School choice: more good news

This has been a good week for school choice advocates.

In a Thursday column in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard researchers, Matthew Chingos and Paul Peterson released the results of a “gold standard” study that tracked students who won the voucher lottery in New York City with those that didn’t.  Researchers followed students from the time they entered kindergarten (1997) until they went off to college (2011). What did they find? African-American students that were able to use a voucher to attend a private school were 24 percent more likely to enroll in college than an African American student that did not win the voucher lottery. Not only do vouchers help to the educational attainment of African American students, the cost is considerably less than traditional education. The largest provider of private education in New York City  is the Catholic Diocese of New York. Total cost to educate a student in Catholic schools is about half of what the costs to educate a student in traditional public schools.

Also yesterday in a blog post, Heritage Education Analyst, Lindsay Burke reported that the support for school choice is at an all-time high. Citing results from the PDK/Gallup Poll, Burke said:

Forty-four percent of Americans now favor allowing students to choose a private school to attend at public expense. School choice favorability has jumped 10 percentage points since last year, a sign that the proliferation of options such as vouchers, education savings accounts, and online learning is creating a welcome choice for families across the country.

….Good news for students, parents and taxpayers. And all the more reason to expand school choice in North Carolina.