School Choice: The Untold Story

Alanna Clark still remembers the feeling of third grade. She remembers feeling mortified when it came time to read aloud in class, the other students reading with ease while she struggled to grasp each word. Little Alanna had a reading disability, and it was causing her to lose confidence and fall behind in class. Her mom desperately tried to get help from the school... but the problems persisted. She feared that Alanna was heading down the same path as her older sister, who fell behind in her early years, kept getting moved up grade after grade despite her struggles, and eventually failed out of community college... Alanna’s mom finally decided to enroll Alanna in a school choice lottery -- where the winning students would be allowed to attend a school other than their local public school. Alanna won the lottery and soon transferred to a charter school, and since then has made tremendous progress. Now in tenth grade, Alanna is poised, confident, and dreams of heading to Johns Hopkins to one day become a surgeon.

Denisha Merriweather used to think she’d be nothing more than a high school dropout. D’s and F’s were the norm for her, and it was embarrassing, and angering. She became disruptive in class, and then started getting into fights... School was a nightmare for her. Then, in sixth grade, Denisha began living with her godmother, who saw the writing on the wall and wished she could send Denisha to this excellent Christian school she knew of, right in their area. But it was no use -- as they couldn’t afford to pay the tuition. Then a friend told them about a school choice program available in their area, where low-income students were given a scholarship to help offset the cost of private education. This gave Denisha just the break she needed to attend the top-notch school, and the environment was drastically different for her. Her grades and self-confidence rose, and she began to believe in herself. She worked hard and graduated with honors, and today Denisha is a proud college graduate, the first in her family. She credits her state’s school choice program with giving her the opportunity she needed to succeed: “It allowed me to have dreams I didn’t know I could have.”

In her first visit to a public school since becoming our new Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos was met head-on by an angry group of protesters, who physically blocked her from entering the school. “Go back!” yelled one protester, before another upped the ante, shouting “Shame! Shame! Shame!” The strongest chant, and the most damning, seemed to be “Stop DeVos, and fund black futures! Stop DeVos, and fund black futures!”

Listening to the protests that morning you would’ve thought that Satan himself had stopped by for a visit.

The pure outrage at Betsy DeVos on display that day -- and throughout the nation at the time -- got me thinking... what was it about Betsy DeVos, school choice champion, that had everyone so dead-set against her?... Looking through the media’s coverage of her, it didn’t take me long to see why.

I googled the term “Betsy DeVos” to find the top articles on her from the time she was first nominated as Secretary of Education up through the day of the protest above. Reading the media’s early coverage of Betsy DeVos -- namely, how she was introduced to the general public -- I found that many of the top articles described DeVos as a super-rich Republican, whose policies would strip funding from America’s public schools. A majority of the articles at some point characterized her as being a cruel person, especially towards children. Here’s a look at some of the descriptions of her:

• “diverting resources from the young people who most need them”
• “diverting money away from vulnerable students and into the pockets of the rich”
• “no consideration of the severe harm done to traditional public schools”
• “she has made a career trying to destroy neighborhood public schools”
• and my favorite: “Betsy DeVos is coming for your children”

In contrast with that demonry, you would never know from the media accounts that this same person once started a foundation specifically to give low-income children greater access to quality education options. And that this foundation has given financial aid to more than 400,000 low-income families to allow them to take their children out of schools where they weren’t getting a good enough education, and put them into schools they felt would be better for them.¹ Out of 50 different articles on Betsy DeVos, only 1 of them mentioned any of this.

As for the children left attending traditional public schools, the articles said that DeVos’ policies would “devastate”, “severely harm”, “break”, or even “destroy” public schools. This sounds horrifying, and can only lead readers to believe that school choice will mean awful things for the educations of public school students... Yet, in not one article was there any discussion of how public school student achievement has actually been affected by school choice in the past.

Many of the top articles also seemed to imply that DeVos’ school choice policies would particularly hurt poor and/or minority students. Here are some examples:

• “these schemes do nothing to help our most-vulnerable students while they ignore or exacerbate glaring opportunity gaps”
• “would pull resources from struggling public schools”
• “lower-income students were effectively segregated into poorer-performing schools”
• “civil rights groups like the NAACP have expressed concern that low-income children and children of color suffer when oversight is scaled back”
• “the NAACP has demanded a moratorium on charter expansion nationally”
• “Betsy DeVos and other Republican lawmakers do not value quality education for black and brown children”

Yet, while many of the articles mentioned DeVos’ support of charter schools and voucher programs, not a single article pointed out that charter schools and voucher programs are mainly serving poor and minority students.² Nor did any of the articles mention how well these programs have worked for poor and minority students.

