When it comes to educational options, there are sundry open doors available to the nation’s more affluent kids—and far fewer for their poorer peers to walk through. In her new book, journalist Naomi Schaefer Riley follows the trajectories of ten children from less-than-ideal circumstances who are given the opportunity to attend private schools via in the Children’s Scholarship Fund, a nationwide initiative founded in 1998 (and funded by Ted Forstmann and John Walton, both now deceased) that offers tuition assistance to low-income students in grades K–8. Each of the ten kids are given their own chapter, and the stories are peppered with asides on education-policy topics like college and career readiness, private school diversity, and the monetary value of a high school diploma. These uplifting, journalistic stories are a perfect summer read and make a compelling argument for expanding parental choice in education. (For a complementary look at how private schools adjust to an influx of scholarship students, see Fordham’s Pluck and Tenacity: How five private schools in Ohio have adapted to vouchers.)
SOURCE: Naomi Schaefer Riley, Opportunity and Hope: Transforming Children's Lives through Scholarships (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2014).
