School choice is potentially a useful tool in improving the educational opportunities for students in the United States. The meaning of school choice, as is clear from the prompt for this series of responses, can cover many different paths. Most often we think in terms of one’s ability to choose to opt out of existing traditional public school systems (e.g., charters or vouchers to attend private schools or home-schooling).

However, choice can also exist within a traditional system. An example here would be the choice system that is used in the New York City public schools at the high school level. Before heading to high school, every eighth-grader is asked to learn about and rank order their top 12 choices from the hundreds of high schools within the system that they would like to attend. Many of these high schools are non-selective, meaning that they are essentially open to all students who express interest. If part of the hope is that choice allows a student and his/her parents to seek a school that seems to be a better “fit” for that student, such choice can exist within a traditional system and doesn’t necessitate options outside of such a system. A team of my colleagues at MDRC recently released an update to their ongoing experimental evaluation of small high schools in New York City, which represent a nexus between choice and other districtwide reforms: http://www.mdrc.org/publications/614/overview.html. This study has found positive impacts on graduation and other outcomes for a very disadvantaged population of students from this combined approach.

The 105 small schools we studied were more than just small; they emphasized academic rigor; strong, sustained relationships between students and faculty; and community partnerships to offer relevant learning opportunities outside the classroom. They were “charter-like” in how they were launched and operated, yet they are academically nonselective, include unionized teachers, and are overseen by the New York City Department of Education. These new results demonstrate that substantial improvement can be achieved at scale within a public school system that offers universal choice and quality options to choose from.

Much has been said about vouchers and choice. A hard look at some fact from Milwaukee is worthwhile. It is the largest private voucher program in any city in the nation.

The program started in 1990. It was not until 16 years later that there was a requirement that teachers in the voucher schools had a high school diploma or a GED. Voucher supporters fought against such government regulation for years.

It was not until 2011 that voucher schools were required to hired teachers with a BA.

What I find is ironic is that there is so much pressure on public schools to have "highly qualified" teachers -- but when it comes to the voucher proponents in Wisconsin that is not the case.

Wisconsin taxpayers have spent over $1 billion on the program since it began. 38% of the funding comes out of state aid to MPS, which the district can replace only through increasing local property taxes -- this will amount to approximately $50 million in 2011-12.

In 2010 about 85% of students attending public-funded private voucher schools in Milwaukee attended religious schools.

In the Milwaukee Public Schools more than 19% of the students have IEPs and require special education services. In private voucher schools: 1.6 percent.

There are 80,098 students enrolled in the Milwaukee Public Schools (2011-2112) and 23,198 in the private voucher schools.

In 2010, for the first time ever, voucher schools were required to give the WKCE and release the results to the DPI. In math, the private voucher schools showed lower academic achievement than comparable students in MPS, and scored about the same in reading.

In MPS, 43.9 percent of economically disadvantaged students scored proficient or advanced in math, compared to 34.4 percent of the voucher students. In reading, the MPS figure was 55.3 percent and for voucher students it was 55.2 percent.

Wisconsin Governor cut aid to public schools by about $1.6 billion in his biennial budget. He expanded the Milwaukee voucher program. The cap on enrollment was lifted and income eligibility requirements were raised to 300 percent of the poverty level.

Some of the original architects of school choice are realizing their goals in Milwaukee. Universal vouchers for all students and the destruction of public schools, or at the very least the creation of a dual school system with the more difficult to educate students in the public schools.

The children of Milwaukee will suffer as result.

School choice is important. We need it because parents should be involved in making an informed decision about where their children go to school, and we need it because there should be appropriate options available to every student. When it comes to learning environments, one size does not fit all. There are circumstances beyond a physical address that should determine where a student receives his or her education. It is also the case that not all school choice options are effective. The salutary impact of competition is frequently cited as the basic rationale for charters and vouchers that give consumers power to make their own decisions. But, a recent study out of Harvard noted that reports have found that reforms such as school choice or school vouchers have, at best, a modest impact on student achievement, and suggested that competition alone is unlikely to significantly increase the efficiency of the public school system.

