Imagine if you were only legally allowed to shop at one grocery store. The produce is rotten, and the store doesn’t have any of your favorite items. Worse, other customers are violent, and they harass you, so you feel unsafe every time you shop. If you pay an exorbitant amount of money, you could shop at a nicer grocery store, but you can’t afford it. You complain, but the bureaucracy doesn’t seem to care. After all, you can’t take your business anywhere else. So, you keep going to the same store, and you get sick because you don’t have access to a healthy diet.
Public schools are not grocery stores, but to some, this scene describes the reality of the American public school system. Excepting special circumstances, parents are legally and financially forced to send their children to the public school in their neighborhood—no matter its quality. The conditions at many schools are deeply concerning, to put it gently. Educational achievement is dropping while chronic absenteeism skyrockets. For schools in poor, inner-city areas, the problems are most severe. Violence is endemic, and for students, the school dynamic becomes about fear and discipline rather than learning. In one Baltimore high school, for example, over three-quarters of students read at an elementary school level. Compounding the issue, public school systems around the country have lowered their standards. Students get pushed through and graduate, even though they fail their classes. This makes high school diplomas nearly worthless and pushes employers to require more and more higher education.
Public education is where the government can have the greatest impact on improving the lives of its citizens. Since it is the key to social mobility, quality public education can combat inequality, boost the economy, and reduce crime. Therefore, the current state of public education is one of our most pressing problems. It is especially tragic, given the potential for education to remedy inequality, that public schools are so unequal. Dismal, shameful public school performance needs to be a call to action. Most Americans can agree: Public education in the United States needs a radical change.
The common line used by defenders of the status quo is that public schools need more funding. The New York City public school system spends $38,000 per student annually. In San Francisco, that number is $27,000. In Baltimore City, $21,000. These numbers are comparable to, if not greater than, tuition at posh private schools. It is important to remember that money per student is spread equally across school districts, so even the lower performing schools in a district spend staggering amounts per student.
It is with this background that school choice programs have been exploding in popularity. They currently operate in 33 states, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico. In 2023, 8 states expanded or passed school choice programs. Over 1 million students across the nation (out of approximately 50 million K-12 students) participate in these programs. This has doubled from just 2018. The future looks even more promising for school choice; in January of this year, President Trump signed an executive order to allow the federal government to fund school choice programs.
What is school choice? The term refers to a range of programs where, instead of administering a child’s education through public schools, the government subsidizes private school education.
There are three main types of school choice programs: Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), vouchers, and tax-credit scholarship programs. ESAs are publicly funded savings accounts that parents can use for various educational purposes, such as paying school tuition, tutoring, and online educational programs. Vouchers are payments that parents can use to pay for their child’s private school tuition. Tax-credit scholarship programs are designed to accomplish this without direct government funding. They allow individuals to donate to nonprofit organizations that pay students’ private school tuition and receive most or all of the money back through tax credits.
School choice was first proposed in 1859 by English philosopher John Stuart Mill. It was introduced to the American political discourse in 1955 by economist Milton Friedman. In The Role of Government in Education, Friedman argued that while the government should fund the education of children, it should not administer the education itself. “Here, as in other fields,” Friedman wrote, “competitive private enterprise is likely to be far more efficient in meeting consumer demands than … nationalized enterprises.”
Why do the proponents of school choice think that it will work? At its core, the answer is competition. Right now, public schools have a monopoly on students who cannot afford private school, which is the majority of students. If private schools were accessible to these students, then public schools would be pushed to perform better. According to some scholars, research shows that public schools “improve communication with parents and are more likely to fire ineffective staff and try new interventions when faced with the possibility of losing students to private schools.”
School choice could also increase diversity in K-12 education. Right now, schools are staggeringly segregated, and shockingly, it’s getting worse. Increasing numbers of Black students attend extremely segregated schools, where up to 99% of the students are Black. Allowing these students to choose private schools gives them the opportunity to be educated in more diverse environments. Here, school choice would act similarly to the desegregation busing supported by progressives, while hopefully avoiding that policy’s intense backlash.
Proponents of school choice claim that for students using choice programs, private school education leads to better outcomes than staying in public school. How could this be true if private schools aren’t spending more per student than public ones? One explanation is that private schools are administered more efficiently than their public counterparts. Another possibility is peer effects. Private schools tend to have more motivated students, who come from families that care more about education. The idea is that this could “rub off” on students who use school choice to attend private schools.
