You can believe in choice because you believe in competition, or because you believe in freedom. You can believe in it because you think the market has amazing power to generate opportunity where capital and the will of free people are available. Though valid and true, I don’t care about any of this, and I think it’s important for the movement as a whole to grow beyond these arguments, which have sustained us but which have not made us full. Right now across this country, there are hundreds of thousands of children dying a civic death in the nation’s worst schools. In some places, those schools are among the most expensive not just in the country, but in the world, like in Camden where, for 13,000 students, we’re spending $360 million this year – that’s over $27,000 per student. For that, Camden students get the state’s two worst high schools and five middle schools that have failed for the last eight years in a row. They get schools no one would ever send their children to if they had a chance to go someplace else.
Derrell Bradford of E3 in the feature story of the School Choice Advocate.
