Paul Hill, via a kind Deb Britt email:

Will this set off another round in the polarized debate over whether vouchers work? It’s an article of faith on the right that vouchers are always a good thing, and on the left that they always do harm. These extremes are silly: vouchers are simply a way of giving parents the freedom to choose, and whether students benefit depends less on the ways money flows from the government to the school than on the quality of schools available and how well informed parents are.

Vouchers apparently benefit students in localities where students can get access to well-established and effective schools, for example, Catholic schools that already had strong records of success with poor and minority students. Vouchers work a lot less well when the available schools, as in Louisiana, are not particularly coherent, well-run, or effective. To be more effective than Louisiana’s program, vouchers also have to be well-funded: those that pay a lot less than the tuition private schools charge benefit the parents who are already paying tuition but don’t do much for students who need to get out of district-run schools.