One of the most frequent objections I hear to market education reforms is that poor and minimally educated parents won’t be able to choose wisely; that they would be bad education consumers.

There is overwhelming evidence that even the world’s poorest, least educated families make better educational choices for their own children than “expert” bureaucrats make on their behalf.

I once offered this evidence to a Democratic state legislator who shocked me with the racism of his response. He basically said that such successes in the slums of, among other places, Africa, were not relevant to the U.S. context. “Our poor blacks” he told me, are less well equiped to choose their children’s schools than Africa’s poor blacks. This particular state legislator is, by the way, African American.

To him and those who share his pernicious misconception, there is now yet more evidence that families of all races, at all income levels, at all education levels, can choose wisely for their children — even if they are American. A newly released study by Georgetown University scholars finds that families (overwhelmingly low-income and African-American) participating in D.C.‘s school voucher program are making rational, informed choices and are becoming more astute consumers the longer they participate in the program.

What most opponents of market education fail to grasp is that the reason so many parents are so detached from their children’s education in the current monopoly school system is that the system itself has marginalized them. Most parents have virtually no direct say in any important aspect of their children’s public schooling. There is thus no point for them to become informed and active. When given a choice and a chance, they know what they want and they learn to be savvier consumers the more they exercise that choice.