The white paper “North Carolina Opportunity Scholarships: Countering a Flawed Duke Report,” developed by Brian Jodice of Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina, is not only a victory for scholarship choice programs but for honesty in research — which, when it comes to school choice issues, is often negatively skewed in both its construction and execution.
Jodice’s paper delineates the fundamental problems with the Duke report and other studies evaluating school scholarship initiatives like the recently-published negative assessment of the North Carolina Opportunity Scholarship Program. The Duke report and others like it are inherently flawed because they inaccurately depict students who participate in school choice programs as performing below expectations just because they have not skyrocketed to the top of the class during their first year in the program.
