One group that benefits greatly from school choice is the urban poor. For decades there
has been school choice for families that could afford it. The wealthy have always provided very
expensive private schools for their children, and middleclass families with the resources have
moved to neighborhoods that offered the best schools. But the poor, often in urban areas, have
had no other option than to send their children to under performing and sometimes even
dangerous public schools. Through school choice initiatives poor families have been given the
same opportunities to send their children to safer and better performing schools which others
have enjoyed for many years. In addition to the urban poor, other often overlooked groups can
greatly benefit from a system that allows individual schools to focus on gifted, special education,
or teen pregnancy programs (Chub). It’s clear that choices in schools allow a custom fit of
education solutions for every type of student.
School choice represents change and there will always be those that resist change stand to
gain from a return to the old system. One of the most active opponents to school choice is the
National Education Association. Representing public education professionals, the NEA is the
largest labor union in the US and boasts over 3.2 million members (NEA). The NEA benefits
from keeping status quo and exercising strong political power. At stake are changes in job
performance accountability, and the loss of union jobs a result of non-unionized schools. The
positions the NEA has taken on other issues have often been criticized as favoring the labor
interests of its members rather than what’s best for students. One of the programs the NEA has
been most vocal against has been school vouchers, contending that vouchers amount to
government funding of religious based schools. On the contrary, citizens are allowed to retain a
portion of their tax dollars that would have been spent on local public school funding and apply
it to a school of their choosing. It is the citizen, not the government that selects and contributes to