What is (and is not) the central argument for school choice?

I guess I'm the opposite of many politicians: I favor school choice, yet I send my own kids to the public schools of an urban school district.  I like the idea of attending and supporting a neighborhood school, and it helps that our neighborhood school is a good one.  But not all parents have the same experience with neighborhood schools, and not all neighborhood schools approach education in a way that reflects the values and priorities of all parents.   School choice should be contingent on our commitment to family empowerment, not contingent on charter or private schools having higher test scores than neighborhood schools.

Charles Murray makes the point well in today’s New York Times, discussing the results of a new study showing that students participating in Milwaukee’s school choice program had similar levels of achievement as the rest of the public school students.  He explains:

As an advocate of school choice, all I can say is thank heavens for the Milwaukee results. Here’s why: If my fellow supporters of charter schools and vouchers can finally be pushed off their obsession with test scores, maybe we can focus on the real reason that school choice is a good idea. Schools differ in what they teach and how they teach it, and parents care deeply about both, regardless of whether test scores rise. 

I am not confident that we will be able to move the focus beyond test scores in the foreseeable future.  It seems as though we cannot agree on much in terms of the prudent objectives of education, and so test scores, as the lowest common denominator, are now threatening to become the whole equation.  (I have no idea if that analogy even makes sense — I have always been horrible in math, perhaps because of my own public school’s failings.)  Just as we’re going to be seeing an increased emphasis on outcome assessment in legal education, it seems to me that our obsession with outcomes — particularly easily assessed outcomes, like test scores – is going to be driving the train for quite some time in all levels of education.  If that’s true, it may not bode well for school choice.  (Even here in Minneapolis, where school choice has long found fertile ground, we’re showing signs of “charter school fatigue.”)