Red states take aim at public schools

The states, said Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, are America’s “laboratories of democracy.” Today’s red-state Republicans see them differently — as staging grounds for cultural revolution.

Despite polls showing that most Americans favor legal abortion, 15 Republican-controlled states have passed laws depriving women of their reproductive rights. They are also targeting the nation’s public schools.

So far this year, 10 red states have enacted laws expanding school vouchers and similar subsidies to private schools. Arizona, Iowa, Utah, Oklahoma and Florida have gone farther, passing “universal voucher” bills that allow even the wealthiest families to collect public dollars for private schooling.

Republican support for vouchers isn’t new, of course. In the past, however, conservatives at least pretended to be concerned about low-income and minority parents whose children are trapped in bad urban schools. Now it’s clear their idea of “school choice” is to give all U.S. families with children financial incentives to exit public schools.

A similar push by a GOP-dominated legislature recently prompted North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, to warn of an impending “state of emergency” in funding public schools. “It’s clear that the Republican legislature is aiming to choke the life out of public education,” he said.

The immediate effect of the GOP push for universal vouchers, education savings accounts and tax credits will be to funnel government subsidies to parents who already have kids in private schools. Universal vouchers will cost taxpayers plenty. In Florida, the bill’s sponsors say a voucher of about $8,000 a year will cost $210 million; critics estimate the true cost at $4 billion. 

What Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) and other GOP leaders seem to want is to set up a parallel education system consisting of private – and primarily Christian – schools. (Almost two-thirds of private schools have a religious affiliation.) Here, free from annoying constitutional strictures on religious expression and censorship, conservative verities would hold sway.     

Rightwing privatizers are clearly feeling emboldened by parental indignation over prolonged school closures, steep learning losses and the seeming indifference of school authorities and unions to their concerns. The spate of voucher laws goes hand-in-hand with GOP demands for “parents’ bills of rights,” book bans and an end to “woke” indoctrination of children.

It’s also true, though, that Republicans are exploiting a political vacuum left by a Democratic Party that’s gone AWOL on school reform. While red states go all in for privatization, Democrats are fighting rear guard actions to defend a K-12 status quo clearly in need of change.

That’s eroding the big advantage Democrats have long enjoyed on education issues. Where previous Democratic presidents (especially Bill Clinton) led the charge to modernize America’s outdated, factory-style public school model, the Biden administration has essentially outsourced its K-12 policy to politically mighty teachers’ unions.

Apparently, it’s forgotten that visionary Democrats in Minnesota, California and Colorado and other states and cities pioneered public school choice to help disadvantaged kids ill served by traditional district schools.

Although Republicans rhetorically lump charter schools and vouchers together under the “school choice” banner, they are quite different. With charters, accountability flows in two directions: upward to a public oversight board and downward to parents who can vote with their feet if they think schools aren’t meeting their kids’ needs.   

Vouchers have zero public accountability. Universalizing them inevitably would create a private marketplace for education that, like all markets, would stratify by income and wealth. The result would be separate and unequal schools reinforcing America’s deep class and racial disparities.

By turning their back on poor and minority parents languishing on long charter school waiting lists, Democrats have opened the doors to the version of choice Republicans clearly prefer, which aims not at improving public schools but helping conservative parents escape them.  

There’s a tragic irony here: The Democrats’ punt on K-12 reform comes amid stunning new evidence that public charter schools are outperforming traditional district public schools.  

A third comprehensive study by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (Credo) finds that compared with traditional district schools, charters “produce superior student gains despite enrolling a more challenging student population.”

In general, charter students showed significant advantages in math and reading proficiency, with Black and Hispanic students showing especially large gains compared to their counterparts in district schools.

The Credo study also blows away the persistent myth that charters “cream” the most motivated students. “In fact, we find the opposite is true: charter schools enroll students who are disproportionately lower achieving than the students in their former (traditional public schools.)”

Most encouragingly, the study concludes that autonomous public charter schools, which operate independently of central districts and union contracts, are closing the nation’s stubborn achievement gaps:

“The real surprise of the study is the number of charter schools that have achieve educational equity for their students: we call them ‘gap-busting’ schools.”

So much for the habitual excuse-making by district bureaucrats and unions that it’s unfair to expect them to overcome the impact of ingrained poverty and racism on their students.  

Public school choice is a Democratic success story. It’s also the progressive alternative to the red-state campaign to eviscerate public schools and pour taxpayer dollars into private and religious schools.

By abandoning K-12 modernization and reform, Democrats have foolishly ceded the initiative to GOP culture warriors. Fortunately, they can take it back by putting kids first again.

Will Marshall is president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI).