The New Politics of School Choice By John J. Miller
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/03/07/the-new-politics-of-school-choice/#slide-1
It is surging in popularity as parents become more activist.
Jessica Bagos is the kind of mom who may be on the verge of transforming K–12 education. “I grew up in public schools, and I’ve always been a proponent of the public-school system,” she says. Then came the Covid-19 lockdowns. The public schools closed in Royal Oak, Mich., the Detroit suburb where she lives. When her twin sons were ready to enter kindergarten at the beginning of the last school year, the schools stayed closed. Her boys could connect with a teacher by video conference, but they couldn’t attend class in person. “You can’t put five-year-olds in front of monitors for hours and hours every day,” she says. Yet for months, her daily challenge was to stop them from wrestling with each other and instead keep them fixed to screens while she tried to hold down a full-time job from her home. “I used to cry in the mornings,” says Bagos. “Then I got mad.”
Last September, she and her husband sued Michigan’s government in federal court, joining several other parents who had suffered from their own frustrations. They seek to overturn an amendment to their state’s constitution that forbids them to pay for private education with money from a state-sponsored savings plan. For more than half a century, the amendment has blocked Michiganders from enjoying any form of school choice (apart from the kind paid for with personal funds) outside the public-school system. Meanwhile, other parent activists in Michigan have launched a petition drive that could create a $500 million program of educational savings accounts (ESAs), allowing families to pay for more kinds of education expenses for their kids, such as transportation costs, speech therapy, and tuition at Catholic schools and cosmetology colleges. Ben DeGrow, of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, the state’s free-market think tank, says that these combined efforts may lead to a watershed moment: “Everything about education in Michigan could change this year.”
It turns out that education already is changing in a lot of other states: Last year, 18 states enacted or expanded school-choice programs. This nearly quadrupled the number of K–12 students who are eligible to benefit from some form of voucher, tax-credit scholarship, or ESA, from a little more than 600,000 students in 2020–21 to more than 2.2 million today, according to an analysis by Jason Bedrick and Ed Tarnowski in Education Next. The biggest victory came in West Virginia, where lawmakers approved what may be the country’s most robust program of ESAs. Under the new law, 93 percent of K–12 students are eligible to participate. It remains to be implemented, but a large majority of West Virginia students soon could have the financial means to hire tutors, pay for after-school programs, or even exit the public-school system.
And 2022 could be an even bigger year for school choice. More than two dozen states already have school-choice bills before their legislatures. Oklahoma looks poised to pass a law that in its final form could be even more ambitious than West Virginia’s. Georgia and Iowa also may approve major reforms. “This is all about funding students, not systems,” says Corey A. DeAngelis, of the American Federation for Children, repeating a phrase that has become a mantra in the school-choice movement — in what may be the most important political moment in its long history.
The roots of the school-choice movement date to 1955, when the economists Milton and Rose Friedman called for giving the parents of school-age children “a sum equal to the estimated cost of educating a child in a government school, provided that at least this sum was spent on education in an approved school.” The idea was to create a market in education, breaking up the government’s virtual monopoly on schools and creating the competitive pressures that could lead to excellence. For decades, however, school choice remained just a libertarian theory. Then, in the 1990s, Governor Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, a white Republican, partnered with black Democrats in the state legislature to launch a means-tested voucher program in Milwaukee, allowing thousands of low-income students to enroll in private schools. It survived legal attacks by teachers’ unions and became a de facto demonstration project for the nation, as education scholars and pundits argued about the results of test scores and what they revealed about school choice in practice. One indisputable finding was that parents liked the ability to select schools for their kids — and today, a generation later, almost 30,000 kids in Milwaukee still participate.
For years, school-choice advocates believed that Milwaukee would offer a model for political success. All it took, they hoped, was building a strange-bedfellows partnership between conservatives and urban minorities, whose combined strength would bring vouchers first to the children of failing city schools, heavily attended by minority students, and later to everyone. Despite a few small-bore achievements — programs in Cleveland and Washington, D.C., for example — that’s not what happened.
In the face of staunch opposition from teachers’ unions, school choice suffered defeat after defeat in legislatures and remained mostly on the drawing board. Efforts at bold reform fared no better. In 2000, for example, a ballot initiative in Michigan proposed to offer vouchers to students throughout the state. Voters rejected it by a margin of two to one. Suburban Republicans were among its foes. Many of them already had engaged in a separate form of school choice, moving into what they regarded as good school districts. They wanted nothing to do with a plan that threatened to erase school-district boundaries and perhaps even lower their property values. Rural voters had their own suspicions, living in areas where public schools often are major employers and town identities are rooted in high-school athletics and histories.
Some conservatives still think that support for school choice can help them appeal to non-white voters. “Fifty-plus years ago, politicians stood in the schoolhouse door and wouldn’t let minorities in,” said Governor Doug Ducey of Arizona on January 10, in his state-of-the-state address. “Today, union-backed politicians stand in the schoolhouse door and won’t let minorities out.” Then he urged legislators to “expand school choice any way we can.”
Arizona has led the way for years, and around 80,000 of its students now participate in some form of school choice. Only Florida has more, with about 150,000. Rather than focusing on low-income families in Phoenix or Miami, however, school-choice backers in these states have created opportunities for discrete groups of students, such as special-needs kids or Native Americans who live on reservations. As these programs have gained popularity among parents and the public, lawmakers have let them grow incrementally. If the progress has been steady, it also has been slow: Today, fewer than 4 percent of all students nationwide participate in some form of private-education choice.
