Voting for School Choice
By Howard Sierer
The United States has long been called the land of the free. School choice is a freedom only slowly being realized as parents pressure the government to give them options for their children’s education.
The progressive left knows what’s best for all of us and is always ready to use the government to force us into compliance. When it comes to education, the left claims to know that traditional, publicly-funded schools are best for children, even when too many of those schools are demonstrably failing in low-income neighborhoods.
Looking past leftist rhetoric, it’s clear that liberal politicians, many of whom send their children to private schools, are instead advocating what’s good for their staunch supporters in teachers’ unions. COVID-19 has given these unions a chance to put their members’ interests ahead of students.
The federal Centers for Disease Control says reopening schools is a public health issue because the harm done by keeping children out of school is “well-known and significant.” The CDC adds that keeping schools closed “disproportionately harms low-income and minority children and those living with disabilities” because their parents lack the resources to switch to a private or charter school, hire a tutor, or even sign up for after-school programs.
With this in mind, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot planned to reopen classrooms in September until the Chicago Teachers Union threatened a strike; opening has been put off until at least November. Hyper-progressive New York mayor Bill de Blasio planned to open city schools on schedule, but unsurprisingly buckled when the teachers’ union threatened a strike.
Yet many public-school districts and almost all private and charter schools, including those in Utah, have opened with good results. COVID-19 protection protocols work if schools want to apply them.
The solution to the union stranglehold on public education is school choice. In places where the government has supported charter schools, offered vouchers for private schools or provided parents with other options, educational results show significant improvements.
The National Education Association complains that voucher programs allow charter and private schools and their newest variations, pandemic pods and micro-schools, to “cherry pick” the best students, leaving public schools to handle the rest. In a paper summarizing the results of dozens of empirical studies of districts offering school choice, Greg Forster shows this just isn’t so:
- In 18 studies of those students leaving for charter or private schools, 14 showed student improvement, two showed no effect and two showed a negative effect
- In 33 studies of those students remaining in public schools after some students had left for charter or private schools, 31 showed improvement in public schools, one showed no effect and one showed negative effects
- In 28 studies of the fiscal impact of school choice on taxpayers, 25 showed some positive effect and three showed no effect
- Ten studies examined racial segregation; nine of them showed diminished segregation
- In 11 studies of student civic values and practices, eight showed improvements while three showed no effect
Parents, especially minority parents, are waking up to who really has their children’s best interests in mind. A Rasmussen Reports survey in late August and early September conducted in five election battleground states showed strong support for school choice.
About half of respondents agreed that school choice “raises the overall quality of K-12 education” while about 20 percent believed that quality was lowered. Black respondents were even more likely to believe the overall quality was raised. Over two-thirds supported the concept of publicly-funded K-12 school choice with black students 3.8 times as likely to attend charter schools.
Another recent study shows that strides made by African-American charter students and by students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds have been particularly impressive, making school choice a civil rights issue.
Despite this large body of peer-reviewed research showing charter and private school success, teachers’ unions adamantly oppose giving parents school choice.
Leading the charge, Joe Biden proposes to eliminate funding for Washington DC’s very successful school-choice program where 44,000 mostly minority kids are enrolled in charter schools. Biden sent his children to an exclusive secondary school in Delaware (average class size: 15) but now proposes to place teachers’ unions ahead of minority children.
Speaking at the Republican National Convention, Rebecca Friedrich, a long-time California public school teacher, noted that teachers’ unions spend “hundreds of millions annually to defeat charter schools and school choice, trapping so many precious, low-income children in dangerous, corrupt and low-performing schools.”
A number of Republican candidates have decided to make school choice an issue in this fall’s election. They’re likely to capture the votes of an increased number of minority parents as a result.
I’m a big fan of public schools. We moved to a large Great Plains city when our children were in their junior and senior high school years. We intentionally chose a home in the urban school district, under court-ordered busing at the time.
Our kids had a great experience. My wife served as the high school PTA president and I chaired the district superintendent’s citizen advisory council. In choosing our home, we exercised our own version of school choice and wouldn’t have had it any other way.
It’s time for all state and local governments to recognize the many virtues of school choice, especially for minority populations. And it’s time for Democrats to support kids before teachers’ unions.
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