Presently, there are more choices for educational services. Magnet schools, charter schools and virtual schools are now publically available options in some school districts. Yet, we do not have evidence that those options are consistently better than traditional public schools. While there are benefits to being a charter option, such as the flexibility they allow, requiring more charters is not a prudent policy intervention at this time. Permitting charters and other school choice options is essential to the transformation of the educational services our students deserve. We must remember, though, that this is not about ideology; this is about serving learners.

Any healthy, organic, effective system needs a space where it is safe to test new ideas, demonstrate and document the implementation of new instructional strategies, and induct new practitioners, all while maintaining the primary focus on the interests of students. Choice and charters should be used to create these particular settings. For example, I would like to see a school comprised of faculty who are research partners with university faculty of different subject areas. This partnership would implement a research agenda dedicated to the efforts to improve practice in the academic disciplines and produce solid field-based documentation of what works where. Some university-based educator preparation programs are establishing their own charter schools as sites for innovative clinical development of teacher candidates. Other institutions are assisting with the management of charters in their local school districts. Through such partnerships, higher education faculty are able to lend their expertise to professional development and even school turnaround efforts by providing curriculum redesign strategies.

Education schools are using chartering opportunities to get important work done. Charters are used by community-based organizations to provide unique educational experiences likely to be effective for certain learners. These are good reasons to support charters. That said, no school, regardless of its governance or instructional focus, should be permitted to operate unless the requirements of transparency and documentation of productivity are met.

For some reason people keep seeing choice – really, freedom – at work all around them, yet they fail to see why it needs to be applied to education. They see the dynamism, specialization, and constant improvements made in our lives by free markets – the things that bring us everything from iPhones, to teeming grocery store shelves, to skyscrapers – but fail to understand why we need them in education.

But one actually need not look beyond education to perceive the power of freedom, albeit curbed and distorted by major government involvement. On one level there are the ballet and music lessons we buy for our kids, which many of us see as very worthwhile investments. On a much larger scale there is American higher education. Yes, it has many problems, first and foremost the prices that skyrocket in no small part in response to federal student aid. But our higher education system is nonetheless widely considered to be the best in the world because, while most countries furnish higher education the stultifying way we do K-12 – the government owns the schools and they are free to students – we have a hugely decentralized system of public schools, private schools, for-profit schools, liberal arts colleges, research universities, conservatories, etc. And all are largely autonomous and need to compete for students, spurring specialization and improvement.

How about those “most successful” countries Marc Tucker talks about?

For one thing, “most successful” is usually just a way of saying “countries that do well on one or two tests,” usually PISA or TIMSS. But standardized tests are hardly comprehensive measures of the value of an education system. And if you look at everyone’s favorite high performer – Finland – you’ll see that it is really only on PISA that it excels. It’s results on TIMSS have been just so-so, and it hasn’t participated since 1999. Moreover, as the research on the effect of national curricular standards suggests, it is culture, not centralized control, that is the main factor driving high scores. Some cultures – especially east Asian – simply appear to be much more geared toward succeeding on tests than others.

Still, what can we see in the structures of the education systems in nations that outpace us on, say, PISA math?

What we find is that many have more school choice than we do, starting with significantly more robust vocational options for students who don’t want to go on to, say, four-year liberal arts colleges. In non-vocational schooling, nations that beat us such as Australia, Belgium, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Denmark, offer significant subsidies for non-government schooling. And those high-flying East Asian nations? They don’t offer much choice within their traditional systems, but they often have massive, for-profit tutoring industries outside of them. In other words, freedom and choice are significantly more integrated into the systems of the best performers – at least as measured by a couple of tests – than in the United States. And critically, almost all nations have adopted the same basic schooling system – varying degrees of government domination – so international comparisons can’t provide a serious test of free markets and government monopoly. But we have had such tests outside of education – think the United States versus the USSR – and freedom won, hands down.

