The Last Days of Public School

A school choice revolution is rapidly reshaping how public education is organized, funded, and delivered in America.

NOTE: This piece is republished with permission from The American Enterprise, a magazine dedicated to the competition of ideas and published by the American Enterprise Institute.

- Robert Pondiscio

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When the 21st century began, there was widespread belief in and no small amount of alarm over “peak oil”—the looming moment when global oil production would reach its zenith, after which it would decline. Not because demand would wane, but because we were racing headlong toward a tipping point at which we would have consumed all the easily accessible crude. Catastrophe would follow as oil prices skyrocketed; cars would become a luxury item. In the Northeast, homes would be too expensive to heat; in the South and West, they’d be too expensive to cool. Millions of people in the suburbs, built around cars, would begin to find it difficult and expensive to buy food and goods. Agriculture would suffer, since farming needs petroleum for fertilizer, running machinery, and shipping produce to markets. Store shelves would soon empty.

Malthusian predictions of peak oil dating back more than a century have yet to prove true, but, without question, we’ve hit and passed “peak public school.” A school choice revolution is rapidly reshaping how public education is organized, funded, and delivered in America.

The revolution has spurred surprisingly little public discussion or even awareness because, at least for now, it’s confined largely to red “flyover” states where millions of parents have been given the power to pull their children out of district-run public schools—taking with them the lion’s share of the money the state would have otherwise spent educating their children. Across the nation, we’re rapidly approaching a tipping point in education. Soon, more than half of US families with school-age children will have the option to educate their children privately with public funds.

The potential effects of peak public school cannot be overstated. For generations, America’s K–12 public schools have been largely immune from the disruptive forces that have roiled retail, travel, entertainment, health care, and many other sectors of the economy and culture, but the reckoning has finally come. Public education is on the verge of an unprecedented crack-up. In fact, it’s already underway.

For more than a century, the dominant model of American education has been the geographically zoned public school—where you live determines where you go to school. To the degree school choice has existed, it has been governed mostly by real estate agents as families seek to buy homes in neighborhoods deemed to have good public schools. But today, nearly 40 percent of American schoolchildren are doing something other than attending their geographically assigned, district-run public school.

This estimate comprises not just private or religious schools but all forms of choice: charter schools, magnet schools, homeschooling, and online education; many states and school districts offer flexibility within the public system. In sum, school choice in all its forms has been normalized. Even greater disruption lies ahead: In the last four years, over a dozen states have adopted education savings accounts (ESAs), which allow families to use public funds to pay for private school tuition, homeschooling costs, and other educational expenses.

The reckoning has arrived. What comes next, and the social and cultural cost of “peak public school,” is a question that demands serious consideration.

The School Choice Revolution

For decades, school choice was a boutique policy idea championed by libertarian economists like Milton Friedman, who proposed in 1955 that government should fund education but not necessarily run schools. For most of the 20th century, school choice remained a niche experiment—limited to Catholic schools, a few experimental voucher programs, and charter schools concentrated in select cities. But in the past five years, school choice has gained more ground than in the past 50. The shift has been driven principally by two forces: the COVID-19 pandemic and America’s culture wars.

The pandemic exposed the fragility of the traditional public school model. Long after it became clear that children were at low risk from COVID, many public schools remained closed or imposed prolonged disruptions. Parents, forced to oversee “Zoom school,” got a firsthand look at what their children were being taught—or not being taught. This shotgun transparency, combined with ideological battles over curricula and the lack of in-person instruction, fueled an exodus from public schools. Homeschooling rates have tripled from pre-pandemic levels. Private school enrollments surged. Parents who had never questioned public education began seeking alternatives, even if just to find a reliably open school. The demand for school choice exploded.

At the same time, public schools are facing mounting challenges: historic declines in student achievement, chronic absenteeism, discipline crises, and plummeting teacher morale. Even as schools return to normal, confidence in public education has suffered hammer blows. In 2022, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) showed two decades of modest progress on reading and math scores had disappeared. The most recent release of NAEP scores in January showed further erosion of student achievement.

Culture war flare-ups have exerted a centrifugal force effect on education politics, aiding and abetting the public school crack-up. Until a decade ago, an influential education reform movement was marked by uneasy bipartisanship. Advocates on the left and right disagreed about the root causes of educational failure but coalesced around a suite of reforms—including charter schools, standardized testing, and school accountability for student outcomes—aimed at shaking public schools out of decades of lethargy and poor performance. That comity began crumbling in the mid-2010s, when education reform’s dominant progressive wing began adopting the arguments and slogans of the social justice left to explain away the movement’s failure to close achievement gaps between black and white students. The culture war had come for the education reform movement.

“Swept along by Black Lives Matter, an increasingly strident Twitter presence, and a furious tide of anti-Trumpism,” observed Rick Hess and Checker Finn in National Affairs, progressive reformers “put race, gender, and an ever-expanding notion of equity at the heart of their efforts.” With its new lodestar, “equity,” education reform became less about raising standards and student achievement and more about dismantling “systemic oppression.”

