One cannot argue with a straight face that America’s primary and secondary education system is just. Students from wealthier socioeconomic backgrounds receive better educations on average. School vouchers offer the best solution to this problem.

Historically, American public school students have been required to attend the public school to which they are assigned. Well-off families have long been able to move to more expensive neighborhoods with better public schools or pay for private school if they were unsatisfied with their neighborhood school; only disadvantaged families have had no real say in which schools their children attend. With a voucher system, all parents could send their children to any school that meets the state’s educational standards on the government’s tab. If total public education spending in the United States was kept constant, each voucher would be worth an average of just over $10,000 per student per year.

There is ample empirical evidence that school choice improves the educational outcomes for students who make use of their ability to change schools. Furthermore, these gains extend beyond the classroom. As one example, consider “School Choice, School Quality and Postsecondary Attainment,” a paper by Dartmouth economics professor Douglas Staiger, David Deming and Thomas Kane of Harvard U. and Justine Hastings of Brown U. In this paper, the authors showed that students who are given school choice in secondary school “are more likely to graduate from high school, attend a four-year college and earn a bachelor’s degree. They are about twice as likely to earn a degree from an elite institution.” Furthermore, school vouchers closed “75 percent of the black-white gap in high school graduation and 25 percent of the gap in bachelor’s degree completion.”

But what about the students who remain at their neighborhood schools? Wouldn’t students at a public school be worse off if some of their peers make use of their vouchers and attend a better school? No. In fact, quite the opposite: Even those students who continue to attend the same school benefit from greater school choice. In a paper entitled “School Choice and School Productivity,” then-Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby found that “regular public schools boosted their productivity when exposed to competition” and that “schools increased productivity by raising achievement, not by lowering spending while maintaining achievement.” Studies done in Sweden, which introduced school vouchers in 1992, have come to similar conclusions: Increased school choice increases competition among schools, which raises the quality of education provided by all schools.

While there are obviously many other issues that one can reasonably bring up when discussing the effects of school vouchers, the empirical evidence seems to suggest that none of them actually argue against school choice. University of Arkansas political scientist Patrick Wolf recently published an analysis of these issues in a paper entitled “The Comprehensive Longitudinal Evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program: Summary of Final Reports.” Wolf concluded, “Although we have examined virtually every possible way that school choice could systematically affect people, schools and neighborhoods in Milwaukee, we have found no evidence of any harmful effects of choice.”

We will not solve our education problems by throwing money at our broken system while continuing to deny poor families school choice. Over the last 40 years, total inflation-adjusted education spending per pupil in the United States has more than doubled, yet test scores have been flat. The United States spends 40 percent more per pupil, pays its public school teachers 5 to 10 percent more and offers parents less school choice than the average country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, yet ranks lower than the most of these countries on most educational rankings.

Unequal primary and secondary educational opportunities have long been an obvious problem in the United States, and school vouchers provide a significant means to reduce this inequality. The longstanding arguments against vouchers — choice doesn’t really improve students’ life outcomes and choice hurts students who remain at public schools — simply do not hold up in light of recent empirical research. It is long past time that all American primary and secondary students received the school choice they deserve.