The New York Times reports that parents are happy to have a choice in schools in the Washington, DC, area, despite no immediate increase in student performance in the first year.

I find an increase in performance something that should come gradually. Parents need time to evaluate school performance and choose schools that perform better. New schools need to have their performances benchmarked in order to improve.

The article concludes with a question:

But Clive R. Belfield, an economics professor at the City University of New York who has studied voucher programs, noted the new report’s finding that of the 1,027 students who entered the Washington program in the fall of 2004, only 788 remained in it by the fall of 2006.

“That’s quite a bit of attrition,” Mr. Belfield said. “If parents are so satisfied, why have about 20 percent of the students left the program?”

That’s a question not to ask the general public but to ask the parents who left. Maybe the schools had a dress code the parents didn’t like. Maybe the school did perform worse than the public school. If that’s the case, that’s still not a failure of the voucher program. More choices to parents is always a win.