"School Choice, No Radical Idea"

John Locke Foundation School Choice, No Radical Idea: "There's nothing perfect about choice-based systems. Some students still fail to learn. Some teachers and schools survive despite lackluster performance. But you don't compare policy proposals to some perfect abstraction. You compare them to the real-world alternatives, which in North Carolina remain unacceptably mediocre and paltry. More than half of our African-American students fail to graduate from public high schools. And many of our graduates, whatever their race, are not really prepared for college, the workplace, or citizenship.

The value of customer choice, the virtue of competition, and the importance of individual responsibility are present in virtually every field of human endeavor. What is truly radical is to suggest that these principles should not also come into play in performing one of our most important tasks: teaching our children when they need to know to survive and succeed."