Residentially assigned schooling remains one of our nation’s most glaring imperfections — not because it doesn’t work for any children but because it could never work for all children. We consign generations of families to schools that have never once boasted a literacy rate over 10%, yet when parents plead for alternatives, the powers that be tell them to wait. All parents, but especially low-income ones, need and deserve options more than ever when it comes to where their children attend school.
In a 2019 interview with the National Education Association, America’s largest teachers union, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who was then a candidate for president, said out loud and on the record what so many union-funded pols think but dare not say: that low-income parents who are desperate for more and better schooling options for their children should stay put and fix their existing schools themselves.