Regular followers of this blog know I rarely stray from medical issues unless I feel passionately about the subject. One of those subjects is school choice. School choice is the key to educational opportunities, especially for children of low-income families – and education is the key to upward mobility. If you want to put your finger on a solution to poverty, the answer is education and that means school choice.
This has never been more clear. The Covid pandemic brought close attention to our public school system and the deficiencies of that system. Children of low-income families, especially in inner cities, have little chance of getting a good education unless they have other options. School choice gives them those options.
William McGurn, writing in The Wall Street Journal, tells us it was Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman who first identified the importance of school choice when he introduced the idea of school vouchers in an essay titled “The Role of Government in Education” in 1955. Friedman said, “Governments could require a minimum level of education which they could finance by giving parents vouchers redeemable for a specified maximum sum per child per year if spent on ‘approve’ educational services.”
McGurn tells us it took years to catch on, probably because at the time most people were satisfied with their public schools. When school-choice measures were later passed in some areas, they were almost always targeted at poor children in urban districts. The rationale was that these kids needed help to escape rotten public schools that condemned them to life on the margins of the American Dream.
I grew up in the same time-frame and attended public schools. I lived in a middle-class neighborhood and I found the schools were adequate for my needs. They must have given me a decent education for I was able to go on to a bachelor’s degree and a medical degree. At the time, I didn’t see the need for a private school, parochial school, or home-schooling education. I didn’t see anything wrong with public schools.
All that changed when teachers unions took over the public schools. The stranglehold the teachers unions have now on public schools was clearly demonstrated during the Covid pandemic when the CDC and the White House colluded with the teachers unions to determine when it was safe for children to return to the classrooms and under what precautions. Most notably, new CDC Director Rochelle Walensky was chastised by the White House, whose First Lady occupant is a member of the teachers union, when she slipped up and declared it was safe for teachers and children to return to school without AFT approval.
This brings me to the revolution that is currently taking place in our states, undoubtedly fueled by parents who are fed up with underperforming public schools and politicians who are protecting the teachers unions. The Biden Administration was so tone-deaf to the pleas of parents they complied with a request from the National School Boards Association to treat them as domestic terrorists!
The anger and resentment of parents is reflected in the words of one single mother and reporter who one of the leaders of the parent revolt in Northern Virginia that contributed to Glenn Youngkin’s upset win the 2021 governor’s race. Asra Nomani says, “For three years, school boards, activist educators and the teachers union machine have treated parents like dirt. Now an entire swath of parents – immigrants, Democrats, single moms, military families, parents with kids with learning disabilities – are championing this idea they cared little about before: school choice.”
Already this year, four states have adopted school choice for everyone – and it’s only April. The most recent is Florida, which just extended school choice to every child in the Sunshine State. When signing the bill into law a week ago, Gov. Ron DeSantis rightly called it a “monumental day in Florida history,” State education dollars will follow the student instead of simply going to the public schools.
Florida is the most populous state to embrace full school choice. It follows Iowa, Utah, and Arkansas, which passed their own legislation this year. These were preceded by West Virginia in 2021 and Arizona in 2022. More may be coming. Four other states – Oklahoma, Ohio, Wyoming, and Texas have legislation pending. Nebraska, South Carolina, Kansas, and Pennsylvania are working on more limited versions of school choice. In Georgia, Republicans in the state House just helped defeat a choice bill, but it may come back in 2024.
Corey DeAngelis, a senior fellow with the American Federation for Children, says the mood has shifted. In the November state legislative elections, he notes, AFC-back candidates challenged 69 incumbents – and took out 40 of them. “There wasn’t a red wave or a blue wave in the 2022 midterms,” he says, “But there was a school choice wave.”
In a time of nearly-every-day bad news, this is certainly good news.
