National School Choice Week is Here. Democratic Lawmakers Need to Join the Celebration.
This week is “National School Choice Week.” It’s the 15th year millions of parents, students, teachers, and school leaders have celebrated education options in their communities. There are school fairs and statehouse rallies, gubernatorial proclamations, and of course, the movement’s ubiquitous bright yellow knit scarves.
But why the last week of January, instead of back-to-school season or wrapped around college signing day, when K-12 education is top of mind?
Because it’s a strategic spot on the academic calendar, winter and early spring are when public charter schools and other nontraditional schools begin accepting applications for the following year.
National School Choice Week is actually a nonpartisan public awareness campaign. Its goal is alerting parents about available school choices and encouraging them to be unafraid to exercise agency over their kids’ education, while there’s time to make a move.
Democratic Governors and President Bill Clinton launched the public school choice movement in the 1990s to reform schools that underdelivered for decades. Proving that the competency of America’s future workforce is a bipartisan issue, both George W. Bush and Barack Obama increased federal support for public charter schools.
President Biden unwisely abandoned it at the behest of the left wing of the party. That left a vacuum, inviting Republican privatizers who seized the opportunity to begin dismantling the entire system by sending taxpayer-funded vouchers to constitutionally unbound, academically unaccountable, and increasingly sectarian private schools.
It would be strategically inspired at this moment for Democrats to boldly step into that vacuum and reclaim leadership on the public school choice issue.
If November taught us anything, it’s that the country is in an anti-establishment mood. And there are few things more “establishment” than antiquated school districts that dictate where students learn, how they learn, and what they learn. And, if forced virtual schooling during COVID taught us anything, it’s that parents do not like being dictated to on any of those things.
Rahm Emanuel, a lifelong moderate Democratic, observed that beginning with COVID, voters only heard these two things from Democrats on K-12 education: “We’re going to close the front door of the school, and after Covid, we’re going to blow open the bathroom school door. That’s it. Not what you’re going to do on math, not what you’re going to do on reading."
Democrats should immediately unify around making students’ learning proficiency the center of their education policy. This is a unique opportunity to re-embrace public, autonomous schools of choice as pragmatic, bipartisan solutions to educational inequities, especially for low-income and working-class families. Public charter schools answer broader concerns about academic achievement because they are subject to accountability pursuant to the terms of their operating contracts, district schools.
Seasoned reformers understand that our 150-year-old school systems, with their central offices, bureaucracies, top-down management, union contracts, and wacky political incentives, are unlikely to reform themselves. As a result, district schools plod along, failing to teach students the skills they need for success as adults.
The biennial National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), commonly known as “the Nation’s Report Card,” tests fourth and eighth graders nationwide. NAEP is our most important measurement of how much core subject matter students know, and allows for comparison from state to state and between large cities.
The 2024 NAEP scores will be released during this school choice week. Word on the street is that they’re grim — perhaps even more worrisome than the NAEP scores immediately post-COVID in 2023.
The teachers unions are the driving force behind the defense of the mostly broken traditional school district model — especially in “blue” urban centers. The unions rely on the system as the most efficient way to mass produce union jobs; they spend big to elect defenders of that status quo.
To understand just how politically untenable that blind defense was, before COVID, Democrats historically led Republicans by 16-20 voter approval points on education. The unions’ unfettered power over school closings in places like Chicago and Los Angeles, and the Biden administration’s fecklessness in its dealings with them entirely wiped out that advantage.
Not only is anti-choice Democrats’ stubbornness on higher performing, more accountable charter schools politically indefensible, but it’s also myopic. Around 70% of parents nationwide approve of charter schools.
More myopia: Public charter schools serve more than 4 million students, while the 2024 presidential election was won by 2.3 million votes. Prior to November’s election, the education advocacy group Agency “did the math” and found all seven swing states had enough parents of charter school students to determine their election results.
For example, Wisconsin enrolled 50,000 charter school students in 2024. Trump won by 29,417 votes. Pennsylvania enrolled 163,372 charter school students, with Trump winning by 121,454 votes.
That’s obviously correlation, not causation. But hundreds of thousands of parents — many of them Black and Hispanic — languish impatiently on charter school waiting lists in a time of declining public school enrollment overall.
Yet, defenders of the status quo work against the schools their constituents crave. They indulge in intellectual dishonesty about charter schools’ 35-year track record. They stymie their growth to preserve teachers unions’ monopoly over dysfunctional education institutions.
All of that lends credence to complaints that “party elites” don’t care about working-class parents. It’s one possible contributor — along with crime and other ills — to Trump’s gains with Blacks and Latinos and Harris’ decreased margins in urban centers.
Democrats just got scorched for being “out-of-touch.” Allowing the unions and left to squander the party’s historical advantage on education over the span of just one presidential administration certainly bears this out.
It’s tempting for frustrated, pro-reform Democrats to say, “We told you so.”
It’s more constructive to say, “Grab this low-hanging fruit now.”
We can’t do much about the price of eggs (news flash, Trump won’t either), but education is a singular issue. No parent willingly accepts a substandard education for their child. Public charter schools offer the best opportunity — usually the only cost-free one — for low-income and working-class families to achieve educational parity with their wealthier peers.
Defenders of the status quo, change course. Seize the moment, grab a yellow School Choice Week scarf, and champion public school choice as a way of fighting Trumpian vouchers.
Republicans have nothing on us — hell, Trump is already slashing his executive order sharpie at the Department of Education. Republicans’ scheme is ending the public school system that made America great in the first place. Charter schools — free, public, and open to all — are the answer to giving parents the choice they need, while keeping the public schools public.