Choice – really, freedom – works, even within the largely government-dominated world of education. We just have to be willing to see it.

Educational choice, alone, will not improve traditional public schools or learning outcomes for children. What choice does do is empower parents and their children to make informed decisions about education. They can only do that, however, if they have access to useful information about the schools in their community and surrounding area and understand all the available educational options.

Policymakers should continue to expand public choice options and invest in traditional public schools, while at the same time helping families become more informed about both, especially low-income families who often lack information and accessibility.

There is broad political agreement on the value of public school choice options such as charter schools, magnet schools, other innovative schools, and open choice school enrollment within a school district.

While there seems to be a lot of support for online learning, there is still much we do not know about virtual schools and hybrid schools, many of which are charters, and their long-term impact on student learning, especially for students who begin participating in these schools in the early grades of elementary school. More longitudinal research on online schooling is needed.

Vouchers and tax credits for private school tuition, meanwhile, remain controversial. 2011 saw a resurgence of political support for vouchers in several states with newly elected Republican legislatures or governors. I think vouchers are a concept that policymakers should drop, as they do nothing to solve education challenges for the majority of students and in some cases actually cause harm. For example, in Florida, fraud, safety issues, and lack of oversight have been major challenges in some of the private schools receiving the public McKay Scholarship funds for students with disabilities according to the Miami News Times. This only hurts the students they are supposed to help.

Federal, state, and local policymakers need to remember that the majority of students still attend traditional public schools. This is unlikely to change. So investments must continue to go primarily to improving the quality of teaching and learning in more traditional settings.

The various public choice options do provide a place to try new strategies, structures and methods on a smaller scale. But for successes in charter schools and other choice options to have a positive impact at a larger scale, policymakers will need to make it easier for traditional public schools to adopt and implement these promising practices. This means giving principals more control over their school’s resources and structure.

One final thought on charter schools: Some operators want to add pre-K to their existing school or open a pre-K charter school, but face hurdles with state and federal laws and funding issues. These schools recognize the value of ensuring children getting the right start. Congress and states should make charter laws clearer to explicitly include pre-K as an allowable option.

Marc Tucker makes a compelling case that choice is not the way that other countries have clawed their way to the top of the international rankings. And I agree with many of his priorities, including finding ways to recruit teachers from the upper reaches of college graduates and to retain those teachers.

However, I suspect that the American way to success involves a healthy dose of choice and charters.

We Americans like to invent our path forward ourselves. We don't like others to tell us exactly where to go and how to get there. Finding our way there ourselves is half the fun.

Charters provide a structure for people with interesting ideas to develop all kinds of flavors of models to help children grow and find their place in the world. Some of their efforts will be flawed. That's why we need strong authorizers.

Finland may be able to develop a system that offers a one way forward to a high level of excellence for most all of its children. But, we're probably better off as a nation and as a people if we find many ways forward for our children -- even if some of them are a bit less excellent. We Americans are very diverse and we thrive when we have choices.

I'm reading Walter Issacson's biography of Steve Jobs now and I recommend this book for those with an interest in education policy. The wild and crazy innovation typified by Steve Jobs is more likely to thrive in an education system that fosters a little wild and crazy innovation of its own.

With this week’s celebrations of school choice week all across America, I remain optimistic about the great promise and opportunity of offering effective public school options for parents and students.

Chief among these are quality charter schools, which are leading the way in student achievement across the country. Online learning is another important public school choice opportunity to help students succeed, whether blended, supplementary or full-time. Districts also open focus schools or magnet schools that are open equally to families across the school district. In my state of Colorado, as in some other states, we wisely allow students and their families to choose schools outside of their neighborhood school and even their school district. Districts can take cues from parental demand to replicate and expand successful models with waiting lists and modify or close unsuccessful schools.

