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Obama’s Education Fibs

Jason L. Riley, Wall Street Journal

Sadly, people in the U.S. and abroad have become accustomed to the fact that President Obama stretches the truth with some regularity, whether the topic is his health-care law, the terror attacks in Benghazi or “red lines” in Syria. In his interview with Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly on Sunday, the president offered up another whopper.

Asked by Mr. O’Reilly why he opposed school vouchers that “level the playing field” and “give poor people a chance to go to better schools,” the president replied, “Actually, every study that’s been done on school vouchers, Bill, says that it has very limited impact if any.”

Mr. Obama said that the means-tested voucher programs in Milwaukee and Washington, D.C, “didn’t actually make that much of a difference,” and added, “As a general proposition, vouchers have not significantly improved the performance of kids that are in these poorest communities.”

In fact, study after study using gold-standard random-assignment methodology has shown that vouchers not only improve student outcomes but have the biggest impact on low-income minorities. Here’s a sampling:

A 2013 study by Matthew Chingos of the Brookings Institution and Paul E. Peterson of Harvard found that school vouchers boost college enrollment for blacks by 24%. A 2006 evaluation of a school choice program in Dayton, Ohio, found that “after two years, black voucher students had combined reading and math scores 6.5 percentile points higher than the control group.” A 2010 study in the Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics found that voucher recipients had math scores 5 points higher than the control group after just one year. A 2008 study of vouchers in Charlotte, N.C., found that “after one year, voucher students had reading scores 8 percentile points higher than the control group and math scores 7 points higher.”

What about the voucher programs in Milwaukee and Washington that Mr. Obama dismissed as ineffective? A 1998 Brookings Institution study found that “After four years, voucher students had reading scores 6 Normal Curve Equivalent (NCE) points higher than the control group, and math scores 11 points higher. NCE points are similar to percentile points.” And the Obama administration itself released a report on the D.C. voucher program in 2010. “The students offered vouchers graduated from high school at a rate 12 percentage points higher (82 percent) than students in the control group (70 percent), an impact that was statistically significant at the highest level,” according to a summary. “Students in three of six subgroups tested showed significant reading gains because of the voucher offer after four or more years.”

According to the president, these studies don’t exist. Nevertheless, the non-existent reports and summaries I quote above can be found on the website of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice at http://www.edchoice.org/Research/Gold-Standard-Studies. The preponderance of evidence shows clear benefits for students who receive school vouchers—whether the measure is test scores, graduation rates or life outcomes. The research is not mixed or inconclusive.

Mr. Obama’s problem with vouchers is not that they don’t work. Rather, it’s that they work all too well and thus present a threat to the education status quo and the teachers unions who control it. Democrats like Mr. Obama are deeply dependent on union support–so dependent that they will sometimes tell bald-faced lies about school-choice research on national television and hope that no one notices.