As school choice programs have expanded across the country, they have generated staunch opposition. Much of this opposition has been driven by teachers’ unions, organizations that lost massive amounts of credibility during the COVID-19 pandemic. The National Education Association, America’s largest teacher’s union, asserts that the programs “drain taxpayer dollars from public schools” and harm the already struggling public school system.
Opponents of school choice point to an important piece of context: the dark history of private school vouchers. The first substantial voucher programs in America emerged in the 1950s, during the South’s frenzy to avoid desegregation. After the Supreme Court desegregated public schools in Brown versus Board of Education, white Southerners turned to segregated private schools—“segregation academies”—to resist integration. Local and state governments enacted school voucher programs to fund these segregated private schools. In some cases, public schools were even shut down.
To some who rally against school choice, modern programs are an extension of this racist history. Recently, public schools have become a key battleground in the culture wars over issues like critical race theory, DEI, and the removal of prayer and even the pledge of allegiance. Private schools can appeal to conservative parents by offering education grounded in religious values. Therefore, school choice gives parents more control over their children’s education, but some think that this is dangerous. Private schools have caused controversy for teaching creationism instead of evolution and having policies deemed homophobic. “These just don’t seem to be the values that we would want to be funding with tax dollars,” said Susan Spicka, executive director of a group opposing school choice.
Underlying these criticisms is the ideal of the “common school.” Public education is meant to do more than just prepare students to be productive workers. It is also meant to inculcate them with a common set of democratic, civic values. Educating diverse groups of students under the same school roof unites the next generation and builds a shared American culture. Private schools, which are free to accept certain students and teach their own set of values, undermine the common school.
Finally, school choice programs are attacked as “handouts to the wealthy.” In Arizona and Ohio, the school choice programs are not capped by income, meaning that they are available to all students. In both of these states, the majority of government funding is going towards the tuition of students who were already in private schools before using the funding. This indicates that the programs in these states are primarily benefiting wealthier students instead of the low-income students that they are marketed to help. Also, the government’s universal subsidizing of private school tuition is likely to cause these schools to raise their tuition (this is why college education is so expensive), so these programs won’t even make private school cheaper for wealthier families.
While some of the dispute over school choice stems from different perspectives on the role of the government or the purpose of public education, much of it boils down to one fundamental question: do school choice programs work? Partisans on both sides claim that the answer is obvious, but the academic literature is conflicted.
Historically, studies have found that school choice programs create positive impacts for participating students. These studies generally evaluated programs in specific cities and determined that vouchers increased the academic performance of students, particularly Black students. However, as state-wide school voucher programs have been implemented in recent years, studies have shown negative effects.
Take a 2018 study that examined the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program, which was the largest voucher program in the country at the time and restricted to low-income students. Controlling for confounding variables, the authors found that students who used vouchers to attend private schools scored lower on standardized math testing and continued to experience an annual loss in math scores while enrolled in private schools. One possible explanation is that “low-income voucher students are moving into environments substantially behind their peers in terms of academic achievement,” which could cause challenges. Beyond Indiana, recent studies have also concluded that the school choice programs in Louisiana and Ohio were detrimental to their participants.
On the other hand, a 2020 study evaluated the North Carolina Opportunity Scholarship Program, a large, diverse program restricted to low-income students (after the study, the program was changed to have no income limits). Controlling for confounding variables, the study found that “voucher recipients scored higher than their public school counterparts in all three subject areas examined—math, reading, and language”.
Research has also substantiated the claim that competition from school choice spurs public schools to improve. A 2023 study on Florida’s Tax Credit scholarship program, which had grown to enroll over 100,000 students, found that students in public schools with a high level of private school competition experienced test score improvement. The positive effects were especially significant for lower income students.
After reviewing the data, it appears that school choice is a promising idea but certainly not a magic fix to our country’s failing education system. School choice should continue to be tried out and rigorously studied. To accomplish their goals, programs need to be restricted to low income students. In North Carolina’s program, which showed success when studied, the median household income for new voucher recipients was $16,213. Additionally, research has indicated that the benefits of school choice are the greatest for low income and Black students—the students that our public school system is failing the most. To avoid subsidizing wealthy families and enabling private schools to raise their costs, states adopting school choice should avoid universal programs like Arizona’s or Ohio’s.
We need a solution to our schooling that recognizes that our public school system is not universally bad. Rather, it is shamefully unequal. School choice programs for low-income students are a promising, innovative way to alleviate the crisis. While conflicting evidence over efficacy and the weakening of the common school are legitimate concerns, the conditions in our nation’s worst public schools are so bad that students deserve a way out.
Featured Image Source: Oklahoma Historical Society