With state legislators getting back to work across the country, it is essential that they focus on sustaining the innovations of school choice, while realizing positive student outcomes. In Colorado, we recently learned that charter schools boosted student achievement growth rates in Denver Public Schools by five percent, led by such outstanding schools as the Denver School for Science and Technology and West Denver Preparatory Charter School. These schools and others like them across the country underscore why charter schools are critical to our public education system. They are a reminder to policymakers at all levels to ensure that laws, rules and other policies facilitate student choice.

For choice to be meaningful, there also needs to be a transportation component. Choice should not mean choice only for those who have parents who can take them to a school across town. Not including busing options or transportation reimbursement risks letting choice further stratify schools by income level.

Good school choice enhances, not detracts from, our public education system because the competition helps drive traditional public schools to do better and effectively meet the wide variety of student learning needs and interests. That’s why we are seeing such a huge increase in the popularity and student enrollments in charter schools nationally. Last year about 200,000 more students enrolled in charter schools, a 13 percent increase -- the largest jump in the two decades that charter schools were founded. More than 2 million students learn in charter schools nationwide.

In Congress, I have worked with Republicans and Democrats to infuse successful charter school policy structures into federal law by amending the one bipartisan piece of education legislation to pass the House, the reauthorization of the federal Charter School Programs. My bill to expand and replicate effective charter schools would codify for the first time federal investment of dollars in this effort. This legislation also includes new language that I proposed prioritizing multiple charter authorizers and autonomous charter school food services. When a school district is the only authorizer, it can put them in a very difficult situation because they are sometimes the approval body and regulator of what some view as their own competition. While enlightened districts have embraced choice as part of a dynamic portfolio of public schools to better serve all families, too many districts continue to see them as competition with “their” schools. It is critical that lawmakers, state and local administrators and other decision-makers not back away from the progress they have made in these and other areas by restricting charter schools’ access to grants, facilities and flexible contracting for student services. This is a struggle every legislative session and one that should come into sharp focus as we recognize the benefits of school choice during school choice week.

Similarly it is essential that the fast-growing online learning environments are not shut to students. Recent data shows that some full-time online schools are struggling, and others are performing comparably to other traditional schools in the state. This should come as no surprise. Our goal should not be to stifle innovation, but rather to identify successful online practices, build and replicate them, and improve schools that are failing. If a particular school continues to fail, fewer parents will choose such a failing model resulting in its closure, but policymakers should not eliminate or suppress the entire online model. Some struggles in this emerging field are to be expected in the early years of any new model, especially when it involves technology and particularly when many online students have failed in traditional learning environments. Full-time online and part-time online learning can be an ideal setting for at-risk students and others who learn better with this approach. Additionally, blended online and supplemental online learning are helping students access classes that were previously unavailable to them. Technology and choice in general are supporting student achievement, and should be nurtured not weakened.

While the House considers the recently released Republican school accountability and teacher effectiveness bills, members can contribute to meaningful education reform by drawing from the outstanding bipartisan work on the charter school act just four months ago, so this essential piece of legislation does not languish during partisan bickering and inaction. Children cannot afford stagnation, and the federal government has a critical and constructive role to play in empowering parents across our nation to make the best choices for their child.

As a founder and former Superintendent of charter schools in Colorado for low–income students and English language learners, I have seen first-hand how charter schools and choice can help open doors for children who otherwise would probably not be in school at all. Children succeeding in school is a make or break issue for the economic strength and competitiveness of our nation and state. Empowering all families with school choice should be honored every week in word and deed, not just this week.

The question on the table is whether charters should be driving national education policy. The answer depends on your goals.

If you are looking for one goal on which the two political parties can agree in these hypercontentious times, then charters are what you should be focusing on.

If you think that the most important problem facing American education is lack of innovation, you should be focusing on charters.

If you think that the most important problem facing American education is the “blob,” the education bureaucracy and the administrators who populate it, then you should be focusing on charters.

