School Choice or Best Systems_ What Improves Education_ - Margaret C. Wang [46]
[t]he fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.3
In Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002), moreover, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Cleveland’s school voucher program, with the majority writing, “[I]n keeping with an unbroken line of decisions rejecting challenges to similar programs, we hold that the program does not offend the Establishment Clause.”4 Thus, vouchers can be used for parochial school tuition as long as the decision is the parents’.
It is doubtful that an “expert” can do a better job of choosing a school for a child than can a well-informed parent.5 In their book Education by Choice: The Case for Family Control, Coons and Sugarman write that the current system of assigning most students to public schools is based on the notion that “local government agents make better school assignments for individual children they have never met than would the family, even were the family to be supported by professional counseling.”6 They also point out that “the question is not whether the judgment of the isolated and unassisted family is superior to the professional cadre of a school or a district. It is rather, when all available knowledge, personal and professional, about the particular school is assembled, to whom shall society commit the final choice.”7
When parents are allowed to choose, survey research summarized by Andrew Coulson8 shows that parents place a high value on academic achievement. “Topping the list of responses in all polls of independent-school parents is academic quality,” he reports. For example, the U.S. Department of Education-sponsored National Household Survey in 1993 showed that parents who chose independent schools for their children most frequently named a “better academic environment” as the primary consideration in their choice.9
Parents are also likely to choose wisely. In 2001 Caroline Hoxby reported comparisons of parents’ ratings of their child’s public school with the school’s value-added achievement (defined as the difference between a student’s 10th- and 8th-grade scores in reading and math). She found that only 15 percent of parents were “highly satisfied” with their schools if they were in the lowest quartile of gains, showing that parents were aware and upset that their children’s schools were academically failing. Some 44 percent of parents with children in schools in the highest quartile reported being “highly satisfied.”10
Parents may not always make the right choices. As Milton and Rose Friedman write: “No doubt, some parents lack interest in their children’s schooling or the capacity and desire to choose wisely. However, they are in a small minority. In any event, our present system unfortunately does little to help their children.”11
Parents’ School Choice Preferences
Survey research shows that large numbers of parents would prefer to choose their children’s schools. One recent national survey showed that 57 percent of parents with children now attending public schools would send them to private schools if vouchers were available.12 Only about 1 in 10 parents can afford private schools because public funds go almost exclusively to traditional public schools.
According to a Public Agenda survey,13 the majority of parents of public school students would choose private schools if tuition were not a concern. That survey found that 55 percent of all parents and 67 percent of inner-city parents would choose private schools. Even higher percentages of African-American families support school choice. According to survey research