If anyone needed a wake-up call about the urgent need to expand school choice, last week’s release of student achievement data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress is the loudest alarm clock we have heard in years. It should jolt every family, every school, and every elected official into action.
The numbers are sobering: only 41% of our nation’s fourth graders are proficient in math and only 35% are proficient in reading. As students get older, the outlook looks even bleaker: only 34% of eighth graders are proficient in reading and math.
What’s worse is that across almost every metric, with the exception of fourth grade math, student achievement is at lower levels today than it was two years ago.
How can we address these challenges quickly? Some changes need to happen at the school and district level and others need to happen at the state level. All of these changes, though, require a more thorough embrace of, and respect for, the role that parents play in their children’s education.
At the local level, schools and school systems with high numbers of struggling students should immediately reevaluate the reading and math curricula they are using. Not all textbooks and learning materials are created equal. To find rigorous, relevant, and appropriate educational resources that actually work to increase achievement, parents must be involved from the very beginning, with real seats at the decision-making tables.
Second, schools of all types should recommit to meaningfully engaging parents in their children’s education — and not just through fundraisers and bake sales. Every school should keep parents regularly informed about their children’s academic progress, especially when it comes to literacy. Schools should also develop benchmarks for responsiveness to parent concerns and commit to taking parent feedback seriously. No mother or father should ever break down in tears, as I once did, because she or he cannot get answers about their child’s progress or academic growth.
For bigger, broader improvements that can benefit a generation or more, states must take action to expand school choice.
Programs such as education savings accounts, opportunity scholarships, open enrollment in traditional public schools, and expanded charter school authorization can help make educational choices more widely available to families across the nation. Research tells us that when parents are provided with a variety of school choice options for their children’s education graduation rates increase and students are better prepared for their futures.
In the 1990s and 2000s, I worked with a bipartisan team of legislators to help pass the nation’s first federally funded opportunity scholarship program for low-income children in the District of Columbia. The creation of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program kick-started a series of broad-based education reforms in the District (largely focusing on expanding school choices) that continue to pay dividends today. For example, D.C. was one of only two states or jurisdictions to actually show meaningful improvement in NAEP scores this year. More than any other reform, broad-based school choice works best.
Opponents of school choice will argue that to improve student achievement, we need to spend more money, and wait even longer, to get results. But we’ve spent the money — with increased federal investments in K-12 education exceeding billions of dollars over the past decade, with no results — and we’re simply out of time.
Our children cannot wait, and frankly, we shouldn’t ask them to.
We have a lot at stake as a country. Parents are deeply worried. They know that students who are not fully literate and who cannot grasp basic math functions will be stymied by a myriad of roadblocks to their lifelong success. Children from lower-income families will encounter even more barriers, pushing the American dream so far in the distance that it seems entirely unattainable.
Together, we can restore the American dream for children in our country but only if we recognize the vital role their parents play in their success and empower them to make decisions for their children’s futures. Let’s do it.
Virginia Walden Ford is an education advocate, the subject of the feature film Miss Virginia, and the author of the forthcoming book School Choice: A Legacy to Keep.
