"School choice" is a term that obscures more than it reveals. It collapses three substantively different policies — public charter schools, inter-district open enrollment, and publicly funded private school vouchers (including tax credit scholarships and education savings accounts) — into a single rhetorical category, then attaches to that category either the language of liberation (the parent freed from a failing school) or the language of betrayal (the public system drained by privatization). The honest position requires disentangling the policies, looking at the actual studies, and accepting that the evidence is uneven, sometimes embarrassing for advocates on both sides, and rarely supportive of strong claims in either direction.
Charters, which now serve roughly 7 percent of American public school students, have been studied more rigorously than any other choice mechanism. The Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford, led by Margaret Raymond, has produced three national studies of charter performance (2009, 2013, 2023) using a virtual control match design. The findings have converged: the charter sector is heterogeneous. About a third of charters outperform comparable district schools, about a third match them, and about a third do worse. The best-performing networks — KIPP, Success Academy, Uncommon, IDEA — concentrate in urban districts serving low-income Black and Latino students and produce gains that, in the most rigorous lottery studies, are large enough to close substantial portions of the achievement gap. The worst-performing charters tend to be small, isolated, or virtual operations whose existence is harder to defend on any criterion. The average effect is roughly neutral nationally but meaningfully positive in urban subsets and modestly negative in rural and virtual subsets.
Vouchers are a different story and one that the Think Law — examine actual evidence, not preferred narrative — handles uncomfortably for many people. The first generation of voucher studies, on Milwaukee's program in the 1990s, produced mixed and methodologically contested findings. The second generation, on Washington D.C., New York, and Charlotte, found small positive effects for some subgroups and null effects for most. The third generation, on the larger statewide programs in Louisiana, Indiana, and Ohio, has produced findings that voucher proponents did not expect: significantly negative effects on math achievement in Louisiana (Mills and Wolf 2017, Abdulkadiroglu et al. 2018), negative effects in Indiana (Waddington and Berends 2018), and negative effects in Ohio (Figlio and Karbownik 2016). These are not edge cases. They are the largest, most rigorous voucher evaluations conducted in the United States, and they show that students who used vouchers to leave public schools for participating private schools performed worse than matched peers who stayed. The effects fade over time in some studies; they persist in others.
Why? The candidate explanations include regulatory selection (the private schools willing to participate in voucher programs are often the ones with declining enrollment and weaker programs), demographic mismatch (low-income students transferred into religious schools whose academic infrastructure was built for a different population), curricular gaps (private schools not aligned to state standards measured by state tests), and the simple fact that being new to any school costs a year of adjustment. The Revise Law applies: the data have moved over twenty years, and the position that vouchers reliably improve academic outcomes is no longer defensible. The position that vouchers offer some families satisfaction with the schools they have chosen, even when test scores do not improve, is defensible and is the position most honest voucher proponents have retreated to.
Open enrollment within and between districts is the quietest of the three policies and arguably the most consequential per dollar. Inter-district transfer programs — METCO, Hartford's Open Choice, St. Louis — have produced consistently positive results for participating students, with effects driven primarily by the move from high-poverty to lower-poverty schools, which is the Coleman finding restated. These programs remain small because suburban districts ration the seats they offer. Within-district open enrollment, which most large districts now permit, allows parents to choose among schools their district operates. The choice can matter, but the upside is bounded by the quality range of the district's own schools, which means the children whose district has only mediocre schools have a choice among mediocre schools.
Where does this leave the Connect Law? Choice mechanisms are partially relational and partially transactional. The parent exercising choice on behalf of a child is performing an act of care, and the act is real. The choice that delivers a child into a school that knows them, expects much of them, and connects them to peers and adults across years is a choice that matters. The choice that delivers a child into a school that takes their voucher and then under-serves them is a choice that the family pays for, often without recourse, because exit options narrow once the original district seat has been forfeited. The collective question is not whether choice is good or bad in the abstract but whether the choices on offer are real choices among schools that can actually deliver what they promise. In the absence of supply-side investment, choice is a redistribution of access to a fixed pool of good seats, not an expansion of the pool.