Parents Are Winning the Battle for School Choice

More states are allowing parents to choose the best education option for their children outside the public school system.

(Illustration by The Epoch Times, Shutterstock)

Nicole Andrews, a Florida mother of five, put it bluntly when asked why she sends her children to a charter school instead of the assigned public school for their community.

She said she “absolutely, desperately” wants her children in charter school because it has “a different culture,” she told The Epoch Times. Other parents feel the same way.

“There is a different level of expectation and rigor” at St. Johns Classical Academy, Ms. Andrews said.

“There is a different value set. There is a different mindset as to the value of education.”

There’s also a waiting list for slots at both of the school’s campuses, in Fleming Island and Orange Park, in the northeastern part of the state. The school opened in August 2017 and is free to attend.

Ms. Andrews is among hundreds of thousands of parents across the United States who are making the switch to some other form of education from public schooling as part of a nationwide rallying cry for “school choice.”

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In general, school choice allows parents options as to how the taxpayer dollars assigned to their child for education are used. That could mean transferring the money to a charter school, using it for tuition for a private school, or taking it as reimbursement for homeschooling expenses.

Recently, many states have adopted legislation to put into place some form of school choice program.

Ten states have what’s known as universal school choice, meaning it’s open to any child. Those states are Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah, West Virginia, Indiana, and North Carolina.

Many other states have a school choice program for at least some children, with a range of criteria to qualify. Some serve children in a low socio-economic demographic. Others offer assistance to children with learning disabilities or other special needs.

In some states, programs allow public dollars set aside for each child’s education to follow a child leaving public school. Then that money can be used for tuition for private schools. Or the money may be transferred to fund that child’s slot at a charter school.

Charter schools are publicly funded but operate independently from the public school system.

In some states, school choice means that even parents who choose to homeschool can use public dollars allotted to educate their children on things such as curriculum and tutoring.

The options vary from state to state. And the amount of public money set aside for each child usually ranges from $5,000 to $8,000, depending on the state.

A school crossing sign warns drivers in front of an elementary school in Miami on April 19, 2023. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

The Department of Education reports that the government spent an average of $14,295 per student in public schools from elementary through 12th grade in the 2020–2021 school year.

Many conservatives support the idea of school choice, saying it will force failing public schools to improve or lose students. And more importantly, they say, those failing schools will lose the funding they receive to educate the children who leave.

Some parents who’ve previously paid for their children’s private school tuition or homeschooling expenses on their own, with no government assistance, say school choice programs bring about much-needed fairness.

That’s because—by paying taxes—those parents contribute to the public money used to pay for public education. But they’ve received none of the benefit and still have to cover the costs of their children’s education.

There’s also a strong lobby movement that’s against school choice.

Public schools are deeply connected to some of the most powerful activist groups in American society—the teachers’ unions.

And though polls show that parents strongly favor school choice, unions are adamant in their opposition.

“Vouchers take scarce funding from students in public schools and give those resources to unaccountable private schools,” the National Education Association (NEA) states on its website.

The NEA also says that vouchers, used in school choice programs, don’t support disabled students, don’t protect the human and civil rights of students, and “exacerbate segregation.”

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) states on its website that evidence “does not support the argument that vouchers and other methods to establish a market system of schools will improve school or student performance.”

The NEA and AFT are two of the United States’ largest unions, with a combined total of more than 4.7 million members.

Officials at the NEA and AFT didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.

Parents told The Epoch Times they hope school choice and the competition it creates will eventually make education better for everyone.

“I think that once you take an institution, and make it a public institution, and have large governmental control over it, you’re going to lose some quality,” Ms. Andrews said.

“Lord willing, public institutions will have to change their game a bit, and everyone will benefit.”

School Choice Options

School choice programs vary widely.

Some states, such as Indiana, Iowa, and West Virginia, offer the use of an education savings account (ESA). An ESA gives money to parents in a bank account, and funds can be spent on educational expenses, such as school tuition, textbooks, private tutoring, and school supplies.

Other states, such as Florida, Arkansas, and Wisconsin, offer vouchers, which take the money set aside to educate children in public schools and allow parents to spend it on tuition for private schools. Voucher money also can be transferred to a charter school.

Aisha Thomas (R) is learning teaching skills with the teacher Alexxa Martinez, in her classroom in Nevitt Elementary School, in Phoenix, on Oct. 26, 2022. (Olivier Touron/AFP via Getty Images)

Still others offer tax-credit scholarships. These allow taxpayers to receive tax credits when they donate to nonprofits that provide scholarships to private schools. Parents can apply for these scholarships for their children.

