School Choice in Washington DC

Below is an interesting video about the voucher program in Washington DC.  If you have not heard about it yet, this program allows inner city kids and their families to choose private schools over the failed local schools they would typically attend.  The government pays the student’s tuition at the private school, which is actually cheaper than the public school.

Currently, Washington DC spends about 25K per student per year for a public school education.  If you want a good example of how well that money is spent, consider that at the beginning of last year some students at the public schools did not even have textbooks. To me this inefficiency is just incredible — I mean, how difficult could it be it to plan and order the right amount of textbooks for your students?

Conversely, money spent through the voucher program is all about efficiency. This program is amazing in that not only does it give kids a better education, but it actually saves the city money.  Of course the teachers’ unions are not happy about the program, because private school teachers are not in unions, and money given to private schools endangers the jobs of public school teachers as well as the wealth and power of the union.  The voucher program  is likely to be squeezed out of existence in 2010 as a result of the political influence of teachers’ unions. Update: as of right now the program will be killed off after the current students graduate, so no new students will be allowed into the program going forward.

Here is a quick video that features students and parents asking Obama why he is canceling the program:

What I also find very interesting is where public school teachers themselves are sending their OWN children to school.  This graph shows data from 2004, representing where public school teachers from Chicago and Washtington DC  sent their own children:

What this tells us is that in both Chicago and Washington DC, the public school teachers pay to send their own kids to private schools at a much greater proportion than the general public.  Here’s a good way to think about this:  would you buy a Toyota if you knew that the factory workers who get substantial discounts to buy Toyotas still choose to buy a Honda instead?