Is school choice becoming the new normal?

 

[June 12, 2015]  By Logan Albright | Watchdog Opinion
 
 There was a time when it was taken for granted that all American kids would walk the same path from the ages of six to 18. Every morning, they’d rise at the crack of dawn, walk, bike, or bus, to the local school house, and have the three Rs drummed into them until mid-afternoon. This pattern was repeated five days a week, nine months out of the year, and few bothered to question it. It was a simpler time, some may say, but simpler isn’t always better.

In a time when schools have become increasingly dysfunctional, plagued by violence, poor performance, and even blatant cheating by teachers, parents are starting to wonder why they should be forced to send their children to such unproductive and damaging environments, simply by virtue of where they happen to live. They’re demanding options, and for once, legislators are starting to listen.

It usually takes government at least a couple of decades to catch on to what people actually want, and even then it usually responds by doing the opposite. But this time, it looks like decades of school choice activism is finally starting to pay off, with groundbreaking school choice programs starting to pop up around the country. Perhaps most notable is the Education Savings Account program that Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval recently signed into law. Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) work by simply giving parents the tax dollars that would otherwise be spent on publicly schooling their child, and they can then use this money on any form of education they like. This includes tuition for public and private schools, online learning programs, textbooks and other materials, and special needs programs for children with learning disabilities.

high school

This system works well, because it not only gives parents the flexibility to customize their child’s education, it forces suppliers to compete on both the dimensions of price and quality. Such competition hugely benefits consumers in a way that was impossible when local school districts had a built in customer base that effectively couldn’t escape.

Nevada is not the only state expanding school choice. In Wisconsin, the state legislature is pushing Governor Scott Walker—already a vocal supporter of alternative education—to sign a budget that lifts caps on the number of school vouchers in the state, and expanding opportunities to open independent charter schools.

At the national level, the pending reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, the federal education law last reauthorized under President Bush, makes great improvements on its predecessor, by expanding charter school programs and increasing state and local control of education. While the bill maintains some restrictive federal mandates, it is unquestionably a big step forward from where we were ten years ago.

Elsewhere, some citizens are simply taking matters into their own hands. Elon Musk, the quasi-libertarian entrepreneur behind Tesla, PayPal, and SpaceX has embraced the practice of “unschooling,” a subset of homeschooling that eschews traditional lesson plans in favor of learning by doing and ordinary life experience. It’s a model that has been employed with much success since it was pioneered by John Holt in the 1970s. Musk has even gone so far as to set up his own unschooling school—admittedly a bit of an oxymoron—for those of his employees who are interested.

Not everyone, of course, has the resources of a guy like Elon Musk, but it’s encouraging that people are at least willing to think outside the box and try new things. It’s time we as a society finally accepted that no two children are the same, and that it makes no sense, therefore, to force them into cookie cutter schools that ignore individual differences and impose uniform expectations. The increase in school choice programs we’re starting to see offers hope that we’re at least heading in the right direction.