Given the well-known achievement gaps that exist along lines of race/ethnicity and household income, the fact that school choice is being utilized by so many students who are underperforming their peers -- and whether or not it is working for them -- seem like pretty important aspects of the story to be left out of the news coverage entirely.³

So, it isn’t surprising that so many people are up-in-arms over Betsy DeVos, given how detestable the media made her seem... and given the fact that so much of the story of school choice has been left untold.

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In the Upton/Druid Heights neighborhood in inner-city Baltimore, graduation parties are thrown for kids graduating 5th grade. Because, as one school director puts it, there’s no guarantee these kids will even survive childhood to get the chance to celebrate higher achievements. “It’s not just, ‘Oh my kid isn’t going to college.’ It’s ‘Will my child even be around, even be alive, to have those milestones?’”

43% of the kids in this neighborhood say they witness physical violence one to three times a week, and 40% of them know someone with a gun. 1 in 3 children said they knew someone under the age of 19 who was killed by violence.

For these children -- surrounded by violence, and faced with far too many examples of lives cut short, either by death or by drugs and crime -- getting a better education or a better school experience is not just a nice-to-have. It may be a matter of life and death. And it’s the best chance many of these kids have of making something of themselves, of gaining confidence and getting inspired to reach for what they want and achieve it! We owe it to these kids to think of school choice in terms of the impact it’s having for them academically.

For years now, some families have been choosing to take their kids out of traditional public schools and enroll them in nearby charter schools instead -- an option open to them through school choice. A recent national study, conducted by a leading research organization in education, tracked the progress of individual charter school students over time and compared it to the progress of public school students with the same demographics and same starting point academically. The study found that charter schools have had a positive impact on academic achievement for the following students:

• Students living in poverty, on average, gained an additional 3-4 weeks of learning per year in both reading and math, compared to public school students also living in poverty
• Black students gained an additional 3 weeks of learning per year, in both subjects
• Black students living in poverty gained an additional 6-7 weeks of learning per year, in both subjects
• Hispanic students living in poverty gained an additional 3-4 weeks of learning per year, in both subjects
• Hispanic English Language Learners gained an additional 8-10 weeks of learning per year, in both subjects

These are remarkable gains for hundreds of thousands of poor and minority children across the country. And these gains aren’t even the extent of what charters are doing for some kids. Right in our backyard (and right by those protesters, funny enough), students in D.C. charters gained an astonishing 3½ and 5 months of learning per year in both reading and math.

In DeVos’ home state of Michigan, the average charter student gained an additional 2 months of learning per year in both reading and math, after starting far behind their peers in both subjects.

Voucher programs, too, have been studied as to their impact on student achievement. In certain states, vouchers are available to help low-income students attend private/religious schools instead of their local public schools, by covering a portion of the private school tuition. It’s paid for with the tax dollars that would’ve gone toward funding their education in public school.

Just last year, researchers published a “systematic review of systematic reviews” of voucher programs. Not the most exciting thing I’ve ever read, but it did give a clear consensus: vouchers generally produce modest achievement gains, or neither gains nor losses, for participating students. One review summed it up this way: “Voucher studies, generally of high quality, indicate a slightly positive impact, particularly for African American students.”

More recently, studies have found negative achievement effects for participants of voucher programs in Ohio, Indiana, and Louisiana -- which are some of the first negative studies to come out on vouchers.

Not every student who participates in school choice will be better off for it. Like all choices in life, we don’t always make the right one. But if there’s one thing to take away from the studies on school choice, it’s that many minority students living in poverty have made real strides academically. And I’m sure their parents are thankful that they had a choice in the matter.

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Going back now to the central argument against school choice -- that it drains money from the public schools, damaging them and hurting the kids who remain there -- there now have been plenty of instances of school choice having been implemented over the past few decades, in many different areas in the country. So I spent some time looking for evidence that school choice has been hurting public school students academically.

According to an article published last year, 11 different studies have measured changes in public school student achievement following the establishment or growth of charter schools in the area. Only 1 of the 11 studies (which looked at a single school district) found any negative effects of charters on public school student test scores. In 10 out of the 11 studies (comprising 6 major cities, 5 states, and a nationwide sample), they found no negative effects of charters on public school student achievement. And in the majority of studies, charter expansion was found in some cases to have a positive effect on public school student achievement.

The author summed it up this way: “Most of the research implies that charter schools do no harm to students in district schools, and may even promote improved outcomes for all students.”

Some voucher programs, too, have been found to improve the performance of the public schools mostly closely associated with them. As one economics professor put it, “Competition improves the performance of the public schools most closely threatened, for want of a better word, by the voucher program.”

In addition, I haven’t found any evidence that any public school curriculum has been negatively affected by charters/vouchers/school choice (such as the loss of an arts program) -- though I certainly could be missing something out there. I actually found one public school district that reinstated music and arts programs in most of its elementary schools in response to charter schools.

