More parents than ever want school choice, yet President Biden didn’t mention it once in his State of the Union. Clearly President Biden isn’t willing to stand up to the teachers unions who want to keep their stranglehold on K-12 education. Good thing parents are standing up instead.
Parent activists, disillusioned with traditional public schools during the pandemic, are embracing school choice in record numbers. Ignoring them or trying to intimidate them into silence will not work—the parent movement is here to stay.
In Case You Missed It via National Review, parents are demanding school choice on an unprecedented level, but the Biden administration refuses to listen.
The New Politics of School Choice
By John J. Miller
February 17, 2022
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It turns out that education already is changing in a lot of other states: Last year, 18 states enacted or expanded school-choice programs. This nearly quadrupled the number of K–12 students who are eligible to benefit from some form of voucher, tax-credit scholarship, or ESA, from a little more than 600,000 students in 2020–21 to more than 2.2 million today, according to an analysis by Jason Bedrick and Ed Tarnowski in Education Next…
And 2022 could be an even bigger year for school choice. More than two dozen states already have school-choice bills before their legislatures… “This is all about funding students, not systems,” says Corey A. DeAngelis, of the American Federation for Children, repeating a phrase that has become a mantra in the school-choice movement — in what may be the most important political moment in its long history.
The roots of the school-choice movement date to 1955, when the economists Milton and Rose Friedman called for giving the parents of school-age children “a sum equal to the estimated cost of educating a child in a government school, provided that at least this sum was spent on education in an approved school.” The idea was to create a market in education, breaking up the government’s virtual monopoly on schools and creating the competitive pressures that could lead to excellence.
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[S]chool choice appears to be surging in popularity. Last June, at the conclusion of a school year marked by lockdowns and remote learning, a poll by RealClear Opinion Research showed that 74 percent of registered voters supported school choice. This was up from 64 percent in an identical survey in April 2020. At the same time, public schools are losing favor. In a Gallup poll last August, 54 percent of Americans said they were dissatisfied with K–12 education, up from 47 percent before the pandemic. Many parents are voting with their feet.
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A report from McKinsey & Company, for example, estimated that students at the conclusion of last school year were on average five months behind on their math skills and four months behind on reading. Michigan’s latest student-assessment scores, published in August, showed that while reading scores were mixed, math scores had dropped for every grade tested. “Parents are waking up to what’s happening,” says [Lynn] Aronoff. “It has turned people into activists about their kids.”
