RALEIGH – I’ve been an advocate for expanded parental choice in education – using tools such as vouchers and tuition tax relief – for more than two decades. I’ve debated the issue with fellow students, teachers, principals, legislators, leftists, moderates, even some conservatives and libertarians.

I haven’t changed my position much, but I have come to respect some of the arguments advanced by opponents. This short list does not include the argument that is perhaps the most revealing, and baseless, charge: that expanding access to private options, even at public expense, is a “radical” and “unproven” policy.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The more one studies the history and operation of school systems in the U.S. and around the world, the more it becomes evident that America’s modern approach towards public education is more the exception than the rule. Particularly since the collapse of communism, there are few countries in the world that rely so overwhelmingly on government-run schools to educate children as the U.S. does (and we didn’t use to). It is no accident that so many countries with a more diverse and competitive market for education generate high-school graduates who test better than American students do in core subjects (though we do lead much of the pack on questions such as “do you think you are well-educated?”)

A recent conference hosted in Washington by the Cato Institute helped to broaden the debate about education reform and call attention to promising innovations from overseas. Many European countries have long had various kinds of tax-funded private education, usually associated with an established church. I don’t like this model, for what should be obvious reasons, but it does at least guarantee that disadvantaged students who need the structure and rigor of parochial education are not excluded from it on economic grounds.

Naturally, it is much to be preferred for tax dollars to flow directly to families, who then make choices about how best to educate their children, rather than entangling the state with sectarian institutions. In the U.S., such an approach would be required to avoid First Amendment problems – and indeed the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that voucher-type choice programs do avoid religious-establishment problems, contrary to what left-wing critics contend. Fortunately, some countries have already gone this route and offer some important lessons for American reformers. They include the Netherlands in 1917, Denmark in the 1920s, parts of Canada in the 1960s, Chile in the 1980s, and Sweden (!) in the 1990s.

Moscow, by the way, now has what amounts to a voucher program, and its citizens pay a flat-rate income tax and maintain private social-security accounts. Food for thought, eh?

Here in the U.S., we also have more experience with school choice than many analysts realize. New England states have sent students to private high schools with tax dollars for more than a century. Tax-funded scholarship programs exist in Milwaukee, Cleveland, Florida, and now Washington, D.C., while tuition tax credits and deductions of various sorts exist in Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, and several Midwestern states. There are also privately funded scholarship programs in many cities, including the one the John Locke Foundation helped to found in Charlotte. These cases offer powerful early evidence that poor parents can make good choices and that these choices result in educational gains far greater than can be had from reforms such as class-size reduction or standardized testing alone.

For school-choice critics, my advice is simple. Read up on the issue more. Our subsequent debates – and I assume there will still be many – would improve greatly as a result.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.