Giving Compass' Take:

· Writing for The Heritage Foundation, Lindsey Burke discusses the school choice movement, how policymakers are affecting it with regulation, and the opportunities it provides for students.  

· What new opportunities does school choice provide students? How does it affect student success? 

· Learn about what the public thinks about school choice. 

What is the measure of a good school? And who is best positioned to decide what works?

For decades, policymakers, and education officials have attempted to bolster school “accountability” by increasing regulations on schools across the board—public, charter, and private. They have tried to do so at the federal level for half a century, with federal intervention in K-12 education hitting a high-water mark under the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind policy and the Obama administration’s attempts to pressure states into adopting Common Core..

Yet ever-increasing government intervention in schooling has had little positive impact on education outcomes writ large. Math and reading achievement outcomes have been largely stagnant since the 1970s for high school seniors, while graduation rates have seen only modest improvements (and even those figures may be artificially inflated).

About one-third of high school graduates have to take remedial courses in college, one-third of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, and 20 percent of high school graduates who want to join the Army cannot do so because they cannot pass the Armed Forces Qualification Test.

It’s no surprise, then, that families have been looking for alternatives to geographically-assigned district schools. Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia have begun to offer alternatives, enacting private school choice options such as vouchers, tax-credit scholarships, and education savings accounts.

Read the full article about school choice and regulation by Lindsey Burke at The Heritage Foundation.