The MSBA on Parental Choice

The MSBA is blogging away … telling us about the successes of public schools in Missouri, right? Well, not quite. Their latest post smears the Show-Me Institute and a few other organizations, cites some studies that fail to find benefits of private schools (for Justin Hauke’s criticism of one such study, click here), and comments:

MSBA and Missouri’s Education Roundtable strongly oppose voucher schemes such as tuition tax credits because they divert precious resources from our public schools and subsidize private schools that are not accountable to the public.

I hope the MSBA will show us some evidence that traditional public schools use resources well or are accountable to the public. When I looked through this week’s education headlines in search of public school accountability, I found this story about the St. Louis Public Schools. The district can’t even explain the education jargon in its new plan, let alone get parents to support it.

But the disaster in St. Louis isn’t even mentioned in the MSBA post, which they categorized under the heading "Religion." Huh? Apparently in the eyes of the MSBA, traditional public school success is a revealed truth that needn’t be backed up with empirical evidence.