A short time ago on X (formerly Twitter), Education Minnesota reposted an image from the National Education Association (NEA) claiming there are “zero” studies showing school choice improves educational outcomes.
If you’re not familiar with Education Minnesota, the organization is the statewide teachers’ union and one of the more powerful lobbying groups in the state. The NEA is the national teachers’ union and is an even more powerful lobbying group.
Each year these teachers’ unions spend enormous sums lobbying and organizing to maintain their overwhelming influence over the education system.
They’re also the loudest voices fighting school choice.
Here’s that post:
Of course, if you click the link, you’ll find Education Minnesota doesn’t allow for comments on X so it’s impossible to post information that would help them correct the … error.
Giving the benefit of the doubt to both Education Minnesota and the National Education Association, here at OAK we thought it would be a good idea to help them out by asking Google, “Are there school choice studies that show positive effects?”
What did Google’s Generative AI have to answer? Here’s the screenshot:
In their X post, the NEA claims there is “zero statistical significance that vouchers improve overall student success” and that “some programs have even been shown to have a negative effect on students who receive them.”
Zero?!?
Finding links to numerous studies showing a positive impact from school choice took about as long as it took us to type the question. And as Google’s AI states, “some research indicates that the introduction of school options can lead to improved performance in public schools due to increased competition.”
Such a blatant omission by the teachers’ unions raises a lot of questions about the character and goals of the people in charge.
EdChoice, one of the premier school choice research and promotion non-profits in the nation, provides a thorough analysis of data in its study “The 123s of School Choice: What the research says about private school choice programs in America.”
The study “reviews the available research on voucher programs, education savings accounts, and tax-credit scholarship programs in the United States and organized the research by eight distinct outcomes.”
As of February 2024, there were “188 studies researching the impact of private school choice” included in the analysis. Here’s the chart:
For Education Minnesota and the NEA to be accurate in their claim, all 188 studies would need to find that school choice is a net-negative to educational outcomes. But that’s not the case.
As an introduction to the study states:
…many readers probably want to know what the research says about choice programs generally. What is the impact overall? Do effects tend to be positive, negative, or mixed? Of the entire body of research included in The 123s of School Choice, 84% of studies detected a positive effect while just 6% detected a negative effect.
Furthermore, Martin Lueken of EdChoice adds:
Some readers may be concerned about the impact that choice programs have on a particular outcome, such as academic outcomes for public school students who choose to remain instead of participating in a choice program. Of the 29 studies that analyzed this outcome, 26 found that public school students benefit after choice enters the picture while two studies detected a negative effect and one did not detect any effect. In addition to these studies, researchers have conducted numerous systematic reviews of this research, including one meta-analysis, all of which concluded that competition from choice has a positive effect overall on public school students.
Again, going back to the NEA’s post, Education Minnesota added to it that “Vouchers don’t work, and they siphon scarce resources away from the schools 90% of America’s children attend – public schools.”
Here it’s important to note that according to the Minnesota Department of Education, 50.1% of all public school students in Minnesota are struggling to read or can’t. It doesn’t get any better by 10th-grade, either. In 2024, only 52% of all 10th-grade students in the public schools were proficient at reading.
That means nearly half of all high school sophomores are struggling to read and some are functionally illiterate. Again, that’s in high school.
You won’t hear about that from the teachers’ unions who have been arguably in political control of Minnesota’s education system for decades. The truth is they own the systemic failure of education while fighting to prevent positive change that would help children.
Instead, they falsely attack school choice and talk about “scarce resources.”
That seems to be what it’s all about for the teachers’ unions: “scarce resources.”
Mind you, many Minnesota school districts are spending $20,000, $25,000, $30,000, or even more per student per year. In the last biennium budget, nearly 40% of all state spending went to education – the largest chunk of the pie.
There’s no lack of resources for education, it’s just that the adults running the system want to use those resources for their own benefit rather than the students for whom those resources are intended to benefit.
School choice with Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) in Minnesota would provide a student with $7,000 to use for tuition at any school as well as to use for tutoring and other eligible education expenses. ESAs would be a lifeboat for families to escape a failing system and get their children into the best schools and educational environments.
And as we found through Googling a simple question, more than two decades of studies overwhelmingly show that not only do students who use ESAs benefit, but that the public education system itself improves as well once schools are competing to provide the best educational environments they can.
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Image Credit: Pexels