Freed from having to make nice with their progressive colleagues, education reform conservatives went all-in on school choice and on the attack against “woke” public schools. A 2021 AEI Conservative Education Reform Network report by Jay Greene and James Paul noted that a significant number of all school choice bills passed in statehouses did so without any Democratic support. A follow-up Heritage Foundation report functionally served the education reform left with divorce papers. The pair argued that private school choice would be attractive to conservative parents concerned about teacher activism and public schools’ embrace of a social justice agenda. They concluded, “It is time for the school choice movement to embrace the culture war.”

And it has—with stunning speed.

Red state legislatures have passed laws creating ESAs, de facto private school vouchers that can also be used for homeschooling or other educational expenses. ESAs have been around for over a decade, but were previously limited to students with disabilities, low-income families, and kids in failing schools. Then, in 2021, West Virginia made any student switching out of public school or entering kindergarten eligible for up to $4,600 per year to pay for a range of services, including private school tuition. The following year, Arizona approved the first fully “universal” ESA. Since then, nearly a dozen states have passed similar measures.

In practice, this means almost any parent can opt out of public education and redirect funds to offset the cost of private school, pay for tutoring, and purchase textbooks, technology, and almost any conceivable service they deem necessary to meet the educational needs of their child. Texas is poised to become the latest state to let parents to opt out of public school and make education spending decisions for their own children. If the nation’s second-largest state, with nearly 6 million school-age children, goes this route, it will mean over half of American families with school-age children will have access to this new and novel way of educating children at public expense.

Rewards and Risks of “Peak Public School”

The wave of momentum behind school choice could be a hammer through glass that unleashes educational dynamism: new flavors and models may arise that traditional public education is poorly disposed to cultivate, grow, and flourish. From classical academies to STEM-focused microschools, from Montessori-inspired programs to online hybrid models, school choice allows families to select educational approaches that align with their values, aspirations, and children’s interests and needs. School choice needn’t justify itself as merely an improvement over traditional public schools. It is an intrinsic good with the potential to succeed where the education reform movement has largely failed, fostering innovation, diversity, and excellence.

But it is not without foreseeable risks.

If, as seems inevitable, more Americans adopt a “choose your own adventure” style of educating their children, it could exacerbate the gaps between educational haves and have-nots and lead to an even further degradation of social cohesion. Horace Mann, the architect of America’s public school system, called education the “balance wheel of the social machinery.” While public schools have largely failed to be the “great equalizer of the conditions of men” Mann envisioned, they have at least aspired to provide a shared foundation of civic knowledge and literacy. In a world where education is fully customizable, we risk losing the common civic framework that binds a diverse nation together. Schools transmit not just knowledge but shared values, norms, and narratives.

Also, school choice does not guarantee better schools—only different ones. The same market forces that produce elite private schools could also create a “long tail” of low-quality options. At present, the nation employs nearly four million full-time teachers. A workforce that large means that by definition, those who lead America’s classrooms are men and women of average talents and aptitude—not the classroom saints and superstars we wish them to be. There is no reason to assume that merely changing who employs them will be sufficient to raise academic achievement across the board.

Moreover, as more middle-class and engaged families exit public schools, the legacy system risks becoming the school of last resort for the most disadvantaged students—further intensifying educational inequality. Most countries fund education pluralistically, supporting a mix of public and private schools adhering to a national curriculum and standards. The US, by contrast, is shifting toward a system where public funds follow individual choices with few common guardrails—the US has neither national standards or a common curriculum. For children poorly educated and insufficiently challenged in low-performing public schools resistant or indifferent to change, choice will be a godsend—if those children have engaged and informed parents motivated to exercise choice thoughtfully. But there will also be non-choosers left behind in public schools with less incentive than ever to improve.

In retrospect, the pandemic could not have come at a worse time for traditional public schools. Decades of expensive and intensive efforts to improve public education outcomes at scale have been disappointing and dispiriting. The education reform movement of the past several decades, which began with the youthful, can-do optimism of Teach For America and high-flying urban charter schools, morphed into a technocratic regime of standards, testing, and accountability that proved not just ineffective but deeply unpopular with parents and teachers alike. Even before pandemic-driven “learning loss,” long-term trends in student achievement didn’t match the effort or expenditure devoted to improving student outcomes and closing the achievement gap. To top it all off, the US is in the midst of a “baby bust”—a decline in the birth rate that will reduce the number of school-age children by an estimated two to three million over the next decade.

To be sure, the zip code–driven default mode of educating our children is unlikely to disappear entirely. It will remain a common mode for a significant number of children if only because of habit and inertia. But we have hit and passed peak public education. Its influence and dominance can only wane.

Credit: The American Enterprise