9:05 | Andrew J. Coulson - The Detroit Free Press is reporting that president Obama will "encourage students to serve their country by committing to at least finishing high school." Maybe that exhortation will help. I hope it does. But if the president is looking for practical policies that could achieve his goal, he might want to look at the work of U of Chicago economist Derek Neal and others, who have shown that private schools raise graduation rates of urban minority students (those most at risk of dropping out) by very substantial margins.
Private school choice programs can't constitutionally be enacted at the federal level, but the president could throw his support behind state-level programs like education tax credits. It would do a lot of good. |
