Texas legislators are very close to approving $1 billion for private-school scholarships. If Texas becomes a school-choice state, a majority of U.S. families will have the option to send their children to private schools -- or homeschools or microschools -- with public funding, writes Robert Pondiscio on The American Enterprise. We've reached "peak public school," he concludes.
Already, "nearly 40 percent of American schoolchildren are doing something other than attending their geographically assigned, district-run public school," he writes. That includes public charter and magnet schools, as well as virtual schools.
Zip-code education is crumbling, he writes. "In the last four years, over a dozen states have adopted education savings accounts (ESAs), which allow families to use public funds to pay for private school tuition, homeschooling costs, and other educational expenses."
"Zoom school" broke parents' faith in public education, pushing them to seek alternatives. "Homeschooling rates have tripled from pre-pandemic levels," private school enrollments are up and parents are trying a wide range of alternatives to the neighborhood school.
About 10 years ago, education reform's bipartisan consensus began crumbling, Pondiscio writes. Progressives adopted "the arguments and slogans of the social justice left to explain away the movement’s failure to close achievement gaps between black and white students," while "conservatives went all-in on school choice and on the attack against 'woke' public schools."
I think schools that embraced transgenderism -- sex is "assigned at birth," sex isn't "binary," parents shouldn't be told that "Charlotte" is now "Charles" -- alienated parents.
Pondiscio worries that school choice could widen the already widening "gaps between educational haves and have-nots and lead to an even further degradation of social cohesion."
Some parents will make unwise choices, and some won't choose at all. "As more middle-class and engaged families exit public schools, the legacy system risks becoming the school of last resort for the most disadvantaged students — further intensifying educational inequality," Pondiscio writes.
Unlike most countries that fund a mix of public and private schools, the U.S. has no national curriculum or standards, he notes. We seem to be "shifting toward a system where public funds follow individual choices with few common guardrails."
I hope that most parents understand that if the tie between the value of their house and the qualify of the local school is broken, then the value of the house will go down.
And if the U.S. goes to a 100% choice system, applying for kindergarten will begin to resemble applying for college.
And image a neighborhood where every K-12 student attend a different school from all of the other students. Not exactly a place to develop any friendships.
In the long run, school choice will work to the benefit of the Tiger moms and will discourage family formation for the middle and blue collar families.