Schools Should Compete

Schools should receive taxpayer dollars only if parents willingly choose to send their children to them. Schools that consistently fail to persuade enough parents to trust them with their children should not be rewarded with funding, as is now often the case with public schools. Instead, such schools should be closed so their few remaining students can attend better schools and their staffs and other resources can be put to better use elsewhere.

In fact, it’s been proven that schools improve when they are required to compete. A survey of more than 35 studies of the effect of competition on public schools found “a sizable majority of these studies report beneficial effects of competition across all outcomes.” Caroline Hoxby  reports student achievement in public schools improves as public inter-district choice increases and as the share of students who attend private schools in the metropolitan area rises. In other research, Hoxby also found schools in metropolitan areas with maximum choice among districts are 35 percent more likely than schools in areas with minimum choice to have curricula that reach high standards in English, math, science, social studies, and foreign language.