The COVID-19 crisis has severely affected the lives of virtually everyone, and K-12 families, students, and teachers have not been spared. It has become abundantly clear during this crisis that America’s K-12 system lacks the necessary flexibility and parent choice needed for our students to be successful in today’s world.
Homeschooling has become increasingly popular over the years. Before the pandemic, more than 2.5 million K-12 students were being homeschooled, and that number was growing at around 5% per year. Because of quarantines, millions of parents and students became instant homeschoolers, which was made more difficult because too many public school districts were slow or even reluctant to transition to online learning.
Initially, many school districts cited disability laws as a reason they couldn’t ramp up and conduct online learning. To her great credit, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos very quickly said that districts could not use disability laws as an excuse to avoid educating students and issued clarified federal guidance.
In Fairfax County, Virginia, one of the nation’s largest school districts with 190,000 students, schools were closed on March 13. The district announced online learning would not even begin for another month. On April 14, the day it was to begin, the system crashed, and online learning was postponed.
It isn’t just the public school districts’ inability to transition effectively. According to the Pew Research Center, 15% of households with school-age children do not have high-speed internet at home. That number is 30% for lower-income households. Overall, 17% of teenagers are unable to do some or all of their homework because they don’t have reliable access to a computer or the internet. This is known as the “homework gap.”
The CARES Act that Congress recently passed included a $30 billion Educational Stabilization Fund, with just over $13 billion for K-12 and the rest for higher education. Sadly, only a portion of the funds are intended for K-12 distance learning for students, although governors will have $3 billion in discretionary funds that can be applied in a number of ways to help directly with student learning.
Congress was right to appropriate funds for education during this crisis, but a substantial portion of those funds should have been in the form of direct aid to families, including lower-income families whose children attend private schools. Families could be using these funds for education technology and materials and ideally for summer courses so students will be better prepared to advance to the next grade in the fall.
It’s important to note that private school families should be a bigger concern for policymakers. There are 5.5 million students in private schools today. If all of these students were in public schools, the cost would be at least $75 billion annually. Of these 5.5 million students, conservatively, about 1.7 million are in lower-income families. Many of these families will struggle to pay tuition, putting the survival of too many private schools at serious risk. The closure of hundreds of private schools would be an absolute tragedy for families and students. Moreover, it would be a financial disaster for school districts that would have to spend billions of dollars absorbing additional students into the public system.
States are already hemorrhaging money because of the economic slowdown, and they should be thinking boldly about how they can maximize educational opportunity and quality during and after this crisis. For example, there are nearly 2 million available private school seats around the country, and the vast majority of these schools could successfully educate children for less than the average per-pupil expenditure in public schools. Providing a scholarship or an Education Savings Account for 80% of the per-pupil public school expenditure would save states tens of millions of dollars.
The teachers’ unions solution to the crisis is to ask for the moon and shovel a bunch of new money right into the status quo. Mind you, this is a status quo where nearly two-thirds of fourth and eighth-grade students are not proficient in reading or math and where families have to spend billions to remediate public high school graduates. The teachers’ unions have asked the federal government for an additional $200 billion in relief for education and another $100 billion for infrastructure. The more sensible approach for policymakers is to take the shackles off the K-12 system, pull it into the 21st century, and give families greater educational freedom, flexibility, and choice.
If additional federal funding for education is forthcoming, and if states want to ensure educational opportunity and quality in the face of budget challenges, policymakers must reject the status quo and consider bolder policies. What about creating federal or state Education Savings Accounts or microgrants controlled by families for educational purposes? What about tuition tax deductions for lower-income private school families? What about enacting Education Freedom Scholarships legislation and boosting the charitable deduction for individuals and corporations to fund them? What about taking a page from 2005, when Sen. Ted Kennedy worked with Republicans and the White House to provide vouchers for 150,000 displaced students as a result of Hurricane Katrina?
There are plenty of good ideas out there if policymakers at the federal and state level are willing to empower families in the face of this crisis. Now is the time to think boldly, put partisan divisions aside, and focus solely on what will help K-12 students.
John Schilling is the president of the American Federation for Children.
