In the wake of yesterday's Supreme Court ruling in favor of school vouchers, The Washington Post and USA Today have duplicitous articles on the topic. The Post claims "polls show that Americans remain skeptical, if not hostile, toward vouchers..." The article cites not polling data, however, but results from three failed school voucher votes, one in Michigan and two in California, where the government school lobby outspent choice advocates by margins of 6 to 1 or greater, mobilized their members to canvas neighborhoods, and ran massive advertising campaigns falsely claiming that vouchers would drain money from government schools (the reality is that when a child opts out of the system, the school gets to keep a significant chunk of his subsidy).

Had the Post reporter been interested in reporting actual polling results, he might have used data from a poll conducted just last week of 600 Michigan voters by an independent polling agency. This poll found that 44% favor a Cleveland-style voucher program for their state, 48% favor giving a tax rebate to parents who send their children to private schools, and 56% favor doing the same for charitable school choice efforts. Two-thirds favor a tax credit for scholarships enabling parents to choose the private or public school of their choice. This in a union-dominated state, after an ugly and dishonest campaign by state teachers unions against a voucher initiative.

This isn't an isolated data point. When questions are asked in an honest fashion (see the poll link above for examples) so that vouchers are explained to the respondent (the Post's own May 2000 survey found that 44 percent of respondents don't know what a voucher is), majorities or large minorities of Americans favor school choice. In fact, this result has been so frustrating to the government school lobby and its shills that they have resorted to asking misleading questions designed to elicit a negative response, as highly respected social science professor Terry Moe makes clear in this report.

USA Today is a little better than the Post in that it cites an actual poll, but in typical style it fails to provide the question that was asked of respondents. What's more, it only reports the percentage of respondents opposed (54%) to "vouchers for low-income families" (leaving the alert reader to wonder whether respondents were asked a question that caused them to conflate this with welfare). Thus we don't know if the undecideds were 2% or 20%, and therefore the corresponding percentage of supporters. If 40% of respondents in fact support vouchers, it suddenly becomes harder for the reporters to claim that "Americans aren't sold on such programs to improve education."

The most shameful part of the USA Today article, however, is this paragraph:

"There are competing claims about the value of private-school vouchers and whether they would hurt or help public schools. A U.S. General Accounting Office report last year said studies have found little or no difference in academic achievement between voucher and public school students."

A reader expecting a balanced treatment goes to the next paragraph looking for results of studies showing that vouchers do in fact improve educational results, an expectation primed by the lead of the preceding paragraph ("There are competing claims..."). Fat chance -- the reporters don't provide such results, despite their abundance. In this they take a page from the NEA handbook; its website reports "the facts" about school choice, but conveniently omits academic studies from Harvard and other places demonstrating significant improvements in student achievement associated with school choice programs.

Of course the polling debate is a misleading frame; this is an issue of parental rights. The question is simple: should parents have the right to choose where and by whom their children are educated? It's amazing how people who get bent out of shape over the denial of choice in any other sphere of life suddenly forget what the word means when the conversation turns to schools.

But let's suppose, for a moment, that The Post and USA Today and the NEA and other government school champions are right, that Americans oppose school vouchers. Well, as a clever columnist for National Review Online noted, there can't be any harm in offering them, can there? If it is true that most parents don't want the option to take their children out of government schools, then the teachers unions should welcome such an option with open arms, as definitive proof that the vast majority of their customers support them, right?

Don't count on it.