School choice is a boon for groups that have long been poorly served by the system

See Thomas Sowell Has Been Right From the Start:His latest book on charter schools continues his research on minority success in education by Jason Riley. Excerpt:

"In a sense today’s public charter schools, which often have predominantly low-income black and Hispanic student bodies, are successors to the high-achieving black schools that Mr. Sowell researched 40 years ago. The first part of “Charter Schools and Their Enemies” describes—in damning detail and with the empirical rigor we’ve come to expect from the author—how successful certain charter schools have been in educating poor minorities. To make sure he’s comparing apples to apples, his sample is limited to charter schools that are located in the same building with a traditional public school serving the same community.

And what’s irrefutably clear is that these charters schools are not simply doing a better job than their traditional counterparts with the same demographic groups. In many cases, inner-city charter-school students are outperforming their peers in the wealthiest and whitest suburban school districts in the country. In New York City, for example, the Success Academy charter schools have effectively closed the academic achievement gap between black and white students.

“The educational success of these charter schools undermines theories of genetic determinism, claims of cultural bias in the tests, assertions that racial ‘integration’ is necessary for blacks to reach educational parity and presumptions that income differences are among the ‘root causes’ of educational differences,” Mr. Sowell writes. “This last claim has been used for decades to absolve traditional public schools of any responsibility for educational failures in low-income minority communities.”

The point isn’t that there are no subpar charter schools—there are—but it’s clear to the author that any honest assessment of the data shows that school choice is a boon for groups that have long been poorly served by the system. It’s also clear that successful charter schools are a threat to the current power balance that allows the vested interests of adults who run public education to trump what’s best for students. As Mr. Sowell reminds us, “schools exist for the education of children. Schools do not exist to provide iron-clad jobs for teachers, billions of dollars in union dues for teachers unions, monopolies for educational bureaucracies, a guaranteed market for teachers college degrees or a captive audience for indoctrinators.”"