If you think the most important problem facing American education is the teachers’ unions, then you will find charters an attractive strategy for diminishing their strength.

If you value parental choice of schools more than you value equal opportunity in education, then you should be very interested in charters.

But, if the goal you hold most dear is improving the performance of American schoolchildren, then you are barking up the wrong tree. That’s the conclusion I draw from looking at the evidence both in the United States and abroad.

Let’s take each of these propositions in turn.

Since Milton Friedman extolled the market as the best solution to the nation’s education problems, the Republican Party has joined in that embrace. Its members would prefer vouchers as the ideal market solution, but, in a practical world, they have settled, at least for the time being, for charters. Beginning in the Clinton administration, there have been strong voices for charters in the Democratic party, especially among the “new” democrats. Many would have preferred no charters, but, like the Republicans, were willing to settle. Others, allied with entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley and the financial industry in New York, saw charters as a way to bring new ideas and new energy into an ossified establishment. In a world in which there seems to be stalemate on most of the domestic agenda, it seems a no-brainer to make the most of this bi-partisan agreement in the education arena.

For many people, in fact, it is a no-brainer to argue that lack of innovation is the problem and charters are the answer. Rick Hess has been an ardent and effective spokesman for this view for a long time. But I see no evidence at all for the proposition that lack of innovation is the problem in American education. Even though the performance of American students is middling at best, educational professionals from all over the world are constantly visiting schools, colleges and education intervention programs in the United States. Why? Because we have a vast array of interesting and exciting things to see and talk about. This country may be the world’s most fertile hotbed of new ideas, being tried out in nooks and crannies in every state in the union. We lack for neither ideas nor demonstration sites where those ideas can be seen in action. Our problem is not lack of innovation, but the lack of a mature education system of the kind that the top-performing countries have in which new ideas can be systematically tried out and then systematically incorporated into the larger system at scale. We are terrible at that. And charters will not address that problem.

But you may not care about that at all. You may be interested in charters because you think that charters are the way to get around what former Education Secretary Bill Bennett called “the blob,” the education bureaucracy. And why would you want to do that? Well, to introduce those innovations that we just talked about. But we don’t lack for innovations, so maybe getting rid of the blob will solve a problem we don’t have. But it is not that simple, of course. The United States has an administrative presence at the local level much larger than its counterpart in the world’s best-performing education systems, and there is good reason to believe that that layer of administration, everything considered, is a hindrance to good education and not an asset. But, if that is true, wouldn’t it make more sense to trim back that bureaucracy for all schools and not just some of them? My point is that the issue of too much and too sluggish an administrative presence at the local level is a real problem, but charter schools are not the answer.

But, as we all know, for many people, the primary goal of charters is not any of the above. It is to get out from under the teachers unions. But, as has often been pointed out, there is no correlation between the presence and strength of teachers’ unions and student performance, either in the United States or abroad, among the best-performing countries. But, even if that were not so, we could be confident that, if schools could just get out from under the presumed “dead hand” of the teachers unions by becoming charters, then student performance would be much better in charter schools than in schools where the teachers are union members. But there is no evidence to support that proposition, either.

In some countries, parents have the right to set up their own schools at government expense. In fact, in some of those countries, parents can choose among all the public schools for their children and all of the public schools have the same kind of freedom to define their own instructional program that is characteristic of many of our charter schools. One could say that the entire system in such countries is composed of charter schools.

