Elites keep making education about themselves

This month, Congress put school-choice funding on offer to the states as part of the Big Beautiful Bill. Progressives have bashed the provision for the harm they claim school choice will do to under-resourced school districts. But the program saps not a dollar from public schools, which shows the protest for what it is: elitist bluster. The same progressives who fumbled their schools’ Covid responses, instituted woke curriculum and pushed adolescent gender transitioning should not decree to parents which school is best for their children. Public schools have not earned Americans’ trust over these past few years; many private schools have.

Under the new measure, families can receive a tax credit for donations to an approved scholarship-granting nonprofit organization. While their own child may not benefit, their donation funds private-school tuition for low-income or special-needs students. The tax break is capped at $1,700 and is not offered to families with an income of more than three times the local median. 

The state governor or legislature, however, must opt in to the program. For blue states, this would require a measure of humility, to try something new; a bit of boldness, to stand up to teachers’ unions; and a paradigm shift that recenters education around what is best for students, not school districts. Will they give low-income families the agency over their children’s education that, until now, has been the prerogative of the elites?

Opponents of school choice argue that a voucher system would drain underperforming districts of students. That is true. Vouchers would not, however, leave an educational desert in low-income areas. I personally know three people who would start inner-city private schools if funding were available. Dale Scott, a black father in a low-income neighborhood near Denver, believes that, with competition, public schools in his district “would start to ask questions, like, what do we need to do in order to be able to keep our performing students in our school? What do we need to do about this exodus to certain types of schools? And so I think it would create a better overall school system.”

Some opponents question private schools’ educational outcomes. Private schools lack accountability, they argue, and school-choice studies reach varying conclusions as to whether students become more academically successful when they move to a private school. Some studies find that private-school students are more likely to finish high school, enroll in college and graduate with a degree. Others suggest that in the short term, at least, public-school students outperform their private-school peers on standardized tests. Public schools teach toward these assessments, of course. While private-school students may not perform as well on multiple-choice tests, the metric may not reflect how well schools are training their students to think.

But let’s put aside surveys, studies and study methodologies – if parents send their student to a private school and find it lacking in academic rigor, they will pull their student after a year, and public-school districts have nothing to fear. Parents such as Dale Scott dismiss those who consider private schools an inferior education. “When you’re in the inner city of Denver, and I would even say parts of Aurora, where we live now” – a district with a chronic absenteeism rate of 40 percent – “there’s a different quality of education” in private schools. Colorado lacks a government-funded voucher system, but the Scotts work with a nonprofit scholarship organization to send their four children to a private school.

To Scott and parents like him, such a school means more than improved test scores. His family has found the community, shared vision and accountability that their local public school lacked. “Having my kids in a private-school environment that aligns with both my academic hopes [and] my moral and religious convictions, I’ve just watched my kids prosper. I’ve watched them be really well educated. I’ve watched them thrive and I watched them become really productive… [they’re] finding opportunities to be servants of their community, not causing problems, not committing crimes, etc.” 

Aren’t those stories worth any restructuring of our educational funding system? Don’t parents know best what kind of school their children need? If underperforming schools do close and teachers’ unions feel the heat, so be it. It is not about them. It is not about the adults, and it is not about a system. This is a matter of children prospering.