making that kind of determination. The most obvious factor is funding. Teachers unions and other public school advocates continually ask for more money for schools. Many people point to prestigious and expensive private schools as beacons of success to emulate as closely as possible. It seems money would be the key factor in judging the success of schools, but that's not necessarily the case.

The District of Columbia spends more per student than most school districts, yet its outcomes are among the worst in the nation. Newspapers are full of success stories from poorly funded inner-city or rural schools in which innovative teachers and administrators work with what they have and graduate well-educated students. \What's the secret? If there were one answer, it would be easy for all schools to simply plug that formula into their classrooms and produce uniformly well-educated kids. Numerous studies have looked at schools around the world and tried to come to a conclusion that would help schools perform better.

The Cato Institute recently released a report based on a survey of many of those studies of schools around the world. "Markets vs. Monopolies in Education: A Global Review of the Evidence" looked at education studies that compared public schools to private schools around the world, in many different cultures and income groups. One of the key conclusions was that when parents pay at least some of their child's tuition directly to the school, even if the schools receive public funding, students came out better educated. "Education markets work best when families pay directly for their own children's education, and so the ideal education policy is one that makes it easier for parents to assume that financial responsibility themselves," the report says.

That conclusion indicates that education programs that have some parental involvement, in the form of payments, better serve their customers. If they don't, those customers will take their students and their money elsewhere. In Texas public schools, parents have options for educating their children. If one's neighborhood school doesn't provide the educational opportunities students needs, parents can enroll them in other schools, sometimes across district lines, depending on classroom availability. Public school advocates point to this and say it's school choice, and to a degree it is. Better, however, would be to allow parents to send their children, and the public money attached to them, to whatever schools the parents deem proper for their children. That would make all schools more responsive to parents, as they would be competing for students and money.

Opponents of this idea complain that it would leave students with the fewest opportunities in the poorest-performing schools. But what's to stop the administrators of those schools from making changes to attract or keep students of all levels of achievement? They can compete and innovate, even as enrollment and funding goes down; small schools across the world have demonstrated that time and again.

Alternatively, tax credits for individuals or organizations that provide scholarships and other financial aid to help students in poor-performing schools could enable those contributors to help more students than they do now. Those scholarships and other aid help lower-income families take advantage of some of the choices available to other students. When governments refuse to pass such tax credits, they are essentially telling those families that keeping public funds in public schools is more important than educating students and providing them with a chance to be more successful. Is that really the legacy public school advocates want to be remembered for? We doubt it. After all, most folks associated with education are involved because of their concern that children must be properly educated to have the best opportunities in life.

But they allow those in their midst who wish to control everything to set the tone of the school-choice debate. It's time to push those people aside and enact and enable programs that give parents and educators more choice and more opportunities. That's the purpose of education, isn't it?