That accurately describes the New Zealand education system since 1989, when the government cut the size of the school administration in half and instituted a radically decentralized system of educational governance and administration in that country. The best analysis of that system, in a class by itself, was done by Ted Fiske and Helen Ladd, in their book When Schools Compete: A Cautionary Tale. Why cautionary? Because it turns out that when New Zealand made all schools schools of choice, the strongest schools got even better, and the worst schools got worse. The best schools got better because they had a first rate staff that knew what to do to get better once they were freed of whatever restrictions they’ve been chafing under. The worst schools got even worse even when the best schools used lotteries to admit the students who applied. That happened for several reasons. First, most of the best teachers wanted to teach in the schools serving the best students. That produced shortages of teachers in the worst schools and, when those schools were able to find teachers, they had to take whatever they could get. Second, the most successful schools typically throve on their relative standing and had no incentive to expand, so the supply was limited. Third, even when admission to the most desirable schools was by lottery, the low income and minority families who typically were the clients of the lowest-performing schools couldn’t afford the expense of getting their children across town to the upper-crust communities where the best schools were; their children often got a frosty greeting from the wealthy, majority students who went to school there, and they didn’t get the special support services that they needed, though were often available in the school they came from. New Zealand adopted a radical public choice system because they wanted schools that were genuinely owned by the people in their communities, not the professional educators who staff them. They got that. But they got that at the price of less equity in their school arrangements than they had before, and that concerns them. The performance of New Zealand’s schools is among the highest in the world. That was true before they introduced this system of school choice as well as afterwards, and we have much to learn from that country. But there is no reason to believe that student performance in New Zealand was higher after implementing their radical school choice plan than it was before it was introduced.

In my opinion, the only reason to prefer one form of school organization or governance over another is evidence that the preferred form produces better outcomes for students than the alternatives. What kind of evidence is appropriate here depends on which outcomes are most important to you. One thing is clear, though. There is no evidence, from the United States or any other country, that charters or their cousins produce, net-net, better outcomes for students at the national or state level. The record in the United States is amusing. First one side, then another undertakes a study, hoping to produce a knockout blow for its position. There have been plenty of studies showing a slight advantage first for this side and then for the other. But there have been no knockout blows for either side. And that is the point. It makes no sense to me at all for the federal government or any state government to have these knock-down, drag-out fights over a school reform strategy that no one has proven, anywhere on the globe, to produce decisive advantages for students at a national or state scale.

Then why are we doing it? Why do charter schools continue to be a centerpiece of the domestic education reform agenda? Because, like the New Zealanders, we see the education system as part of government and we do not want the government to tell us what to do. And because charters are virtually the only thing the Democrats and the Republicans can agree on. It is a sad state of affairs that the only reform measure the two parties can agree on is a strategy that no one, anywhere on the face of the earth, has proven improves student achievement overall, and which research shows produces less education equity when implemented than when not implemented.

Well-designed education systems include features that enable the managers of the system to let good ideas bubble up from the field, provide labs for researching the effects of those ideas, and then, if they work, incorporate them in the larger system, in ways that strengthen, and not weaken that system. A greatly changed version of what we call charters should find a place in a system like that, but would by no stretch of the imagination be the primary engine of steady improvement.

I continue to hope that, at some point, American education reform strategy will take its cue from the strategies the countries with the most successful education systems have used to get to the top of the rankings. They include making sure children begin school on a level playing field, ready to learn; fair school finance policies; world class instructional systems; and a whole host of policies designed to recruit their teachers from the upper reaches of their college graduates and to retain those teachers. They do not include charters. Charters are a side-show.

School choice should absolutely serve as “a tool to fuel common ground on education policy.” Choice is, at its heart, really about high-performing options, especially for students who have been too often written off by the system. Schools of choice were some of the first places where the myth that poverty would always trump students’ ability to achieve was busted. Through such models, we have seen that demographics do not have to equal destiny.

It is unfortunate that, in 2012, we must continue a debate about whether all students should have access to high-quality school options. It is unfortunate that too many children don’t have the opportunity to attend public schools that can change their destinies. And it is truly unfortunate that we continue to look for excuses and justifications for denying students access schools that are proven to be effective when it comes to addressing all students’ learning needs and preparing all kids – regardless of race, family income, or zip code – for college and career.

