For eight years, the Obama administration was often hostile to school choice. It aimed to defund the federal scholarship program for low-income kids in Washington, D.C. Its Department of Justice tried to stop a scholarship program in Louisiana. Even the secretary of education's extended "exit memo" to President Obama on the administration's education activities scrupulously avoided even mentioning charter schools or parental choice in K-12 education.

But as they were walking out the door, President Obama and his education team inadvertently handed President Trump, education secretary-designate Betsy DeVos and other school-choice advocates an enormous parting gift: The now-documented failure of the administration's massive "school turnaround" program offers a convincing argument for empowering disadvantaged families with more educational options – exactly what Trump and DeVos appear to have in mind.

Almost everyone agrees on the problem: Millions of low-income kids, especially in big cities, have been assigned to schools that aren't working. The divide is over what to do about it. There are those who believe we must work through the existing systems, namely by providing more resources for the troubled districts running the troubled schools. On the other side are those who believe the answer must include making available new and different school options so families can choose.

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The first camp has been dominant for generations. This is why state and federal policies have continuously increased spending on and programming for these schools and districts. It's why both the No Child Left Behind Act and its successor, the Every Student Succeeds Act, crafted extensive rules for identifying and supporting these districts and schools.

Nevertheless, a large body of research and experience has shown that these efforts have been unable to deliver the results our neediest kids deserve. Despite decades of countless state- and local-level school and district transformation projects, there are still entirely too many dysfunctional districts and dysfunctional schools. This is one of the major reasons school-choice programs have been gaining ground for the last quarter century. Advocates have been able to argue that the traditional approaches to improvement haven't worked and that these kids desperately and immediately need something different. Today, there are dozens of state-level, publicly funded initiatives (vouchers, tax-credit scholarship programs, education savings accounts) that enable these families to enroll in schools other than the persistently underperforming ones to which their kids are assigned.

However, President Obama and his first secretary of education, Arne Duncan, chose to go all-in with the traditional approach. It must have seemed like the right political strategy to provide more money and programming to existing districts and schools and avoid the school-choice dispute, even if the evidence weighed against this tack. So they created the largest "school turnaround" program of all time, the School Improvement Grant program. Billions of federal dollars were handed to the long-struggling districts operating the long-struggling schools. The funds were to be used on interventions favored by the Obama administration – interventions eerily similar to those tried by the feds, states, districts and schools in the past.

Over the course of the administration, results trickled in showing that the program wasn't working. Consistent with previous "turnaround" programs, the failing schools receiving funding weren't making anywhere near the promised progress. In fact, many were making no progress and some were getting worse. But Duncan and Obama pressed ahead.

The damning final evaluation of the SIG program was released – just a coincidence, we're told – two days before the administration walked out the door. Funded by the very Department of Education that ran the program and conducted by two respected research institutions, the study found that SIG had no influence on student achievement. None. Schools that received massive SIG funding and support saw no gains in test scores, graduation rates or college-going rates compared to similar schools that weren't part of SIG. The traditional approach failed again. Billions and billions of dollars were wasted. Most importantly, countless boys and girls are still assigned to those schools.

Although Obama administration officials were able to decamp before being held accountable for this enormous failure, the timing of the study's release could not be better for the new administration. Already strongly in favor of school choice, Trump and DeVos now have an astonishingly compelling public argument. They could announce: "Our predecessors made a huge, last-ditch effort to prove, despite decades of evidence, that the 'school turnaround' approach was the way to help our most disadvantaged students. But after eight years and billions of dollars, the Obama administration's own evaluation showed that this strategy failed once again. It is clear that we must now empower these families with school choice."

Years from now, we may look back and say that President Obama and Secretary Duncan – though unintentionally –laid the groundwork for the expansion of school choice.