I did stumble onto this report though, in which numerous public school superintendents said that charter school expansion in their district contributed to them closing one or more public schools (due to budget impacts). And from what I’ve read, school closure can certainly have a negative effect on the academic achievement of students who are displaced.

But given the expansion of school choice across the country, for decades now, if it really were “devastating” or “disastrous” for public schools -- taking away critical funding, and causing the best/most motivated students to leave -- I would think there’d be more evidence of public school test scores having gone down as a result of school choice. From what I’ve seen, there seems to be more evidence that school choice has improved public school student performance than diminished it.

That said, I do know there’s much more to education than test scores. And I know I haven’t addressed a lot of the negative impacts that school choice has had on public schools and school teachers. All I’m saying is, if school choice is helping at-risk children achieve real gains in their test scores, all while having a neutral, or even positive, effect on public school student test scores... there is something to be said for that.

And what it says, about the real effects of school choice on our children, is the opposite of the story the media told us about evil Republican Betsy DeVos.

There is an important debate to be had about school choice in America. Just as we shouldn’t promote school choice in disregard of its impacts on public education, we shouldn’t dismiss it without acknowledging its real benefits to so many children in need. To do either would be a disservice to the lives and futures of too many young Americans.


Angelo Jones “would’ve been gun-toting in two years”, says his mom, if he hadn’t changed schools. Angelo, afflicted with ADHD, would routinely get into fist fights and shouting matches at his former school (where such altercations among the students were all too common). Angelo was falling further and further behind academically, when his mom -- a single mother of two -- decided to enroll him in a school choice lottery. She ended up winning a spot for Angelo at the Davis Leadership Academy charter school -- and just by changing schools, Angelo’s entire educational experience was transformed. Angelo’s family credits the charter school’s zero-tolerance discipline policy for teaching Angelo how to be respectful, and focused on his schoolwork. And they credit the school’s particular attention to African-American history and culture for inspiring and motivating Angelo. Now, far from gun-toting, Angelo pledges to someday inspire others and help bring about advancement within their communities -- to which his mother can only respond, with tears of pride in her eyes, “How’d I get so lucky?”


1. “Betsy DeVos founded [the American Federation for Children] to provide better education options for lower-income children throughout America. I’m very proud of what the AFC has achieved, particularly at the state level. More than 400,000 lower-income families have been empowered with financial support to take their children out of schools where they thought the kids were not getting an adequate education, and put them into schools that they thought were better.” -- Senator Joe Lieberman, at Betsy DeVos’ Senate confirmation hearing

2. A recent national study on charter schools found that 53% of students in charter schools are living in poverty, and 56% are either black or Hispanic (see page 16). And a 2016 review of school voucher programs says “The U.S. programs all are limited to students with incomes near or below the cut-off for the federal lunch program… The overwhelming majority of voucher participants in the U.S. are either African American or Hispanic.”

3. The same national charter school study found that the average charter student’s starting test scores are below the 50th percentile in both reading and math (see page 21).

The Medicare Debate, Part II

It barely made a blip on the news, so you may not have heard that the U.S. credit rating was just downgraded again for the fourth time in the past fourteen months. Downgrades are dangerous because they signal to other countries that the U.S. is now a riskier place to invest in, and this raises our cost of borrowing money. But the bigger problem for Americans is the reason for the downgrades: our government is less likely to pay its debts, and is therefore less likely to honor its commitments to people who are counting on government assistance in their senior years.

One of our biggest obligations is Medicare. It's the third-most expensive federal program ($560 billion spent in 2011, or about $3000 per working-age adult¹), and due to the wave of retiring baby boomers its cost is expected to nearly double within a generation.² Our current path is unsustainable — and will result in millions of people shelling out more for their medical care than they've been planning on.

So what do we do about it? The status quo approach is to cut costs by reducing pay for doctors who treat Medicare patients...but this would also reduce the quality of care (see my last post). VP candidate Paul Ryan has an alternative plan, one that's been both attacked and championed by people who probably don't really understand it. (I know — I was one of them.) But now that I've read his plan, here's what you need to know:

Nothing changes for anyone currently 55 or older.

For everyone else, when you become eligible for Medicare you will choose your own health insurance plan. You can choose the traditional fee-for-service option (the way it is now, where government reimburses doctors directly), or you can select from among a variety of private insurance plans within the new Medicare Exchange.

Every year, each insurer in the Exchange will declare the price that they must be paid in premiums in order for them to cover enrollees' medical costs. Medicare then pays for all or some of your premiums depending on your income and the price of your plan.

The "benchmark" that determines how much Medicare pays for is the price of the baseline plan, which is either traditional fee-for-service or the second-cheapest private plan, whichever is cheaper. But what's not clear is what "benchmark" means — that is, if you choose the baseline plan, are your premiums fully covered or not? What is clear is that of the people who select the baseline plan, Medicaid-eligible seniors will have no out-of-pocket expenses, other low-income seniors will receive additional assistance, and high-income seniors will have to pay a share of their premiums.

