Competition Is the Key

Alex Adrianson / April 10, 2009

School choice can be more than just a “lifeboat” for students needing to escape troubled public schools. When structured correctly, school choice can create competition among both private and public schools to improve their performance.

That, say Jay Greene and Ryan Marsh, is what’s going on in Milwaukee right now. Milwaukee has one of the nation’s largest and longest-running school choice programs. Green, the head of the University of Arkansas’s Department of Education Reform, and Marsh, a graduate student at Northwestern University, did a study recently to see if the existence of school choice induces public schools to perform better in order to discourage students from leaving. They found that, indeed, the more voucher options that students in public schools have, the better they fare academically. School choice, in other words, can help students who stay in public schools, too. (more…)