(Author’s note: Due to technical difficulties with the email server, subscribers stopped getting their regular blog posts by email on 11/11/22. Therefore, I am re-publishing those posts not received by the subscribers from then until Dec. 8 when the problem was corrected. My apologies to those who have been able to read these posts by going directly to my web site.)
School choice is the issue that crosses partisan lines. The reason is simple; when it comes to their children, parents care more about their education than about political ideology.
The Covid pandemic has brought this issue into focus with greater clarity than ever. The pandemic impact on education was devastating as evidenced by the recent release of the National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP (America’s Schools Are Failing). This report, often referred to as the nation’s report card, has revealed how devastating the school lockdowns were to the educational progress of our nation’s children. This impact was greatest among public school children and lower income families who could not afford tutors and private schools to compensate for lost classroom time.
Jason L. Riley, columnist for The Wall Street Journal, says parents took advantage of education options like never before during the pandemic, to the point where K-12 schooling in the years ahead could look a lot different than it did pre-Covid. According to a new report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, enrollment grew 7% at charters between 2019 and 2022, while falling 3.5%, or almost 1.5 million, at traditional public schools over the same period. Catholic schools likewise have seen a boost in attendance, with nationwide enrollment this year up 3.8%, the largest increase in more than two decades.
Parent found other ways to compensate for public school deficiencies, such as creating “learning pods” or “microschools” for their children. This involved bringing together small groups of students who were taught by hired instructors or parent volunteers. The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), a research organization based at Arizona State University, has been studying the phenomenon, and its findings are revealing.
In a report released earlier this year, CRPE noted that 58% of the families who created pods didn’t just prefer them to the remote-learning and hybrid-learning options during the pandemic. They also preferred them to their experience with traditional public schools before the pandemic. Nonwhite families were twice as likely as white families to say the pod improved their child’s overall happiness and attitude toward school, and they trusted the pod instructors more than they did the pre-pandemic teachers in traditional public schools.
This is not surprising, really. There is a long tradition in America of blacks taking education matters into their own hands. Booker T. Washington worked with the philanthropist Julius Rosenwald in the early 20th century to build thousands of quality schools for southern blacks. Black activists in California opened schools in poor sections of Oakland and Los Angeles in the 1960s. Marva Collins started a school for black kids in Chicago in the 1970s, and Geoffrey Canada did so in Harlem in the 1990s.
Some have criticized pod learning, like charter schools, for contributing to school segregation. The original objection to school segregation was that it prevented black children from getting the best education. A public school official in Atlanta wrote in The New York Times that pods “exacerbate inequities, racial segregation and the opportunity gap with schools.”
But Riley, himself an African-American journalist, asks the appropriate question: “Where is the evidence that black children need to sit next to white children to learn?” Some of the highest-performing public schools in the U.S. are public charter schools with student bodies that are overwhelmingly black and Latino. Riley asks, “If racial diversity is so essential to classroom learning, how do children in countries with essentially no such diversity, such as Japan and South Korea, regularly outperform American students on international tests?”
Riley adds, “Black parents who embrace education alternatives understand that a school’s quality doesn’t depend on the racial makeup of the classroom. For today’s Democratic party, however, racial balance is the highest priority, even if it means keeping low-income minorities trapped in violent, low-performing schools with the least-experienced teachers at the head of the classroom.”
It is clear that black parents are waking up to the reality that activist organizations such as the NAACP and the teachers unions have spent the past two years trying to undermine charter-school expansion. Riley points out it is no coincidence that the teachers unions, which oppose school choice, are among the largest donors to the NAACP, members of the Congressional Black Caucus and Democrats in general. But the recent election results show that blacks and Latinos are voting Republican in growing numbers and school choice is at the top of the list of reasons for this political change.
