A Voice for Choice

In his essay “A Lost Generation” (August 29), Vladimir Kogan comprehensively analyzes the causes of student learning loss during the pandemic. His “both sides bad” treatment of the resulting blue-state and red-state solutions, however, lacks similar depth, particularly regarding school choice.

First, Republican-run states with blue urban centers and governance were frequently forced to fix the mistakes of Democratic-led localities and special interests. For instance, Iowa Republican governor Kim Reynolds fought a lawsuit from the Iowa City School District and the Iowa State Education Association to get students back into schools.

More troubling was Kogan’s minimization of the academic benefits of school choice. A majority of random-assignment studies have found that private-school choice improves academic outcomes, and numerous studies show that the resulting competition carries those benefits over to public schools. Further, most school-choice programs target the same low-income families that Kogan rightly argues should receive the primary focus. It’s policy malpractice not to include school choice in efforts to remediate pandemic learning loss.

I assume it’s unintentional, but Kogan conflates parent participation in education with public participation in the culture wars. My experience over 20 years in education reform is that the vast majority of parents are busy with work and family and prefer to avoid public advocacy. Parents typically take advantage of school choice because they found their child’s previous school a bad fit. They simply want better options and the accountability that school choice provides.

Bill Phillips

Senior Director of Charter Policy

American Federation for Children

Vladimir Kogan responds: I appreciate Mr. Phillips’s letter and agree about the theoretical benefits of broader school-choice options, but my read of the empirical evidence is that it is more mixed than he suggests and that the benefits vary greatly with context (e.g., the quality of “fallback” public schools) and depend on regulatory guardrails. I also agree that including choice in efforts to address pandemic learning loss makes sense. But the thrust of my criticism is that such efforts in many states seem to have begun and ended with choice, failing to be a comprehensive set of policy responses or to include more learning time.

School choice alone will not close the gaps that opened during the pandemic, for two reasons. First, such programs — especially the recent ones — will not help the students who fell behind the most. While Phillips is right that school-choice programs have historically affected the categories of students who suffered the most academically during the pandemic, that is less true of the more recent legislation adopted since the pandemic, such as Arizona’s universal-voucher program. Second, even with more options, most students will continue to attend public schools. Phillips is also correct that greater competition will benefit these students, but even the largest such positive impacts documented in the research suggest that similar benefits would not be enough to restore more than a fraction of the pandemic learning loss.

By all means, we should implement well-designed school-choice policies, but we should not expect them to be a panacea for a pandemic.