“I couldn’t trust these people with my kids,” Nancy Andersen, a North Carolina mother, told me recently about her child’s school. She was speaking for herself and her family, but she’s far from alone.
In 2019, Andersen began reviewing her private Montessori school’s curriculum. What she found shocked her. Her elementary-age children were being taught that America was founded on rape and murder. Her students were instructed that the first Pilgrims were bigots filled with “hatred” and “greed.” The organizations that designed the curriculum contend that, in America, racism is “embedded in institutions and everyday life.”
“This was scary and caught me by surprise,” Andersen said.
Parents in North Carolina and around the country share Andersen’s sentiment. Other private schools, such as Sidwell Friends in Washington, D.C., (where former presidents have sent their children) also argue that America has “white supremacist origins” and offer racial affinity groups in which students can “explore their developing identities.”
These ideas are unpopular with voters and parents. In 2020, a nationally representative survey commissioned by the Heritage Foundation found that 70% of parents say that slavery was a tragedy but does not define America today.
What does define America? In 2021, an Associated Press-University of Chicago poll found that 85% of respondents believe “individual liberties and freedoms as defined by the Constitution” are important to our national identity.
Yet toxic lessons soaked in identity politics and cloaked behind the facade of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or DEI, have made their way into private and public schools across the country. DEI content, which is included in lessons in virtually every subject area, focuses on ethnic “identities” and radical instruction on sex. The former lessons harken back to the dark days of racial discrimination when students were treated differently based on skin color. The latter ideas force families to accept ideas about human biology that are unscientific and often leave minor children confused about their sex.
Understandably, Andersen left her private school for a different option when she discovered what her children were being taught. Tens of thousands of parents across the country did the same thing. In fact, government-assigned school enrollment dropped by 3% in fall 2020. That’s equivalent to the entire public school enrollment of Los Angeles and Chicago combined.
This trend has important implications for the future of school choice, or policies that would empower families to send their children to a school that best fits their needs and values.
Opponents of school choice like to claim that giving families options will “destroy public education.” This refrain is especially common among teachers unions and other liberal special interests groups.
In reality, school choice restores an authentic meaning to the words “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion.”
When parents choose to home-school or send their children to a school that better represents their values, they are preserving a diversity of ideas. School choice also allows families to customize the learning experience according to each child’s needs. Those needs are different, as are the proposed solutions. Learning pods and micro-schools, for example, have become an increasingly popular option for families in the post-pandemic era. West Virginia lawmakers just adopted a policy specifically allowing families to create pods and micro-schools. Policymakers in other states should consider following suit.
Parental choice in education also guarantees every student an equal opportunity to learn and succeed. Leftist activists have perverted equity to mean equal outcomes, regardless of personal behavior. But school choice is the true equalizer. Giving families more educational options means children from disadvantaged backgrounds will no longer be bound by their zip codes or financial status. They will have the same opportunities as others to move to a school that better fits their needs.
Finally, the future of school choice can only be forecast as inclusive. West Virginia policymakers adopted an education savings account proposal in 2021 that allows nearly every child in the state to apply for an account. In Arizona, Gov. Doug Ducey just signed a similar expansive proposal that gives every Arizona child the same opportunity. Lawmakers in Iowa and Texas are on the verge of adopting similar policies. This is what inclusion should look like — not mandatory racial affinity groups or policies that allow only children of a certain ethnicity to use the playground at certain times.
Activists have corrupted and institutionalized the ideas of diversity, equity, and inclusion. School choice will allow us to reclaim these terms and offer students a diversity of ideas and equal opportunities that include everyone. That’s the kind of education parents can trust for their children.
Jonathan Butcher is the Heritage Foundation’s Will Skillman Fellow in Education and author of Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth.
