President Trump spoke about the state of our education system Tuesday night at the State of the Union, saying, “For too long, countless American children have been trapped in failing government schools. To rescue these students, 18 states have created school choice in the form of opportunity scholarships. The programs are so popular that tens of thousands of students remain on waiting lists.”
While the official waiting lists for currently enacted private school choice programs are indeed in the tens of thousands, how many more families would actually desire to have an educational option beyond their ZIP code-assigned school if they were given the opportunity?
Those of us in the school choice movement typically hear opponents make the argument that “families don’t want school choice! Ninety percent of families are choosing public schools!”
Union leader Randi Weingarten says it quite often.
What about the 90% of children whose parents choose to send them to public schools despite all @BetsyDeVosED attempts to undermine them? https://t.co/5qLDIQMeri
— Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten) December 10, 2019
.@BetsyDeVosED: ‘Teachers’ Unions Are the Only Thing Standing in the Way’ of School Choice— Really Betsy.. we are doing double duty fighting for public ed particularly because you seem to neglect it as the viable choice that 90% of parents opt for…. https://t.co/bh41mqaEWa
— Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten) January 29, 2019
Trump vilifying public schools which 90% of children attend while enshrining vouchers.. (which discriminate & have little evidence of academic achievement)
— Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten) February 5, 2020
It’s absolutely false that 90% of families choose to send their children to public schools.
First of all, according to the latest federal data, only 82% of children actually go to a district-controlled school (47.2 million out of 57.5 million). The rest were going to a private school (5.8 million), a public charter school (2.8 million), or were home-schooled (1.7 million).
Second, here’s the real point: Parents aren’t “choosing” those district public schools — the arbitrary red lines around their ZIP codes basically “choose” (in reality, assign) the schools. Just because a child is in a public school doesn’t mean the child’s family chose it.
At the American Federation for Children, we asked in state and national polling, “If it was your decision and you could select any type of K-12 school, what type of school would you select in order to obtain the best education for your child?” The largest survey conducted to ask this question was from RealClear Opinion Research in September 2019, interviewing 2,371 adults.
Only 30% of people said they would choose a district public school.
About 40% said they would pick a private school, and 13% said they’d pick a public charter school. Ten percent would choose to home-school, and 6% opted for virtual school.
What does that mean in terms of the number of students across the country? Assuming a schooling-age population of 57.5 million based upon that 2016 data, it means 17.5 million students would go to district public schools even if their families could choose another type of school.
But 40 million children would go to a nondistrict school if their parents had total educational freedom.
The demand for educational options other than an assigned district school is 40 million children. But according to the most recent federal data, only 10.3 million students were realizing that option.
But it goes beyond just preferences. Millions of families are desperately begging for a new educational opportunity for their children and grandchildren, and that opportunity is being squashed by a system designed to create orderly factory workers. It’s a crisis that has resulted in what a new report shows to be a travesty of our supposedly great cities: They have third-world educational results.
In San Francisco, 70% of white students are proficient in math. For black students, it’s only 12%. And yet California and its liberal Bay Area beacon are seemingly doing everything in their power to resist an agenda that puts families in control of their children’s education. Liberals say the state knows best despite a staggering 58-point gap between white and black children in San Francisco.
It’s why you see within the RealClear survey that 75% of African Americans would prefer to send their children anywhere other than government-run district schools. The system has utterly failed their children and grandchildren.
There’s a whole new landscape of educational opportunities that could be imagined if the structures of a Prussian education system from the 1800s weren’t stifling the freedom of American families to pursue those options. At least 40 million students seek to have that freedom in our K-12 education system that we as a nation vigorously support when it comes to educational freedom in the form of “universal pre-K” or Pell Grants for higher education.
Clearly, the demand for school choice is massive. And the system is meeting neither the preferences nor the needs of students.
Tommy Schultz (@Tommy_USA) is the vice president of marketing and communications for the American Federation for Children.
