School Choice Advocates Are Having a Good Year

Millions of
schoolchildren
across the United States are starting the academic year off with more access to school choice than ever before following hard-fought wins in
courtrooms
,
state legislatures
, and at the
ballot box
. 

Arizona,
which has a long legacy of education freedom, is leading the way. The state has pioneered policies that expand school choice, including education savings accounts, state-backed private school scholarships, a growing charter school sector, and a thriving open enrollment policy. 

Last month, Arizona scored another landmark victory for school choice when Republican
Gov. Doug Ducey
signed a massive expansion of the state’s private voucher system despite threats from public school advocates to block the bill and press voters to nix it during November’s general election.

PARENTS MUST TAKE A STAND FOR CHOICE

The expansion lets every parent in Arizona take the money the state sends to the K-12 public school system and use it for their children’s school tuition or other educational costs. All 1.1 million Arizonan students who attend traditional public schools qualify to leave their public school and get money to go to a private one. An estimated 60,000 private school students and about 38,000 homeschooled children are immediately eligible to take up to $7,000 per year.

For Susan Cleary, that’s good news.

The Scottsdale, Arizona, boutique owner told the Washington Examiner that school choice was one of the reasons she insisted her daughter and two elementary school-aged grandsons move from California to the desert.

“They aren’t learning a thing back there,” she told the Washington Examiner in July. “They’re taught to hate themselves, their families, and say Jesus didn’t exist. We are ‘one nation under God.’ The government shouldn’t be allowed to shove education down our throats. It should be up to parents to decide what their children are taught.”

Cleary’s comments resonate with scores of parents across the country looking for something new.

“School choice” is an umbrella term used to describe the movement to expand alternatives to traditional public schools, which include charter schools, private schools, magnet schools, open enrollment schools, online learning, homeschooling, or other learning environments a family chooses. 

While school choice has been around for nearly 150 years —
Vermont’s
town-tuition program started serving families in 1869 — the modern movement began in the early 1990s. In 1991,
Wisconsin
became the first state to create a modern school voucher program. That same year,
Minnesota
became the first state to create a law allowing charter schools. The City Academy in St. Paul, Minnesota, the nation’s first publicly funded, privately run charter school, opened its doors in 1992. 

Since then, there has been a groundswell of support, buoyed by former President Donald Trump, as well as then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who became a hero to advocates of school choice and a villain to traditional public school supporters. 

Last year, 19 states enacted 32 new or expanded school choice policies, making 2021 “the year of school choice.” Now, a total of 21 states and Washington, D.C., offer school choice programs that give parents financial assistance and private school options.

Momentum has grown, and in 2022, several states adopted policies that empowered parents to pull their children out of traditional public schools and weigh other options, such as charter schools (tuition-free public schools that are independently run), education savings accounts (state-supervised funds that parents can use to pay for a selection of education options), learning pods (a parent-organized small group of children who come together to learn and socialize), and open enrollment (allowing students to go to another school district if it has space).

There are currently about 7,700 charter schools in the U.S. that serve about 3.6 million students, according to
schoolchoiceweek.com
. Forty-five states and the District of Columbia have passed laws allowing for the creation of charter schools, and the number of students attending these schools has more than doubled in a decade. Magnet schools, which allow students to focus on a specific learning track, have also grown. There are currently more than 4,000 operating in the country.

Private schools are also available in every state but charge tuition. Thirty states now offer programs that make scholarship money or tuition assistance available to families. Of the 30 states, 21 offer an official scholarship program. Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Louisiana, Alabama, and South Carolina offer both scholarship and state deduction programs, schoolchoiceweek.com reported.

‘PARENTS ARE AWAKE’: SCHOOL ACTIVISTS PREPARE FOR LONG-TERM STAYING POWER

Virtual learning is still a popular choice for families. About 375,000 K-12 students attended online school full-time in 2019-2020. The number soared to 656,000 for the 2020-2021 school year. The numbers for the 2022-2023 school year have not yet been released. 

“These are massive gains for American families, but supporters of school choice shouldn’t let their understandable euphoria subside into complacency,” said Jason Bedrick, a research fellow at the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation. “Defenders of the status quo are vigorously mounting a counteroffensive to delay, block, and undo the choice reforms. We have entered the ‘Empire Strikes Back’ phase of the fight for school choice.”

In July, a West Virginia judge struck down a law that would have funneled state money into a program that incentivized families to pull their children out of public schools. Kanawha County Circuit Court Judge Joanna Tabit ruled that the Hope Scholarship voucher program violated the state’s constitutional mandate to provide “a thorough and efficient system of free schools.” The voucher program was supposed to go into effect this school year, and more than 3,000 students had been approved to receive about $4,300 each during the program’s inaugural cycle. 

MORE THAN 3,000 WEST VIRGINIA STUDENTS COULD MISS OUT ON SCHOOL CHOICE PROGRAM

Dale Lee, president of West Virginia’s largest teachers union, told the Associated Press that parents have the right to choose whether they want their children to homeschool or send them to private school but that the state shouldn’t be using taxpayer dollars to fund it. 

“It is one thing to allow parents the choice of where to educate their children, but it is another matter entirely when we entice them away from our public schools with public money as the incentive.” 

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey has filed for an appeal. The case is likely to go before the state’s new Intermediate Court of Appeals but could wind up in the West Virginia Supreme Court. 

Despite the growth of school choice in several states, some public school teachers the Washington Examiner spoke to in Virginia, Florida, and Georgia described it as nothing but a veiled attempt to take money away from public schools and put it into private ones that can select and reject candidates based on the color of their skin, gender, religious beliefs, and affiliations.

Opponents also argue that Republican-led legislatures pushed through bills to expand charter schools and voucher programs during the
COVID-19 pandemic
without putting in safeguards to make sure that students, their families, and taxpayers are protected from “discrimination, corruption, and fraud” that have at times stained alternative schooling options.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

They also point to some troubling figures. For example, seven states publicly fund homeschools with few, if any, checks on the quality of instruction or monitoring of student progress, according to a report by the Network for Public Education, an advocacy group that supports traditionally funded public schools. Nineteen states do not require teachers in voucher schools to be certified, while 26 states do not require that voucher students take the same state tests as their public and charter school peers.

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