Welcome to back-to-school season: 84% of the 25 largest public school districts in the country have decided not to reopen with any in-person instruction this fall.
Teachers unions across the country are fighting to keep public schools closed in the name of safety, and many teachers’ fears are genuine and understandable. Yet while they are advocating for building closures, private businesses, including daycares and private schools, are fighting to reopen. This divide highlights a major fault line in America: the vast gulf between the incentives guiding public vs. those guiding private establishments. After all, the major difference between these services is that one of them receives your money through property taxes regardless of how well their reopening decisions meet the needs of families.
In a democratic country with a large government, this tension has to be handled with great care. In America today, it is not. And if this isn’t corrected, it’ll have long-standing consequences.
Imagine if you still had to pay Walmart the same amount of money each week regardless of whether it reopened for in-person shopping and provided you with adequate and fresh groceries for your family. The grocery store would have a very different set of incentives than it does today. Because fresh groceries are more costly to provide and buildings are expensive to maintain, the store would profit from remaining closed — and giving you subpar produce when it opened.
But that’s not what happened. Walmart and other private stores know you can take your money elsewhere.
Private schools and charter schools — though charters are public, they are in direct competition with what we more accurately might call government schools, thus sharing many of the incentives of fully private schools — similarly understand that families can take their money elsewhere if they don’t deliver an adequate educational experience. This might explain why a nationally representative survey found that parents of children in private and charter schools were at least 50% more satisfied with the instruction provided during the spring lockdown than parents of children in traditional public schools. The same national survey found that private and charter schools were about 20% more likely to introduce new content to their students during the lockdown than district-run public schools.
This difference in incentives might also explain why some private schools went so far as to fight actively against orders from government officials to remain closed in places such as Montgomery County, Maryland, and Dane County, Wisconsin. Some private schools got creative to work around such orders. For example, Capital Christian School in California trained its teachers as daycare workers and rebranded itself as a “childcare center” because the county’s closure order only applied to “schools.” Others have suggested that private schools in Dane County, Wisconsin, renumber their grades since, technically, the order there only applies to schools serving children in grades 3-12.
Either way, keeping private schools closed provides a clear benefit to nearby public schools: Shutting down their competition minimizes funding losses associated with reductions in enrollment. In Montgomery County, Maryland, for example, private schools were ordered to remain closed for in-person instruction until Oct. 1, just one day after the public school enrollment count deadline, a clear attempt to level the playing field artificially for government schools by letting public unions decide even for those they do not represent.
Several public school districts that decided not to reopen in-person are even reopening their elementary schools as “childcare” centers and charging families for the service out-of-pocket. This practice — already happening in school districts in states such as Arizona, California, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Virginia — arguably violates many states’ constitutions since they require the provision of schooling for “free.” These public school districts are essentially charging families twice for the same service: once through property taxes and again through out-of-pocket fees.
Imagine if you paid a private school $15,000 in nonrefundable tuition and it refused to open its doors for your child unless you paid another $15,000 for “childcare.” That would be considered unlawful extortion. Yet that’s essentially what these public school districts are doing.
But this leads us to a more important question: If elementary schools can reopen for in-person daycare, then why aren’t they able to reopen for in-person learning? The problem is that one group of employees is refusing to return to work in school buildings, whereas another group is willing to monitor the same students in-person in the same locations. Daycare employees are watching the children in schools, while teachers are providing remote instruction from their homes.
That is a great deal for public school teachers. But families in these districts now have to pay two employees for the job of one.
The situation has gotten so bad that it’s pushing many families to unenroll their children from the school system to homeschool full-time. For example, homeschool filings are up 129% from the same time last year in Loudoun County, Virginia, and up 229% from the same time last year in Maricopa County, Arizona. And a new national Gallup poll suggests that public school enrollment will drop 7 percentage points this school year. Because around 50 million children attended public schools before the pandemic, this finding implies that the K-12 public school system could experience an exodus of about 3.5 million students. These decisions by families are causing some public school districts to realize that they might actually lose some money this year despite their near-monopoly on education funding.
In fact, Denver Public Schools and Falls Church City Public Schools in Virginia, neither of which are planning to reopen in-person, both put out statements discouraging families from unenrolling their children because of budgetary concerns. And a principal of a San Diego elementary school that is not offering in-person instruction emailed new homeschool families asking them to “give our public schools a chance” after threatening them with investigations from Child Welfare Services if they didn’t send her proof of their children’s participation in an accredited homeschool program.
They aren’t providing families with in-person options, but they don’t want families to access alternatives either.
Some evidence also indicates that public school reopening decisions are linked to politics and teachers unions’ influence rather than safety. Education Week has published data on the reopening decisions of 738 large school districts, which cover about one-third of all public school students in the country. My latest analysis of these data, published at Reason magazine, found that school districts located in states with stronger teachers unions are less likely to reopen in-person this fall.
For example, 79% of Florida school districts in the dataset are planning to reopen full-time with in-person instruction this fall. However, just 5% of school districts in California, a state with much stronger teachers unions, are planning to do the same. Similarly, 36% of school districts in right-to-work states have decided to offer full-time, in-person instruction this fall, whereas only 10% of school districts in states that previously required union membership as a condition of employment made the same decision.
Meanwhile, COVID-19 risk in the areas studied, as measured by both cases per capita and deaths per capita, was statistically unrelated to public school district reopening decisions. Jon Valant’s initial analysis of these data, published at the Brookings Institution, similarly found that school district reopening decisions were unrelated to coronavirus risk in the county.
The public school system is inherently political. Ten major teachers unions recently joined a coalition including the Democratic Socialists of America to demand more federal money, a ban on new charter schools and voucher programs, and police-free schools. The Los Angeles teachers union’s report on safely reopening schools included calls to defund the police, pass Medicare for All, and institute a wealth tax.
The American Federation of Teachers threatened “safety strikes” in July, and Detroit teachers voted to authorize a strike in late August. And teacher groups in Arizona have already forced a school district to cancel in-person classes because of a “sick out.” Other teacher groups protested reopening schools with fake obituaries, tombstones, and body bags.
The unions are, to be clear, also following the incentive structure. Teachers unions are just trying to do their jobs by maximizing benefits for their members. The same goes for the public school teachers themselves. These individuals are just making rational choices given the options in front of them. Most people would probably do the same thing if they were in these educators’ shoes, and we shouldn’t blame them for millions of families getting the short end of the stick. We should blame the system and the perverse incentives that come along with it.
And reform it. We should fund students instead of school systems, just like we do with several other taxpayer-funded initiatives such as Pell Grants, pre-K programs, and food stamps. The money goes to families that are then able to choose from various providers of the service.
K-12 education funding should similarly follow the child to the educational model parents choose, whether that be a private, public, charter, or home school. In this scenario, we wouldn’t worry so much about the reopening decisions of individual school districts because families would be able to take their children’s education dollars elsewhere.
School districts should have the choice to reopen however they want. Teachers should have the choice to return to school buildings or not. But families need a choice, too.
Corey DeAngelis is the director of school choice at the Reason Foundation and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is also the executive director at the Educational Freedom Institute.
