The Washington Post’s Campaign Against School Choice

​Does The Washington Post truly mistake correlation for causation?
 
The Post recently offered a heart-rending profile of tearful teachers celebrating bittersweet memories as the John R. Davis Elementary School in Phoenix shut its doors for good. This sad moment was presented as an example of how school closures are “a response to enrollment declines as the state [Arizona] offers unprecedented taxpayer funding for alternatives to public school.”
 
In this recent feature piece, The Post linked the closure of one-third of schools in the Roosevelt Elementary School District in Phoenix, like Davis Elementary, to declining attendance caused by school choice. The piece specifically blamed the participation of students in the state’s school voucher program under its Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESAs) for shuttered public schools.
 
Thankfully, Brittany Bernstein of National Review dug into this story and found that of the 8,500 students who have left the district, only 102 went to a private school under the ESA. Where did the other 8,398 flee to?
 
“The rest have enrolled in public schools not operated by Roosevelt,” Bernstein writes. “It’s not hard to figure out why parents are pulling their kids out of Roosevelt schools en masse: Just 10 percent of students in the district scored proficient in math and just 17 percent scored proficient in reading on the 2024 state tests.”
 
As we’ve reported before, far from degrading public schools, school choice improves them. Randomized control trials of voucher programs found moderate evidence of improvement in academic achievement from private school vouchers – a welcome result given America’s persistently mediocre place in international school rankings. Moreover, out of 28 studies that explored the causal relationship between school choice and the performance of public schools, 25 found that school choice improves educational attainment in traditional school systems.
 
It is evidence-based results like these that show that competition benefits schools and elevates the student experience. That is why 18 states have embraced some form of universal school choice. The momentum behind this policy juggernaut is coming from parents who want to choose schools equal to their ambitions for their children, and respectful of the values they want to express across the generations. That is why Protect The 1st sees school choice as a quintessential First Amendment issue.
 
It is easy to see why parents love school choice. It is harder to understand why so much of the legacy media clings to old narratives based on shoddy evidence.

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