WILL’s Dr. Will Flanders writes at National Review online on how to win over school choice skeptics by using effective messaging and data:
School choice in the United States was once a bipartisan cause, championed by individuals as diverse as Milton Friedman and liberal Democrats in California. But in the interceding decades, support for the issue has become far more polarized. And some fear that the nationalization of the issue, as embodied by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and President Trump, may have served only to deepen this divide. Are there ways to broaden the school-choice coalition even in the current era of hyper-partisanship?
To help answer that question, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty conducted a statewide survey experiment of 1,500 Wisconsinites. Our results show that school choice is indeed popular — but also that the words used to describe it are vitally important.