Editor's note: Here's another selection of "choice nuggets," a feature we started last week to keep some smaller but still blogworthy items from going to the compost heap. 

Are vouchers too popular, or not popular enough?

For years, school choice critics have posited that vouchers and tax-credit scholarships will open the floodgates for a mass exodus from public schools. So it was a bit of a monkey shock last week to read Diane Ravitch belittling Louisiana’s new voucher program because, in her view, too few students had applied.

“Not exactly a stampede for the exits,” Ravitch wrote. “No big rush to enroll in the little church schools that are supposedly better than the public schools … ”

According to published reports, about 9,000 students applied for vouchers, not counting those already enrolled in the voucher program in New Orleans. Sounds like a lot of people to me. But if it’s obvious that only a small percentage of parents will opt for private schools (because, truth be told, most parents are satisfied with their public schools) then why are critics so upset? Doesn’t that undermine the argument that school choice is a Trojan Horse for profiteers?

Ravitch ends her piece by suggesting Louisiana officials puffed up the application numbers. “As usual,” she concluded, “they were playing the media for headlines.”

Two days later, the Washington Post’s “Answer Sheet” blog ran Ravitch’s piece in full.

A tale of two reports

Two national reports released in the last week purported to offer some gauge of academic progress in Florida’s public schools. One relied on apparently undisclosed measures to determine that Florida’s educational ranking dropped from No. 35 to No. 42 in the past year. The other tracked nearly 20 years of scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress to conclude that Florida students have made more progress than their peers in every state but one.

Guess which report got more play? (more…)