Despite the growing calls for school reform, a recent report released in Sacramento finds that school choice is already a reality for many families, and that student performance in such programs does not markedly improve. However, evidence throughout the nation suggests the report’s authors are just plain wrong.

The study is the work of Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), a think-tank whose board of directors includes a long list of education establishment figures, including the President of the California Federation of Teachers and Governor Davis’s Secretary of Education.

Authors Bruce Fuller and Luis Huerta assert that one in four students nationwide no longer attends their neighborhood school, and that “despite this steady exodus, bottom-line effects on children’s learning remain doubtful.”

According to the report, “seven million children are entering alternative programs that did not exist a generation ago, such as charter schools.” What’s more, two million new families enter public-school choice programs each year, through open-enrollment or by way of charters or magnet schools. Fuller, a professor at UC Berkeley, charges, “anybody who claims there is a public school monopoly is 20 years behind.”

Despite Dr. Fuller’s assertion, one might ask what happened to the more than 75 percent of children who still attend their neighborhood school? Many of these children remain in poor- performing schools because they have no other choice.

Open-enrollment, charters, and magnet schools are a hit with predominantly white, middle-class families. Unfortunately, if you are a poor, minority student in an under-performing urban school, there are simply fewer options. For example, in 1998, out of 682 schools in the Los Angeles School District, less than two percent were charters. Middle-class and more affluent families can “vote with their feet,” moving to suburban districts where they can take advantage of more open-enrollment plans, charters, and magnet schools. Poor children do not have that luxury.

The PACE report looks at school choice primarily in terms of programs operating in the public-sector. Across the country, however, several private-sector choice and opportunity scholarship programs have had positive results. In New York, 1.25 million children applied for 40,000 slots in a scholarship program operated by philanthropist Ted Forstmann. These families were still willing to pay $1,000 annually in order to give their children a shot at a better education.

Unfortunately, interest groups and legislators in California have often denied low-income families the same opportunities that Mr. Forstmann and many others seek to provide. In 1993, teachers unions and other interest groups spent close to $20 million in order to defeat a school choice measure that appeared on the ballot. When Governor Wilson endorsed similar opportunity scholarship legislation, it fell on deaf ears in the Legislature. The state’s charter schools have had to fight an uphill battle against union-meddling as well, including a slate of anti-charter bills this session.

The most spurious of the report’s conclusions is that “in only one carefully-run voucher experiment in New York City is there evidence that children are performing at higher levels.” Evidence from the country’s two most prominent voucher experiments in Milwaukee and Cleveland strongly refutes PACE’s claims.

While both plans have been repeatedly challenged in court by the education establishment, enrolled students have performed better than their counterparts in public school. According to Harvard Professor Paul Peterson, Milwaukee, whose program has expanded from a few hundred students to 8,000 since it was implemented in 1991, has experienced strong gains among its choice students. Students who stay in the program four years, see their math scores increase by more than ten percent against their counterparts in public school. Reading scores are up nearly six percent.

In Cleveland, the results are even more pronounced. According to Peterson, after just two years, choice students gained seven points against the national norm in reading, and 15 points in math. The bulk of these improvements occurred during the first year.

California and other states across the country should learn from the positive experiences in Milwaukee and Cleveland, and from programs like Theodore Forstmann’s and John Walton’s in New York, Washington, D.C., and other urban cities throughout the nation. While PACE and others defend the status quo, choice, opportunity, and the promise of a better education must be expanded to low-income families nationwide.

Thomas Dawson is a Policy Fellow at the San Francisco-based Pacific Research Institute. He can be reached via email at tdawson@pacificresearch.org.