Teaching in the Age of School Choice

The rapid rise of education savings accounts is transformative for parents and students, but also for teachers. There are boundless opportunities and significant risks.

On Tuesday, April 29, I gave the keynote presentation at event titled “New Pathways for Teachers in the Age of School Choice,” hosted by the American Enterprise Institute and the University of Austin. The full presentation and subsequent conversation are available here. This is a condensed version of my remarks.

Let me tell you the story of how I almost invented the microschool. In 2002, I became a fifth-grade teacher at a public school in the South Bronx—literally the lowest-scoring school in New York City’s poorest-performing district. I’d come from a 20-year career in the news business. Teaching was supposed to be my two-year, mid-career, do-gooder public service stint. It was not supposed to turn into a second career.

I was utterly naïve about education policy. But at some point, I became aware that every kid in front of me was costing the taxpayers of New York City and the State of New York about $30,000 a year to sit in my classroom. The City was paying me about $36,000. I was gobsmacked. “Holy, hell!” I thought. “Give me six of these kids. Any six. I’ll pick them up in the morning, bring them to my apartment, and teach them all day. I’ll even make them lunch. I’ll do it for $25,000 per kid and if they don’t pass their state tests, it’s free!” I’ll save the taxpayers money and my upside is $150,000.

I was this close to being Kelly Smith and founding Prenda.

By the way, when I was working on TIME Magazine’s first online efforts in the early ‘90s, it also occurred to me that it would be really easy to sell books on the Internet. But I don’t want to talk about that one. It’s too painful.

What I’d intuited—hiring a teacher to work with a small number of students in someone’s home—came to fruition not in microschools but with pandemic pods: scrappy, parent-driven experiments that sprang up when schools shuttered during COVID. Families, their kids suffering Zoom fatigue and the soul-crushing limits of remote learning, banded together to form tiny, bespoke learning groups, often in a living room or backyard, guided by a hired teacher or plucky parent, tackling everything from algebra to art projects. A year into the pandemic, the New Yorker, no friend of school choice, predicted pods would outlast COVID, acknowledging their benefits. It showed what’s possible when parents take the reins, demanding flexibility and results.

Today’s discussion, “New Pathways for Teachers in the Age of School Choice,” takes place at a moment when the relationship between Americans and schools is in play to a degree I doubt any of us could have predicted before COVID. Public schools, a bedrock government service, became unreliable for weeks, then months, even years. Habits changed. Homeschooling rates tripled. Private schools, charters, and online programs gained students, while traditional public schools lost them. Remote learning pried open the black box of the classroom, broadcasting lessons onto kitchen tables. Parents weren’t always happy with what they saw.

It’s no longer taken for granted that your local public school is the only game in town. Parents are asking: “Is this school the best I can do for my child? If not, what else is out there—and how do I get it?”

The days when the vast majority of Americans simply accepted the default mode of geographically-zoned, district-run schools are over. In a recent piece for American Enterprise magazine, “The Last Days of Public School,” I argued we may be witnessing the twilight of public education as we’ve known it—not because public schools will vanish, but because their monopoly is crumbling. Universal school choice, empowered by education savings accounts (ESAs), is decentralizing education, giving families unprecedented control over where and how their children learn. Once Texas adopts and implements ESAs, half of America’s families will have the power to opt out of traditional public schools and take the money with them. The percentage of kids in local, district-run schools will never again be what it once was.

This shift is transformative for parents and students, but also for teachers. The profession, long tethered to public school systems, will be forced adapt to a pluralistic, entrepreneurial education market. But schools of education have long failed our teachers—and our kids. My colleague Daniel Buck has described his ed school experience: making Black Lives Matter friendship bracelets, attending group-therapy-style classes, and submitting acrostic poems and rap videos in graduate school. His critique echoes my own ed school experience more than 20 years ago. I still have a vocabulary picture book I made out of construction paper and pictures cut from magazines. I got an A each time I submitted it. In three different classes.

For years I’ve joked darkly that if we trained air traffic controllers the way we trained teachers, students would write papers about structural inequities in transportation and work on developing their personal philosophy of air travel. “Landing planes? Oh, that’s something you learn on the job. We’re not here to train you.”

