School choice — and its most prominent national champion, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos — has been under sustained attack in the media for the duration of the Trump administration’s tenure.

With the New York Times cherry-picking test score data every other week, it’s worth reviewing not only the positive effect that educational choice has been proven to have on students’ standardized test results, but also to take a more holistic look at the broader impact choice can have on kids and families. Beyond ticking up scores on a spreadsheet, school choice changes lives, engages families and lifts up communities.

One under-reported consequence of empowering families to choose their children’s learning environments may be fewer lives — of both victims and perpetrators — destroyed by the effects of criminality. We now have three studies that indicate that students enrolled in schools of choice commit fewer crimes than their counterparts in public schools.

Researchers from Harvard and Princeton studied the impact of the high-performing charter school Promise Academy in Harlem, and found that enrolled boys were 100 percent less likely to be incarcerated — an outcome that would surely be shouted from the rooftops if attached to a typical big-government wrap-around program. Similarly, another Harvard study found that students deemed “high-risk,” but who were given the opportunity to attend their first-choice school in an open-enrollment district were half as likely to commit crimes than students who attended their government-zoned school.

Finally, University of Arkansas researchers who examined the country’s oldest modern private choice program in Milwaukee found that those lucky enough to receive a school voucher had lower crime rates as young adults when compared with a matched peer in the public school. Among those students who used the voucher to attend private schools, overall felony convictions were reduced by a whopping 79 percent, while incidences of common specific offenses like drug crimes and theft came down by 93 and 87 percent, respectively.

These kinds of impacts reach far beyond the students and their immediate families. Through reducing crime rates in addition to improving academic and attainment outcomes, school choice is transforming entire communities.

Of course, choice advocates should always be ready to meet the New York Times and other opponents’ arguments about how well students fill out standardized test bubbles. A recent meta-analysis of 19 gold-standard studies on school choice showed modest but significant improvements in test scores, especially for some of the most vulnerable student groups, who are least well-served by the current system.

However, the movement for school choice — a movement that has spread choice programs to more than half the states in fewer than three decades — is about more than churning out kids who can perform well on exams. Allowing parents to use individual information that only they know about their child’s well-being, learning style and engagement with those around him in order to find an environment where he flourishes should be the real goal for every American student.

Allowing families, rather than government bureaucrats, to determine how, where and what their children learn is a crucial step in knitting back together Edmund Burke’s “tiny platoons” that famed observer of American life Alexis de Tocqueville so admired in our civil society. The school choice programs proliferating across the country are ensuring that fewer American dreams are derailed, and helping parents shape their children into citizens they can be proud of, who enrich the republic and all around them.

And at a time when Americans’ faith in our institutions seems to be failing and our civility to our fellow citizens seems stretched past its breaking point, the real value of school choice cannot be reduced to a score on a state or national assessment. While choice does indeed improve test results, in the end, it’s the impact of putting parents back in the driver’s seat on students, families and communities that matters most.

Inez Feltscher Stepman is director of the Education and Workforce Development Task Force at the American Legislative Exchange Council.