This week is National School Choice Week.  I will be participating in a panel discussion on school choice sponsored by America’s Future Foundation.  The event is on Wednesday at Natty Greene’s in Raleigh and will begin at 5:30 pm.  Be there.

Just in time for National School Choice Week, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) just published a fascinating study by Roger Gordon and Gordon Dahl, “Views among Economists: Professional Consensus or Point-Counterpoint?” Despite surveying economists with clear differences in ideology, experience, age, and field, Gordon and Dahl found that there was a great deal of consensus on many economic issues.  For example, the researchers posed the following question to the economists:

Public school students would receive a higher quality education if they all had the option of taking the government money (local, state, federal) currently being spent on their own education and turning that money into vouchers that they could use towards covering the costs of any private school or public school of their choice (e.g. charter schools).

Just under 80 percent of the sample agreed with that statement.  A question on hydraulic fracturing (also known as fracking) had the lowest percentage of agreement, 64 percent.

The bottom line is that 4 out of 5 top economists agree that public school students would receive a higher quality education if they had educational options.