STEPHEN MOORE: One Million Kids Can’t All Be Wrong

This is the dawning of the age of school choice.

The school bells will start ringing in the days and weeks ahead, but a record number of kids – especially children from low-income families – will be opting out of the traditional public schools. This year as many as one million kids will participate in public school alternatives, including voucher programs, tuition tax credits, scholarship programs, or charter schools.

That’s a good thing right?  After all, to paraphrase the famous axiom: when schools compete, kids win.

But that’s not the way the teachers unions and the education aristocracy sees it. The New York Times notes that education freedom is causing a “crisis in the public schools.”

Why? Because so many families are opting for better school alternatives. Isn’t this mass exodus from the public schools and the reign of the teacher unions, prima facie evidence that they are failing their communities and the kids?

A new study by the Commonwealth Institute in Pennsylvania finds that almost four of 10 public schools have a problem with violence, bullying, guns on the premises and other infractions. How can kids learn if they don’t feel safe?  This is a form of public education child abuse.

That hasn’t stopped the trillion-dollar education empire from striking back at school choice programs.

The Washington Post just published a front-page hit piece last week on the highly touted Arizona choice program with as many as 300,000 kids participating. It’s become a model for the nation.

The Post complains that so many kids are switching to private alternative schools and that many of the failing public schools in Phoenix will have to shut down. One school highlighted for closing its doors is Roosevelt Elementary. The Post says the community is going through a “grieving process,” and some families are “heart broken.” The school librarian pouts it feels like “death.”

Not to the parents whose kids have gained access to better schools. They’re feeling liberated.

It’s a head-scratcher why empowering low-income families with access to superior private schools is regarded as a bad thing.

This would be like complaining that a popular Whole Foods grocery store has moved into town and now the crappy grocery store down the street has to go out of business.

The logical end conclusion of the teacher unions and the educators’ opposition to school choice is that only kids from rich families should have the right to attend great schools. This is a weird sense of social justice that poor kids should be trapped in the underperforming schools so that teachers have a job.

To its credit, the New York Times acknowledges that vouchers and other choice programs are forcing the public schools to clean up their act, serve the families in the community and compete head-to-head for students. That’s the whole point. Raise the standards everywhere to end the curse of declining national test scores.

School choice will undoubtedly raise the quality of the public schools and the academic performance of the schools that haven’t already lost most of their students.

Buried deep in the Post story complaining about vouchers is an admission that “just 13% of students districtwide ranked proficient or better in math in 2023-24.” Amazingly, half of these schools are graded by the district as A or B schools.

I don’t know what’s worse: that there are schools where only one of six kids can do basic math or that these schools still get an A or B grade.

Talk about grade inflation!

Would you send your kids to a school where only one in six students are learning basic math? I wouldn’t. No one should have to.

Stephen Moore is a former Trump senior economic advisor and the co-founder of Unleash Prosperity, which advocates for education freedom for all children.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

(Featured Image Media Credit: Screen Capture/PBS NewsHour)