If you choose a plan that's more expensive than the baseline, you'll have to cover the difference. Choose a plan cheaper than the baseline and you'll receive a rebate for the difference.

Each insurer in the Exchange must abide by two ground rules. First, they have to cover at least the actuarial equivalent of the fee-for-service benefits package. This means that while each plan will provide different coverage, every plan's coverage will be at least as valuable as traditional Medicare and you'll know upfront what's included in your plan. Second, they have to accept all applicants regardless of any high-risk/pre-existing conditions. Medicare will support this provision by paying for the increase in premiums that's necessary for high-risk individuals and by regularly transferring money from plans with more low-risk seniors to plans with more high-risk seniors.

The vision here is to have companies compete for customers by thinking of creative and efficient ways to cover medical expenses for less than it costs Medicare to do so today. If this plan fails and the anticipated cost reductions don't pan out, there's a provision to cap Medicare expenditure growth at nominal GDP growth plus 0.5 percent. This means that if insurance prices rise faster than that upper growth rate, some seniors (Medicaid-eligibles excluded) would have to cover the spillover costs. Whatever the merits, this is a more truthful way of dealing with ballooning costs than trying in vain to hide the problem from seniors by paying doctors less.

No plan will magically wipe away the underlying problem of having an increasingly strapped government provide for an aging population...but applying the tried-and-true principles of competition and personal choice/responsibility is a step in the right direction.

1. There were 183.9 million U.S. adults ages 20-64 in 2009.
2. Peter G. Peterson Foundation. "Budget Explainer: Medicare."

High Prices and Fairness

High prices are often associated with greed and a lack of compassion. Companies that charge high prices are considered to be taking advantage of their customers, and unfair to those who don't get the company's service. Yet most people don't think twice about charging a high price when it comes to looking for a job.

Your salary is the price a company must pay for your time and effort, so seeking the best salary is essentially charging the highest possible price for your work. Are you greedy and uncompassionate for doing this? Are you taking advantage of your new company? Not at all — you're just taking part in the fair and widely beneficial system of competitive pricing.

High prices are considered unfair for a couple reasons:

"People who pay high prices are being exploited."

If this were true, then people who receive high salaries would be exploiting their companies. On the contrary, companies choose to pay high salaries to valuable workers just like people choose to pay high prices for valuable services. In free market competition, the price system requires a mutual agreement between buyer and seller — it doesn't get any fairer than that.

"Some people can't afford pricey services."

A service's high price shows how highly valued it is among the population. There are many people who can afford a pricey service but do not value it highly enough to purchase it, which means that the scarce service is left for those who value it the most. Along these lines, your job search matches you with the company that values you the highest among all companies that could have afforded to pay your new salary.

But what about the people who legitimately cannot afford a needed service? For one, these people are greatly benefited by private charity.¹ In addition, the price system will help them in two ways. First, a service's high price signals other businesses to start providing that service in order to profit from its high price. The increased supply will drive down the price so that more people can afford the service. Second, the high price encourages hard work and saving, enough of which will allow anyone to eventually get the service.

With ample competition, the price system is fair because both sides have to agree, and helpful in sending resources where they are most valued.

1. The United States is the most charitable nation in the world.

Dollars and Saints

Sean Payton is the head coach of the Super Bowl-champion New Orleans Saints. The Saints are known for their high-powered offense, but few know that their best play this year was made by Sean Payton, before the season even began. Payton gave away $250,000 of his salary so that the Saints would have the funds necessary to sign defensive specialist Gregg Williams. We seldom hear of such sacrifice, but it's actually commonplace; sacrifice is necessary for success in competition.

Payton's goal was to win the Super Bowl. Forced to compete, he had to generate the best possible team with limited salary money. Instead of keeping the $250,000 for himself, Payton improved his team by using the money to acquire Gregg Williams. Williams revamped the team's defense, bringing victory to the Saints and prosperity to the city of New Orleans.

In capitalism, entrepreneurs and executives must compete to attract customers. A company attracts customers only if the price of its service is as low as possible. Low prices are possible only if production costs are low, meaning that resources are allocated efficiently. For example, say that Comcast can more efficiently provide the same Internet service that Verizon provides. If so, then Comcast will attract customers by offering prices lower than Verizon's. Comcast will turn a profit, which is great not only for Comcast, but for the entire country! People will get Internet service more cheaply, and will have extra money to be spent in other industries, which ultimately helps people who don't have Internet service at all.

Success in competition requires an efficient allocation of resources, thus competitors are compelled to sacrifice. In the end, Sean Payton profited from his sacrifice. Instead of equating profit with greed, we should commend risk takers like Payton for trying in the first place, for profits benefit not only the risk takers, but everyone who's counting on them. Just ask anyone on Bourbon Street.