School choice means giving parents the power and opportunity to choose the school their child will attend. Traditionally, children are assigned to a public school according to where they live, regardless of the school’s performance. Children living in poor neighborhoods are often forced to attend the worst schools, perpetuating the cycle of poverty and destitution. School choice means better educational opportunity, because it uses the dynamics of consumer opportunity and provider competition to drive service quality. This principle is found anywhere you look, from cars to colleges and universities, but it’s largely absent in our public school system, and the poor results are clear. School choice programs foster parental involvement and high expectations by giving parents the option to educate their children as they see fit. It re-asserts the rights of the parent and the best interests of the child over the convenience of the system, injects accountability and quality into the system and provides educational opportunity where none existed before.

In 2002, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris that voucher programs do not violate the US Constitution, even when participating schools are overwhelmingly religious. Since then, six states – Colorado, Florida, Maine, Ohio, Vermont and Wisconsin – and the District of Columbia have adopted programs that allow students to use state or district-funded scholarships to attend a private school of their parents’choice. Forty states and the District of Columbia have enacted Charter School laws, and fifteen states guarantee public school choice within or between districts. Many other policies have been implemented by states that offer parents educational choices for their children.

School choice works. The National Center for Education Statistics found that parents of students in private schools or public schools of choice were more likely to say they were “very satisfied” with their children’s schools, teachers, academic standards, and order and discipline than were parents of students attending a public school to which they had been assigned.

Whether it’s home-schooling, public charter schools or vouchers, American Values supports any policy or program that takes children’s educational decisions out of the hands of the federal government and puts them into the hands of their parents.