News Release

July 31, 2003

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Cato Expert Comments on N.Y.C. School Failures
Cato education experts available to comment

Experts from the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom are available to discuss today's New York Times report that "growing numbers of academically weak students are being pushed out of New York City's school system so that their failure to graduate won't tarnish schools' statistics."

In a statement released this morning, David Salisbury, director of Cato's Center for Educational Freedom, said:

"The steadily increasing number of students being 'pushed out' of public high schools is another indication of the intellectual bankruptcy of our public educational system. Apparently, some bureaucrats would rather ruin a child's life in the name of improving self-serving statistics than admit that their schools deserve a failing grade.

"The problem of 'push outs' is not new, as admitted in the article, but has grown as public attention on school failure has increased. Rather than an indictment of the No Child Left Behind act, which requires that schools show results, this is an indictment of a bureaucratic and inflexible public school system that forces children to stay in bad schools for far too long. The solution would be to give families greater choices of schools right from the start, including private schools, through vouchers or tax credits. That way, if a child isn't learning, he or she can switch to a school that offers a different approach.

"Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld vouchers as a constitutional means of giving families school choice, citizens and politicians should embrace school choice as a way to provide greater educational options and opportunities for all children."

The history of the struggle for school choice is richly documented in Clint Bolick's "Voucher Wars," published by the Cato Institute. The book documents the twelve-year fight from the first urban school choice program in 1990, to the 2002 Supreme Court decision establishing the constitutionality of voucher programs.