Ed schools’ stranglehold on teacher certification is as endangered as public schools’ grip on students. Teachers will need to prepare for diverse settings—charters, microschools, homeschool co-ops, virtual platforms—requiring entrepreneurial, adaptable skills. Some may not even be “teachers” as we currently conceive of them. School choice doesn’t change who gets an education—but it is certainly changing who can provide it.

In Arizona, I interviewed a man who spent most of his adult life building and running a successful business making high-end furniture for luxury homes. A few years ago, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor that brought his career to an end. After surgery and six months of recovery, his daughters, who both teach piano, convinced their father turn his business into a school and teach woodworking. His shop is far beyond even what most well-equipped school districts could offer, filled with half a million dollars of equipment. He has about three dozen students all on Arizona’s ESA.

But this dynamic and creative era that’s emerging comes with serious pitfalls, and we must face them head-on. There are no magic bullets in education. Candidly, I think we’ve been a bit blithe, either stating or implying that what’s wrong with public education is a lack of competition. I don’t think “competition” is even the best argument for school choice. Choice enables diverse school models—Montessori, STEM, classical—that don’t have to justify themselves by comparison to a default public school. That said, there are foreseeable risks of exacerbating inequities and fracturing our already fragile social cohesion that we need to discuss.

Arguably the Achilles Heel of universal ESAs is the perception – not entirely invalid – that it will mostly benefit the education equivalent of the “worried well,” or those whose children are already in a private school and for whom an ESA is functionally a voucher: Relatively affluent families who have the motivation and parental bandwidth to take full advantage of it—as well as teacher entrepreneurs who are similarly motivated, energetic, and creative.

Working parents, especially those who are less advantaged, need a school for their kids during the workday, not a bespoke education they must cobble together. This risks a two-tier system: affluent families in high-quality schools and settings; “non-choosers”—typically the most disadvantaged—left behind in struggling public schools that may become something like schools of last resort.

Teacher capacity is another issue. If we just change where teachers work and who employs them, I don’t see how that’s going to change student outcomes. The inconvenient fact remains that the nation needs nearly four million people to teach our children. Any number that large means the men and women who staff our schools and teach our children will be, by definition, ordinary people—not superheroes.

If achievable, sustainable progress is our aim—and it must be our aim—the job has to be doable by the teachers we have, not the teachers we wish we had. Let’s be honest: Almost anyone can teach students who are motivated, curious, and engaged. But some students are none of those. They need a school staffed by our most gifted and expert teachers. And to complicate things further, we’re simply not training teachers adequately for success with even average students, let alone the hardest to reach, motivate, and teach.

Perhaps the gravest risk is to social cohesion. Public schools, in theory, are where Americans of different backgrounds learn to live together. Horace Mann saw them as forging a shared civic identity. The reality has obviously never matched that lofty ideal, but a “choose your own adventure” education system could make things worse. If everyone splinters into niche schools—one for secular progressives, another for religious conservatives, another for this ethnic group or that pedagogy—we risk losing any sense of a shared culture.

E.D. Hirsch, Jr., warned us that schools are “the central and main hope for the preservation of democratic ideals.” In a choice-driven system, how do we ensure students in, for example, an Austin microschool, a Houston magnet, or a Dallas Catholic school share some common knowledge and civic preparation? One solution is curriculum. Diverse schools could commit to teaching a core set of historical facts, literary works, or civic ideals balancing pluralism with coherence and cohesion.

I know I probably sound more like a school choice critic than a proponent right now, so let me be clear: These challenges—teacher capacity, equitable access, and social cohesion—are not reasons to oppose school choice. I support choice because it empowers families and opens new opportunities for teachers, and dynamic new models of education.

But to sustain it, we must pair choice with quality: training teachers to be successful in news settings and in new models, ensuring equitable access, and taking curriculum seriously to drive academic and civic outcomes. We’re at a crossroads. If we address these potential pitfalls with urgency and wisdom, we can build an education system that delivers freedom, flexibility, equity, and excellence—not just for some, but for all.

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash