SCHOOL CHOICE

Why Does the Left Hate It?

The History

In 1778, Adam Smith argued that parents should hire teachers as they knew the most about their child’s learning styles and needs. For 80 years after our founding, parents drove their child’s education.  After that, a slow but huge push for mandatory, state-funded, public education arose, in part against the way Catholic immigrants were providing schools. In 1955, Milton Friedman wrote an essay, “The Role of Government in Education,” which explained why the value of the free market—competition and consumer freedom—would generate the best results in education. 

By the time of Friedman’s writing, the government monopolized public schools. When the government administers all the systems, forces children to go to schools in their district and pays for it, parents are forced out.  While private schools existed, they weren’t cheap; the poor couldn’t afford them and many lived in areas with awful schools.  It also seems unfair that when your tax money is paying for schools, you have to pay your taxes AND pay again to send your kids to a better school.

In 1990, Milwaukee Parental Choice Program began (a low-income voucher system), long after the idea first surfaced.  Around the same time, public charter schools started to offer another option, lower-cost, parent-involved teaching. Much later, 18 states, plus DC launched similar voucher programs.  In 2011, 12 states either created new school choice programs or expanded the ones that existed.  Arizona, under Governor Ducey, created an education savings account option which gave parents taxpayer money to pay for education expenses, including costs for home schooling.  The savings account idea has now been adopted in Florida, Tennessee, Mississippi and North Carolina.   

The Enemies of Choice

Given a history of proven benefits to giving parents and children choice, it would be hard to imagine that anyone would deprive children the right to a school that worked for them.  But one powerful group is determined to force every child back into public schools—the teachers’ unions, especially, the big enchilada, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and its president, Randi Weingarten.  You’ve heard the name.  She’s the one most responsible for ensuring that schools remained closed during Covid, using pressure on the CDC to get the backing she wanted. 

Other union leaders have banded together in the effort to seize control back from parents.  I’d like to point out that this doesn’t mean most teachers side with these goals.  Many are great and want the best for their students, often taking jobs in dangerous areas to offer the most benefit to those most needing it.

However, unions are a different animal.  While they may have been the least-bad option back when employers treated workers like slaves (except for paying them small wages), they no longer really do much for workers.   This is why the only unions growing at all are government unions.  Even FDR felt that unionization should NEVER be allowed for government workers.  Teachers’ unions are government unions.  They rarely care what the teachers want; they are there to prop up their own interests and benefits.  Running a union can be very profitable.  Randi, herself, made $560,000 in 2021 and that doesn’t include all her benefits.  The things unions fear are school choice and the National Labor Relations Act, which give people the right NOT to join a union.  Either or both would diminish the union’s power.  BTW, Randi has come out since Covid pretending she was anxious to re-open schools; she never supported that.

The government run by the Left is also an enemy of choice.  Once they control something (think health care), they won’t give it up.  And sadly, when they own it, they usually make a muck of it.  These are powerful and compelling enemies of choice.  And politicians, being given wads of cash from unions, feel they need to support them.

Covid Reveals

Not every parent realized how bad the schools were, especially in the nicer, more expensive districts.  But Covid rules allowed them to see the poor state of teaching, as well as the kinds of things being taught, right on their own PC screens.  Not only was too much of the “teaching” indoctrination, it was also very time-limited and poorly managed.  The claim was how hard it was to teach online.  However, online and successful K-12 education has been available for more than 20 years.  The technology is there. 

The good news is that given the data, many parents acted.  They pulled their kids out, opting for charter schools, private schools, home-schooling and a variant where parents collaborated and hired a teacher to create a little neighborhood school.  In most cases, these kids will never come back to public schools.  Unions are fighting the closure of schools who no longer have enough enrollees to justify their existence.

Left Behind

This was all good news…except for the poorest kids.  They couldn’t afford any of the options above.  In many cases, they didn’t have the high-speed internet required, or even a suitable PC or tablet.  Parental support was limited, as in most cases, the parents had to be at work.  Democrats claim to be all about “the children,” using “for the children” as the excuse for infringing on our rights.  But their support of teachers’ unions only hurts these kids. 

As I showed in the history section, some states are defying the union and Democrats push to “save” public schools.  What’s odd is that there is a way public schools and other options can co-exist.  As Milton Friedman said, bring in competition which would force the public schools to improve.  Competition brings out the best; just look at our current cell phone. Governments can’t do that.

But look at which states are out there, winning against the unions.  It isn’t California or New York.  Blue state politicians love union money, so many decisions they make favor unions over parents.  What’s needed is a national mandate to force competition.  And kids going to bad schools will never be given the opportunity to succeed. This is a huge part of the increased income gap; if you can’t read, you’ll never move up.

Competition=Excellence

Time to allow all forms of education to thrive.  Parents want the best for their kids, no matter what their socio-economic status is.  In a perfect world, parents would control the amount of money the schools get in a special account.  If a child goes to public school, the school gets the money.  If not, it goes to where the parents want it to go.  Sure, some bad schools will arise in the private sector, but they will quickly go broke.  Some public schools will go out of existence, if they fail to rise to the level needed to compete.  And that’s as it should be. 

A perfect example is the Post Office.  FedEx, then UPS and even Amazon, compete for the right to deliver a package to you.  Doesn’t that work better for all of us?  And package delivery, while nice, isn’t as important as education.  Time to get the Federal government out of the school business and allow all comers to compete to educate our children.