A study financed by the Department of Education shows that school choice significantly improves the lives of children and increases their educational prospects for the future, especially minority children.

One startling point is that school choice eliminated “nearly 75 percent of the black-white gap in high school graduation and 25 percent of the gap in bachelor’s degree completion,” according to The Daily Caller.

But don’t expect a miracle like that to change the policies of the Obama administration, the Department of Education or the union thugs who rail against giving families the ability to choose where they send their children to school.

Here’s the details:

On Monday the National Bureau of Economic Research released a working paper written by Harvard, Dartmouth and Brown University researchers, providing “the first evidence of the impact of school choice on the college achievement gap.”

The researchers, two economists and two education policy experts, looked at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina and the effect of their school choice program “on college matriculation and degree completion.”

“CMS implemented an open enrollment public school choice program in the Fall of 2002,” says the paper. “Students were guaranteed admission to their neighborhood school but were allowed to choose and rank up to three other schools in the district, including magnet schools. When demand for school slots exceeded supply, allocation was determined by lottery.”

Of the eight public schools in that district, the researchers ranked four as “low quality” and four as “high quality.” Students who lived in a neighborhood where the nearest school was low quality, but who won a lottery to attend a high quality school, were “more likely than lottery losers to graduate from high school, attend a four-year college, and earn a bachelor’s degree.

“They are twice as likely to earn a degree from an elite university. The results suggest that school choice can improve students’ longer-term life chances when they gain access to schools that are better on observed dimensions of quality.”

From my understanding, private schools weren’t included in this “choice” program but even on a limited basis, the program produced wonderful results.

Imagine what would occur if competition were allowed back into education. The lives of children would become better, more hopeful. But the stranglehold that unions have over the education system would weaken so they’ll fight it every step of the way.