> * According to the study, many parents (19%) turned down the vouchers they received after their students were accepted to public charter schools. It seems like parents are showing a strong preference for charter schools over private schools. IMO, this warrants further investigation into the funding of public charter schools instead of public funding of private education.
Umm, why should the preferences of 20% be a reason to exclude an option prefered by 80%?
Fortunately, we don't have to make either group unhappy.
We can have both public charter and vouchers for private schools. If the money goes with the kid, both will get funding proportional to the demand. I suspect many of the parents who weren't offered the choice would go for one of those two options and DC has a lot of students. So I believe that we can have "enough" public charters and enough private schools in the DC area.
That 19% represents some subset of the people that received vouchers but didn't use them AND said that the reason they didn't accept the voucher was because their kid got accepted into a charter school. The "other 80%" also didn't use the voucher, for some other reason. We can't use this statistic to say that 20% of people prefer charter schools and 80% prefer private schools. In particular, we don't know how many people sent their kids to private schools without applying for charter schools, and we don't know how many people applied to charter schools without accepting private school vouchers.
The definition of the population wasn't clear in the quote. Note that the actual definition doesn't support the "more public charters" conclusion because the breakdown of the turn downs tells us nothing about the relative number of accepts and turn downs. (Of course, the preferences of the "turn downs" are likely to be at odds with the preferences of the folks who accepted.)
Still, the fact that 20% of the folks who turned down vouchers did so because their kids got into public charters doesn't imply that we shouldn't have vouchers.
I happen to think that we should have more public charters. Since vouchers can let parents choose public charter schools for their kids....
Umm, why should the preferences of 20% be a reason to exclude an option prefered by 80%?
Fortunately, we don't have to make either group unhappy. We can have both public charter and vouchers for private schools. If the money goes with the kid, both will get funding proportional to the demand. I suspect many of the parents who weren't offered the choice would go for one of those two options and DC has a lot of students. So I believe that we can have "enough" public charters and enough private schools in the DC area.