Learning as We Go

Why haven't schools of choice yet achieved a broader appeal? Choice opens up what our public education system now holds tight, allowing innovations in curriculum and other aspects of instruction that are not now possible. Thus, choice is a necessary if not sufficient condition for needed innovations in curriculum, methods, use of time, and human resources. Publicly funded school choice programs--charter schools in forty-three states and vouchers in a few localities--have for the most part been qualified successes; along with many mixed results, some have in fact been more dramatic successes. Yet the rhetoric of choice supporters promised much more effective schools and an era of innovation that has not come to pass. Is there something wrong with the theories behind the choice movement? Paul T. Hill answers this question with an emphatic no. In Learning as We Go: Why School Choice Is Worth the Wait, he examines why continuous improvement that school choice was supposed to introduce to public education has been so slow to occur.