FreedomWorks Chairman Dick Armey and Kitchen Tables Patriots co-founder Ana Puig have written an oped at Forbes.com today, urging Pennsylvania lawmakers to put education choices in the hands of parents rather than bureacrats.

It's Time For School Choice In Pennsylvania

Dick Armey and Ana Puig, 02.08.11, 03:45 PM EST

School choice puts education back in the hands of parents, where it belongs.

The plight of children in failing schools, particularly minority students in low-income districts, has rightly been called "the civil rights issue of the 21st century." The opponents of school choice have become the anti-reformers of today, sometimes with startling honesty.

William Penn School District Board President Charlotte Hummel actually compared herself to infamous segregationist George Wallace. She told The Philadelphia Inquirer recently that, "I will be standing in the schoolhouse door" to block vouchers, an allusion to the former Alabama governor who stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama in 1963 to protest integration.

Remarkably Hummel is fighting to block reforms that would improve a public school system that simply does not provide a quality education for all of our children. Over the past 10 years enrollment in Pennsylvania public schools has declined, while spending and staff have grown by leaps and bounds. According to the Commonwealth Foundation, taxpayers now spend an outrageous $14,420 per pupil each year, while at the same time student performance has stagnated.

Jan. 23 to Jan. 29 was National School Choice Week, when advocates rallied across the nation to shine a spotlight on effective education options for our children. We had an opportunity to see how school choice programs have revived failing education systems across the country. It also challenged Pennsylvanians to answer why we haven't helped our children break out of failing schools and given them the opportunity to succeed.

In other areas with struggling schools, voucher programs, like the one recently proposed for Pennsylvania by State Sen. Anthony Williams, have helped revitalize the education systems. They've also been the catalyst of major reforms by creating competition in the education marketplace and forcing public schools to expect more from teachers and staff.

The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, established in 1990, is the nation's oldest example of school choice. A study released this month by Dr. John Warren of the University of Minnesota found that students in the MPCP had an 82% graduation rate in 2009, compared with 70% in Milwaukee Public Schools. MPCP ranked higher than MPS in graduation rate in six of the seven years in the study. A report from the University of Arkansas estimated that MPCP saved taxpayers $37.2 million in 2009, because the size of the voucher is significantly smaller than per-pupil spending in MPS.

A review of empirical studies by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice found that, out of 17 studies examining how vouchers affect academic achievement in public schools, 16 showed improvement. None showed that vouchers harm public schools. The review found that "every empirical study ever conducted in Milwaukee, Florida, Ohio, Texas, Maine and Vermont finds that voucher programs in those places improved public school."

School voucher programs have also produced less tangible, but equally significant, results. In Washington, D.C., the young Opportunity Scholarship Program "significantly improved students' chances of graduating from high school," according to the Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. Both parents and students reported higher satisfaction and rated schools safer if the student was offered an OSP scholarship.

Click here to read the full story at Forbes.com