There is much we can learn from successful public schools of choice, just as there is much we can learn from traditional public schools that are exceeding expectations. Policy makers on both sides of the aisle should be jumping at the chance to bring what’s already working in public schools – traditional, charter, magnet, or technical – into all struggling schools.

In Connecticut, Governor Dannel Malloy and Education Commissioner Stefan Pryor are leading the way on that front, seeking to extract best practices from all of our public schools. One of Commissioner Pryor’s first actions when he stepped into his role was to embark on a far-reaching listening tour at schools around the state to understand the successes and challenges in our public schools. The new path that the governor and commissioner are forging is built on the idea that we have already seen schools of all kinds addressing students’ learning needs, no matter what they walk in the door with – and they want those successes to serve as a framework for building out a far-reaching education reform policy agenda.

Choice can, should, and must help inform the entire education policy agenda. Ultimately, our goal must be to provide great public schools to all students, no excuses. Public school success, regardless of the wrapper it might wear, serves as the exemplar for driving change. We should be agnostic about where solutions come from, as long as they are real, effective solutions that work for our kids. The stakes are too high for us to accept anything less.

When I was in junior high school in Detroit (long before its current meltdown), my classmates and I were taken to a wealthy suburban public high school for an “exchange visit.” We were stunned to see carpeted, well-stocked libraries; working restrooms with warm water and hand towels; real science laboratories; and a gym building with indoor track and swimming pool. We were never told what the purpose of the trip was, but its net effect on our young minds was to confirm that we were worth—less than rich people’s children.

My hard-working, middle-class parents, like millions of American families, depended on their neighborhood public schools to provide quality education for their children, and rightfully so. Certainly, all parents in the U.S. should be able to choose the educational option that works best for them and their children. Most important, in this nation, every family in every community should have access to good schools. The only difference among schools should be perhaps each having a different focus. No parent anywhere in these United States should have to move or risk arrest in order to secure quality education for her/his child(ren).

How is it then, that millions of American children live in neighborhoods with schools chronically neglected by the same political/educational system that now wants to condemn them as "failing"? In such settings, it is hypocritical and cruel to use the illusion of "choice" and "free-market competition" to justify closing or taking even more resources from those same schools; sending parents scurrying for scarce or non-existent schooling options.

In a widely read New York Times op-ed last December, a black, middle-class mother from D.C. described "Why School Choice Fails."

"But I’ve come to realize that this brand of school reform is a great deal only if you live in a wealthy neighborhood. You buy a house, and access to a good school comes with it. Whether you choose to enroll there or not, the public investment in neighborhood schools only helps your property values.

For the rest of us, it’s a cynical game. There aren’t enough slots in the best neighborhood and charter schools. So even for those of us lucky ones with cars and school-data spreadsheets, our options are mediocre at best.

Today, I live in and my own chldren matriculated through a school district that is still dragging its feet about ending the inequities of segregation ("Justice Department Files Motion.." May 2011). Most of those with whom I have taught here in the Mississippi Delta have done amazing work, sometimes under disgraceful conditions, helping many of our students go on to productice lives. I often wonder how much more those children could have achieved, and how many more we could have helped, if all schools had the resources and support of our better situated colleagues? Real school choice should start with making every public school worthy of choosing.

The supposition behind publicly sponsored school choice plans is that the way to improve schools is by generating competition that would force schools to either get better or close. In reality, as Cheryl Williams correctly notes that, "to the extent we rely on competition to improve some schools, others will be left behind. In that situation the losers are always children, and ultimately the rest of us as well." What such plans promote is abandonment of schools in the neediest communities, and the students whose parents for whom moving/transferring is not an option. It is a simplistic to suggest, as some voucher proponents do, that we just "let the money follow the students." The already insufficient resources at many of these schools cannot be easily or adequately sliced off on a per student basis without causing multiplied damage to those left behind.

Shouldn’t ending such longstanding inequities be a higher priority than funding faulty school choice schemes?