When it comes right down to it, most arguments against parental choice in education boil down to the assumption that parents lack the capacity and information necessary to make good choices on behalf of their children.

Choice opponents can fudge and finagle all they want, but that’s really the position they are advancing. Faced with two sets of data – huge parental demand for charter schools on one hand and some studies questioning the effects of charters on student achievement on the other – the opponents prefer to trust the studies. They don’t trust that the parents know what’s best for their children.

By making this observation, I don’t mean to impugn the motives of school-choice opponents. For one thing, I’d be the first to recognize the value of empirical research in forming opinions about policy alternatives (although in the case of North Carolina charter schools the opponents of choice do not seem to have read widely enough). Furthermore, there is nothing inherently implausible about the proposition that some, perhaps many, parents have difficulty evaluating the value of the education their children receive.

But it really is a stretch to assert that most parents aren’t up to the task of choosing schools wisely. Parents obviously have the strongest-possible incentives to make good decisions on behalf of their children. They have specific information about specific children that educators and politicians, regardless of their intelligence and intentions, simply do not and cannot have. Every day, parents make critical decisions about their children’s future – diet, behavior, friends, neighborhood, travel, medical care, etc. If most parents are incapable of evaluating educational quality, why do we let them choose their children’s physicians? Information about the quality of medical care is less available to the layman than information about schools.

As it happens, we don’t need to guess at whether parents can, on balance, make good decisions about their children’s education. Parents already make such decisions routinely:

• Many families make use of day-care services and therefore decide where their preschool children spend hundreds of days each year. Sometimes these decisions determine which providers will pocket day-care vouchers from the government, just as choice plans do in K-12 education.
  
  
• Many families decide among a wide variety of colleges and universities, with government grants and subsidized loans in the balance.
  
  
• Many families shop among competing providers for after-school and extracurricular offerings in such areas as music, dance, team sports, gymnastics, and swimming. This is a major segment of the market for education and training, and it lies mostly outside of government support and control.

I provide these examples to explain why it is less reasonable to doubt parental capabilities than it is to put faith in them. Does anyone really believe that K-12 education is so different from preschool, higher education, and after-school education that it operates under a unique set of conditions and incentives?

To the extent that parents lack specific information about school quality, it is more likely that the cause-and-effect works in the opposite direction. That is, if parents are effectively limited in their choices – because the government takes thousands of dollars from them in taxes to support public schools to which students are involuntarily assigned – then the cost of obtaining information about education quality exceeds the benefit of knowing it. They can’t act on the information, which also means they can’t learn through experience.

There’s actually pretty good evidence that when parents obtain more educational choice, they become more informed about educational quality and outcomes. In other words, if you worry that parents don’t know what they need to know about schools, the solution is not to deprive them of choice but to extend it to them as soon as possible. As we used to say in 4-H, it’s best to learn by doing.

John Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation, which -- like Grassroot Institute of Hawaii -- is a member of State Policy Network.