The School Choice Battle Will Happen at the Statehouse
While all eyes will understandably be on the presidential race over the next ten weeks, parents and others concerned with the well-being of our nation’s youngest should also be keeping their eyes on state-house politics. That is where control of the nation’s school systems resides—and it’s also the home to a growing movement to give parents ultimate control over their children’s education.
In the last two years, eight states have adopted universal school-choice programs, in the form of Educational Savings Accounts. Under these programs, public money for education is diverted to families who can use it to pay for tuition (or other legitimate educational expenses) at any school—public, charter, or private—including religious schools. These programs and the legal and economic underpinnings of this approach are described in my latest issue brief for the Manhattan Institute.
The sudden growth of these programs after decades of debate stems from discontent among parents, who observed widespread abandonment of in-person schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the wake of the simultaneous George Floyd era, many parents were also concerned about how school districts and state education departments were approaching complex issues of equity for racial and other minorities.
These concerns are valid areas for state action, but not all states react in ways that satisfy parents, fueling the newfound support for school choice. Many families, for example, lamented the way school districts dealt with racial and ethnic “inequalities of outcomes” when it came to students testing into advanced classes. Rather than respond by increasing access to advanced coursework for all underserved communities, however, many state policies instead equalized outcomes by limiting access—a move which harmed many communities, including Asian communities, who were vocal about their dismay.
Similarly, many parents objected to how school district policies handled gender issues. Some districts had policies that enabled minor students to pursue social-gender transition at school while withholding information from those children’s parents. These policies are part of the motivation for the growing movement of parents seeking alternatives to the traditional neighborhood school.
So where can parents go? In 2022 and 2023, Arizona, West Virginia, Iowa, Utah, Arkansas, Florida, Oklahoma, and Ohio either enacted or expanded public support of school choice. These states now offer public support to almost all families for educational expenses. In 2024, three other large states, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee, also signaled their interest in school choice. These three states failed to enact school-choice proposals supported by their governors as some Republican legislators quibbled over specific aspects of the programs and many Democrats remained opposed to the very concept of universal school choice. But still, there’s no doubt these states will continue to explore universal school choice in the coming years.
In contrast to these encouraging signs, in other states—particularly New York, Illinois, and California—the political prospects for universal school choice seem bleak unless political power shifts from left to right in dramatic fashion. These states do have publicly funded charter schools, which have successfully educated students from lower-income communities of color, where traditional district public schools have failed. But anti-choice political leaders care little. The anti-choice sentiment of leaders in these states is on full display in current efforts to reign in the growth of charter schools in Chicago, and the ongoing legislative cap on the issuance of new charters in New York City.
In the end, parents and families will make their own decisions about the school placement of their children, with or without public support. States with universal choice programs are removing cost considerations from those decisions, allowing parents the ability to direct public funding to the schools they deem appropriate for their children. Meanwhile, states that remain opposed to that level of educational freedom may find that families vote with their feet and move to states that will afford them that freedom.
In fact, this migration away from states opposed to school choice has been happening even before the COVID awakening, based on a host of quality-of-life issues. Between the 2012-2013 school years, California, Illinois, and New York saw enrollment in public schools in grades K-12 drop by a combined 800,000 students, or seven percent of their total enrollment. At the same time, Florida, Utah, and Oklahoma experienced a more than seven percent increase in public school enrollment. These are long-term trends which are likely to continue. Enrollment in New York City, meanwhile, the nation’s largest public school system, is projected to decline by 228,000 students, or twenty-five percent, over the next ten years, due to declining birth rates in the city. One would think that these states and large cities would be more responsive to parents rather than attempting to force them into the one-size-fits-all public school system.
School choice is about more than preserving enrollment though; it’s about recognizing that children differ in their educational needs, and parents differ in their educational priorities. In recent years, I have observed some unique schools in the public, charter and private sectors. Some emphasize classical education. A charter high school for advanced students in Florida emphasizes learning through the scientific method and has all its students taking college courses in grades ten through twelve. A charter high school in New Orleans has all its students enrolled in a Junior Marine ROTC program and emphasizes character development and academic and workforce preparation. A religious school in Brooklyn serving the Haredi community immerses its boys in centuries old Talmudic learning. Its graduates include many who are serving the Jewish community in leadership roles in nations across the world.
These and other examples point to the promise and hope of school choice. This movement, centered in state policy, enables students and families to pursue different interests and educational priorities while contributing to the common good.
