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That 19% represents some subset of the people that received vouchers but didn't use them AND said that the reason they didn't accept the voucher was because the
by briansmith 18y ago
That 19% represents some subset of the people that received vouchers but didn't use them AND said that the reason they didn't accept the voucher was because their kid got accepted into a charter school. The "other 80%" also didn't use the voucher, for some other reason. We can't use this statistic to say that 20% of people prefer charter schools and 80% prefer private schools. In particular, we don't know how many people sent their kids to private schools without applying for charter schools, and we don't know how many people applied to charter schools without accepting private school vouchers.
- anamax 18y agoThe definition of the population wasn't clear in the quote. Note that the actual definition doesn't support the "more public charters" conclusion because the breakdown of the turn downs tells us nothing about the relative number of accepts and turn downs. (Of course, the preferences of the "turn downs" are likely to be at odds with the preferences of the folks who accepted.) Still, the fact that 20% of the folks who turned down vouchers did so because their kids got into public charters doesn't imply that we shouldn't have vouchers. I happen to think that we should have more public charters. Since vouchers can let parents choose public charter schools for their kids....