By Fred Hiatt  | Washington Post - Post Partisan | March 11, 2010

Here’s what I don’t understand about the opponents of school reform, including their most recent convert, pro-reformer turned anti-reformer Diane Ravitch. What do they have against letting poor parents have options, just as all other parents have?

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this week, Ravitch explains that she has turned against charter schools because their “promise has not been fulfilled. Most studies of charter schools acknowledge that they vary widely in quality.” Given “the weight of studies, evaluations and federal test data,” she concludes that charters and deregulation aren’t the answer.

But what about the weight of what parents want? In Harlem, thousands of desperate parents every year apply on their children’s behalf to charter schools and are turned away. They don’t want their children in failing public schools. They can’t afford private schools, and they can’t afford to move to suburbs with better public schools. And there aren’t enough places in the charters — in large part because the teachers unions and their allies in the New York state legislature have imposed so many restrictions on their establishment.

In Washington, we’ve seen a similar phenomenon — many more parents every year desperate to win scholarships for their children in a program that, as Kelly Amis and Joseph E. Robert wrote in The Post on Monday, the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress are on the verge of killing. Why the over-subscription? Because in the neighborhoods where these parents live, vouchers may be the only option to give their kids a safe and effective education.

Now, I fully accept that some poor parents will make misguided choices on their children’s behalf, just as some middle-class parents undoubtedly do. And I agree that some charter schools are bad and some charter schools are good. We should take seriously “the weight of studies, evaluations and federal test data” to keep learning more about what works and what doesn’t work. We should keep trying to improve traditional public schools, as Joel Klein in New York and Michelle Rhee in Washington are doing. Katrina vanden Heuvel surely is right, as she argued here Tuesday, that ending child poverty is the ultimate answer.

But in the meantime, is it right to tell parents stuck in dangerous schools that they just have to wait for, as vanden Heuvel calls it, that “fundamental change in the way America’s poor are treated in every aspect of their lives?” That they should take heart, because maybe Klein’s and Rhee’s hard work will pay off in time for the next cohort of children? Middle-class parents don’t have to wait; they have options. The evidence is incontrovertible that poor parents want options, too — today. Why would we take those away?

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2010/03/why_take_school_choice.html