School Choice: Polluting Our Planet?
A new study published in Environment Science and Technology analyzes the environmental impact of school choice policies in St. Paul, Minn. The authors found that eliminating school choice would lower emissions rates 3 to 8 times and curb the "significant environmental consequences" of providing more educational opportunities for children.
The authors arrive at their conclusion by analyzing the travel patterns for 803 survey respondents and then applied those findings to the entire St. Paul school district. Students attending the school assigned to them by the state were more likely to walk or have a short commute to school. Students participating in schools of choice programs, however, traveled on average a longer distance to school and thus contributed to the emission of more pollutants into the atmosphere.
Fortunately, school choice programs can offset these "significant environmental consequences" with significant educational consequences. Nine out of 10 scientific studies link school choice programs to higher student achievement. In fact, a brand new study of the Milwaukee voucher system, which operates on less than half the per-pupil funding of Milwaukee Public Schools, found that participating students are 12 percent more likely to graduate than nonparticipating ones.
The study of St. Paul did not analyze the environmental impact of homeschoolers.
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Vehicle Emissions during Children’s School Commuting: Impacts of Education
Three pages of this six-page paper are given to a statistical analysis reaching two unremarkable conclusions:
(1) Magnet/"choice" schools are not usually the closest to home.
(2) Children who travel further to school are (a) less likely to walk [or bike] and (b) on average use more fuel for transportation.
Another page "analyzes" the consequent costs of school choice in dollars and vehicle emissions. The rest of this intellectually sloppy exercise - the introduction, conclusion, and incidental comments throughout - make clear that this is agenda-driven "research", motivated by a desire to show that school choice is harmful to school budgets (because of all that transportation) and the environment (because of all that pollution) and to child health (because they miss the exercise of walking to school) - in other words, harmful by whatever arguments we can make.
At least the authors acknowledge that "Because we focus on environmental impacts [or whatever arguments we can think of?], we do not evaluate here the advantages cited by school choice advocates ..." However, they fail to mention that the logical conclusion of their work argues for home schooling.
And I can't help wondering if any of the authors, or those who cite their "research", used the same arguments against school busing for "racial balance". Why do I doubt it?