Educational freedom matters, but we’ll need a whole infrastructure to transform schooling.
Educational freedom matters, but we’ll need a whole infrastructure to transform schooling.
I n 2023 alone, more than half a dozen states passed universal school-choice bills with even more expanding on former laws. School-choice legislation is going gangbusters. But is school choice itself growing?
How much competition do public schools actually face? How many alternative-schooling options exist in each locality? We’d hardly consider it a win if a child were given their choice of meals, but the only options were Wendy’s or McDonalds.
A new report from my Fordham Institute colleagues seeks to answer this question by comparing the total enrollment in the nation’s 125 largest districts to enrollment at nearby charter, private, and homeschools. The report concludes that, while America’s K–12 education system has become more competitive, the size and pace of the shift is nothing to write home about. Nationally, there was a 3 percent increase in enrollment in non-district schools between 2010 and 2020.
While headlines cheer a 300,000 student increase in charter-school enrollment since 2019, that remains a drop in the bucket compared to America’s 55 million school-aged children. Similarly, substantial increases in homeschooling rates mask a modest reality: Considerable growth in such a small sector is unlikely to change the big picture. In the median large district, 80 percent of kids still attend traditional public schools.
To be clear, even a marginal increase in non-district enrollment represents progress. There is a large and ever-growing body of research literature on so-called “competitive effects,” whereby competition from charter, private, and homeschools improves the educational outcomes of public schools. Monopolies are indifferent to consumer interests, so any disruption of that monopoly tends to improve the market.
What’s more, one of the largest charter-school studies ever conducted, including 29 million students, confirmed this year that these institutions “produce superior student gains despite enrolling a more challenging student population.” For the individual child, each and every spot at one of these high-performing charter schools could alter a life’s trajectory.
Still, the picture that the study paints undercuts many current narratives about American schooling.
First, public education isn’t dying. The majority of students still attend traditional public schools, and if current trends persist, will continue to do so for decades. Conservatives who care about America’s near-future cannot afford to abandon traditional public schools. In addition to advocating school choice, state-level policy-makers and school-board members must also push for improvements in public education such as early reading reforms and sane student discipline policies.
Second, simply passing pro–school-choice legislation isn’t nearly enough. I wrote recently about how important school choice is by describing what happens without it. But our efforts must also bolster the supply side of schooling — and I speak as someone on the founding board of a classical charter school. Choice means little if there are no choices. As the report highlights, many of the districts with the least competition are in states with the best charter-school laws — a testament to the fact that quality legislation doesn’t necessarily produce quality options.
And efforts to bolster the supply of quality choices must go beyond the establishment of individual schools. A robust education sector requires mediating institutions: teacher preparation pipelines, curriculum companies, even some reimagined version of the bureaucracies we so loath. Yes, bureaucracies create bloat and stymie innovation, but they also mean that teachers don’t need to bother filling out tax forms or jumping through regulatory hoops because they have HR managers and lawyers to handle that stuff. Charter-school networks such as Hillsdale’s Barney schools and the Great Hearts academies have developed many of these same capacities, and even the nascent micro-schooling movement has institutions to help founders get accredited and navigate regulatory hoops.
Finally, there are other deregulatory measures that must accompany choice-enabling legislation. A classical school would quickly founder if the only credentialed principals and teachers available for hire drank deep from education-school kookiness. The accreditation process, too, pressures schools toward a politicized education. And finally, barriers such as caps on the number of charter schools or limits on co-location (housing traditional and charter schools in the same building) stymie efforts at expansion.
Overall, the report provides grounds for cautious optimism. Because more states are creating friendly legislative environments for private, charter, and homeschools, competition is growing. But the expansion of school choice is only the first step. Now the real work of building institutions to supply children with adequate schooling begins.