Some advocates of school choice now recommend a partisan strategy. In a study last year for the American Enterprise Institute, Jay P. Greene and James D. Paul examined 70 times when state legislatures have approved stand-alone private-school-choice bills since 1990. In only three cases did Republicans need any Democratic votes for final passage. “Few Democrats ever vote in favor of school choice, and the few that do rarely matter,” says Greene, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “They’re inconsequential.” He adds that the most effective organizations to push for reforms aren’t the ones that try to forge bipartisan coalitions but conservative grassroots groups such as Parents Defending Education and Moms for Liberty.
Meanwhile, school choice appears to be surging in popularity. Last June, at the conclusion of a school year marked by lockdowns and remote learning, a poll by RealClear Opinion Research showed that 74 percent of registered voters supported school choice. This was up from 64 percent in an identical survey in April 2020. At the same time, public schools are losing favor. In a Gallup poll last August, 54 percent of Americans said they were dissatisfied with K–12 education, up from 47 percent before the pandemic. Many parents are voting with their feet. At the start of the pandemic, about 5.4 percent of U.S. households with school-age children reported homeschooling, according to the Census Bureau. By the fall of 2020, this rate had more than doubled, to 11.1 percent. Interestingly, blacks during this period went from the racial or ethnic group least likely to homeschool (3.3 percent) to the one most likely to homeschool (16.1 percent).
“Everybody was home from work,” says Lynn Aronoff, of the Michigan-based Parent Advocates for Choice in Education. “We watched it. We couldn’t look away. We had kids who didn’t learn for a whole year.” Studies are starting to show that she’s right. A report from McKinsey & Company, for example, estimated that students at the conclusion of last school year were on average five months behind on their math skills and four months behind on reading. Michigan’s latest student-assessment scores, published in August, showed that while reading scores were mixed, math scores had dropped for every grade tested. “Parents are waking up to what’s happening,” says Aronoff. “It has turned people into activists about their kids.”
The surge in parent activism has started to shape elections. In Virginia, exasperation over public schools became a defining moment in last year’s race for governor. At a debate between the two candidates, Republican Glenn Youngkin said that his opponent, Democrat Terry McAuliffe, had vetoed legislation that would have required public schools to inform parents about sexually explicit content in teaching materials. McAuliffe shot back: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” At a time when many Virginians were showing up at school-board meetings to complain about critical race theory, mask mandates, and transgender policies, McAuliffe’s words displayed a striking contempt for the role of parents in the education of their own children — and it helped drive Youngkin to victory in a race he once wasn’t expected to win.
Youngkin hasn’t said much about school choice. Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor Winsome Sears, a black Republican, is a strong supporter. “The money in education follows the brick building, it doesn’t follow the child,” she told the Wall Street Journal. “I don’t care about the brick building. I care about the human life. We don’t get do-overs for our children.” With Democrats in control of the state senate, Youngkin probably won’t see an ESA bill anytime soon — but there may be more school-choice success stories in 2022 because of his win.
“Everybody paid attention to what happened in Virginia,” says Beth DeShone, of the Great Lakes Education Project, a group that supports school choice in Michigan. Well, almost everybody: On January 15, the Michigan Democratic Party posted a statement on its Facebook page: “The purpose of a public education in a public school is not to teach kids only what parents want them to learn. It is to teach them what society needs them to know. The client of the public school is not the parent, but the entire community, the public.” The comment wasn’t as pithy as McAuliffe’s remark, it didn’t come from the mouth of an actual candidate, and the Democrats quickly deleted it. Yet DeShone calls it just as revealing: “They said the quiet part out loud.”
Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, stayed silent on the flap, but her own views about parental rights in education are clear. In November, she vetoed a pair of bills passed by the Republican-controlled state legislature that would have created ESAs. “The movement to privatize education in this state has been a catastrophic failure, causing Michigan students to fall behind the rest of the nation,” she said. Yet her obstruction may represent only a temporary setback. School-choice advocates have started a petition drive to adopt ESAs without the governor’s approval. Under Michigan law, if they collect a little more than 340,000 valid signatures, the legislature can vote them into law without the governor’s input. “We’ll turn in the forms by Memorial Day, and the legislature will pass the law by Labor Day,” says Fred Wszolek, who is managing the campaign.
If this happens, the next major goal for Michigan’s school-choice boosters will be to invalidate the state’s constitutional prohibition on using public dollars to support private schools — in other words, to win the federal lawsuit filed by those disgruntled parents. The problem is Michigan’s Blaine amendment, named for James Blaine, a 19th-century Republican politician from Maine who was the GOP’s presidential candidate in 1884. A critic of Catholicism, he crusaded against the use of tax dollars to pay for Catholic schools — and his influence led dozens of states to pass these restrictions. Michigan’s moment came in 1970, when the ad hoc “Council Against Parochiaid” sponsored a ballot initiative, which voters approved. Ever since, the state’s constitution has banned private-school choice in Michigan.
In recent years, however, Blaine amendments themselves have fallen under fresh scrutiny. In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue that although states don’t have to fund private education, once they choose to support it, they can’t exclude religious schools. Last December, the justices heard oral arguments in Carson v. Makin, a case from Maine that involves a similar question. A new ruling could arrive at any time. The modern jurisprudence of religious freedom may overturn Blaine amendments everywhere, including Michigan.
While some supporters of Michigan’s petition drive for ESAs believe that their prospective law is written in a way that would allow it to survive a legal assault, others are less confident — and just about everyone in the state who supports school choice would like to see the federal lawsuit triumph against the Blaine amendment. “A successful lawsuit would remove all shadow of doubt,” says Peter Ruddell, a Lansing lawyer who helped draft the ESA legislation. “It would create the certainty we all want.”
Jessica Bagos, the mom who’s suing, is certain of one thing: “We need school choice, and we need it now.”
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