Some education arguments last for generations because each side holds part of the truth. Three of the most heated concern who should choose a child's school, how much to rely on standardized tests, and how to teach children to read. In each, both sides claim to speak for the child, and both can cite evidence. The fair approach is to state each case as its best defenders would.

School choice

In most countries children attend the public school nearest their home. School choice policies loosen that link. In 1955 the economist Milton Friedman proposed vouchers: public funds that families can spend on tuition at a school of their choice, including private schools. Charter schools, publicly funded but run independently of the local district, began with a Minnesota law in 1991. Sweden, Chile and the Netherlands have all funded independent schools in their own ways.

The best case for choice: wealthy families already choose schools by buying homes in good districts, so choice extends to poor families a freedom the rich already have. Competition may push all schools to improve, and parents know their own children. Some evidence supports this. Studies using admission lotteries at oversubscribed Boston charter schools found large gains in test scores; because seats went by lottery, the comparison is fair.

The best case against: choice can drain money and motivated families from neighborhood schools, leaving the hardest-to-serve children behind. Private schools may screen out costly students, and public oversight is often weaker. Results also vary widely. An early study of Louisiana's statewide voucher program found that students who used vouchers did markedly worse in math. Some research suggests charters do best in cities with weak district schools and less well elsewhere. The honest summary is that choice is neither a cure nor a catastrophe; its effects depend on rules, funding and oversight.

Standardized testing

Standardized tests give the same questions under the same conditions to many students. Defenders argue that common tests reveal gaps between groups of students that local grades can hide. That is why many civil rights groups supported the testing requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2002: once schools had to report scores separately for poor, minority and disabled students, those students could no longer be ignored. Tests can also find talented students whom teachers overlook.

Critics reply that heavy stakes distort what tests measure. When a school's survival depends on scores, it may narrow the curriculum, drill test formats and drop subjects that are not tested. At the extreme, people cheat: in Atlanta, educators were convicted in 2015 after a scandal in which students' test answers were changed. The social scientist Donald Campbell warned in the 1970s that the more a number is used for social decisions, the more it will be corrupted. In 2015 Congress replaced No Child Left Behind with the Every Student Succeeds Act, which kept annual testing but returned more control to the states. Colleges have had their own debate: many dropped SAT or ACT requirements during the COVID pandemic, and several selective universities later reinstated them, arguing that scores helped them spot strong applicants from weaker schools.

The reading wars

Reading is not natural the way speaking is. Writing is a recent human invention, and children must be taught its code. Phonics teaches children to connect letters and letter patterns with the sounds they stand for, so they can decode new words. Whole language, popular from the 1970s, held that children learn to read best by immersion in meaningful books, using context and pictures to guess unknown words, much as they learned to talk.

Whole language had real strengths: love of books, rich stories and attention to meaning. But the evidence has largely favored systematic phonics for beginners. In 2000 the US National Reading Panel concluded that systematic phonics instruction significantly helps young children learn to read, alongside phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. Many schools adopted a compromise called balanced literacy, which critics say kept the guessing strategies. Phonics alone is not enough either, because comprehension depends heavily on background knowledge. In a classic 1988 study, weak readers who knew a lot about baseball understood a passage about the game better than strong readers who knew little about it.

Worked example: Mississippi's reading push

In 2013 Mississippi, long near the bottom of national rankings, passed a literacy law. It trained teachers in phonics and the science of reading, placed reading coaches in struggling schools, screened young children for reading problems, and held back third graders who could not read at a basic level, with extra help and several exemptions. On the national assessment, Mississippi's fourth grade reading scores rose from well below the national average to roughly the national average by 2019, despite high child poverty. Supporters credit the teacher training and coaching. Skeptics point to the retention policy, which removes the weakest readers from fourth grade testing for a year, and note that eighth grade gains have been smaller. Both points can be true at once. The case shows how to weigh a reform: look at more than one measure, ask what else changed, and check whether gains last as students grow older.