"School Daze"

I agree with Barack Obama. There, I said it. Of course so does Bob McDonnell and his new Secretary of Education, Gerard Robinson. We agree that parents needs school choice. There are a myriad of studies that show that vouchers not only help the kids that utilize them, but also the "Public Option" (intentional reference to 'Obamacare', which I disagree with, but I digress...) schools they leave behind.

One such set of studies comes from Robinson's previous employer; The Black Alliance for Educational Options. From the 2009 edition of "The ABC's of School Choice": Citing the Friedman Foundation's work; "A Win-Win Solution, the empirical evidence on how vouchers affect public schools" - "The first empirical study on the Milwaukee (voucher) program was conducted by Carolyn Hoxby, then of Harvard University, and released in 2001. She compared schools that were at least 66% eligible for vouchers." Her findings were that in a school year, students in the "more exposed to vouchers" schools out performed their fellow students by 3 percentile points in math, language and social studies and 5 percentile points in science. That's the kids still in the "public option schools." NOT the ones who used the vouchers to pay tuition to a private or parochial school.

Print this report to hand out, or at least be ready to reference it, the next time someone tells you that voucher programs and school choice drains and diminished the Government schools.