In other states—including Alabama, Illinois, and Louisiana—qualifying parents receive tax credits for paying for their children’s private schooling.

Alaska offers state funding for some private schooling through “correspondence study programs.” These programs allow a student to receive an individualized learning program and options normally unavailable in public schools, such as resources from religious groups or private tutoring.

Many states allow families to open college savings investment accounts to help with educational expenses. These accounts allow families to deposit pre-tax money into investment accounts. Recently, some states have changed the rules on these accounts so parents can spend some of this money on childhood education expenses.

In 1990, school choice options such as these were practically nonexistent.

As of 2023, the United States had about 700,000 school choice programs, according to statistics from EdChoice, an Indiana nonprofit that promotes school choice.

With so many Americans increasingly taking advantage of school choice options, this may be just the beginning of a movement that would fundamentally reshape U.S. public education, EdChoice President Robert Enlow told The Epoch Times.

“This year has been the year of universal choice, where we now have 10 states that basically allow every single student in the state to attend whatever setting works best with them—public, private, charter, at home, or online,” Mr. Enlow said. “We’re really excited about that growth.”

For homeschooling parents, receiving state money can make a huge difference, homeschooling mother Kimberly Ebbers told The Epoch Times.

She quit her job to give her three sons an education at home. She’s been teaching them for 22 years.

“In the beginning, we didn’t take vacations and buy new clothes and eat out,” Ms. Ebbers, who lives in Florida, said. “We sacrificed so that I could stay home.

“It was just important to us to be with our children and for our children to be with each other.”

In 2023, Florida passed legislation allowing for universal school choice, which means even homeschooling children are eligible for funding from the state for educational expenses.

Republican presidential candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks during an event in Philadelphia on June 30, 2023. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

But surprisingly, the Ebbers family isn’t interested in using the state’s money.

State money can mean state control over education to some degree, Ms. Ebbers said.

“In the future, it may lead to them choosing our curriculum or other choices like that,” she said.

However, money from the state could be a blessing to families with children with disabilities, she said.

“I do have friends that have kids with special needs that have to have services, like speech pathology, or physical therapy, or occupational therapy. And it’s expensive, going every week to those appointments and paying out-of-pocket costs.”

Florida homeschooling mother of five Michelle Jernigan told The Epoch Times she greatly appreciates new laws that give homeschoolers aid in educating their children.

“I’m very grateful to the state for making it so we’re able to afford things we were never able to afford before for my kids,” Ms. Jernigan said. “And it has made a big difference in their education.”

Her two youngest are “both going into high school successfully,” and she said that has a lot to do with the scholarship money they receive from the state.

Increased educational freedom has been something for which homeschoolers have long fought, Ms. Jernigan said.

Not long ago, her mentors in homeschooling had no law guaranteeing that homeschooling was even legal, she said.

“They would have truant officers at their doors and those kinds of things,” she said. “I started homeschooling with that idea that the generation before us had worked really hard to give us the freedom to homeschool.”

Today, homeschoolers have more freedom and state support than in the past to raise and teach their children as they wish, she said.

Growing Movement

Since as early as the 1800s, the United States has relied on public schools to educate children.

In a public school system, taxpayers hand over money to the government, and the government uses that money to run schools available to all children.

As of 2021, this public system educated 81.9 percent of non-homeschooled children, according to federal census figures. The rest were in private schools.

But this ratio is likely to change as school choice programs grow in popularity, experts say.

In many communities, public schools are failing. Statistics show that American student test scores currently are the lowest they’ve been in decades.

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, educational losses following the COVID-19 pandemic wiped out decades of academic progress.

Students walk to an elementary school in Chicago on Jan. 12, 2022. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

That analysis shows that reading and mathematics scores have been slowly declining since 2012, but during the pandemic, the rate of decline accelerated.

That’s one reason parents now are demanding better education options.

School choice programs have been on the rise since the 1990s. The number has soared over the past decade, according to Shelby Doyle, vice president of public awareness at the National School Choice Awareness Foundation.

According to polls by Morning Consult Intelligence, just 36 percent of parents with children in school say they believe education is “generally going in the right direction” nationally. And only 22 percent of teachers said the same.

One big difference may be that public schools often design curricula to prepare children for the workplace, but charter schools can choose to focus on developing students as well-rounded individuals, according to St. Johns Classical Academy Headmaster Matt Johnson.

His school accepts children in kindergarten through 12th grade, teaching them Latin, logic, rhetoric, moral philosophy, economics, American government, and more.

Before graduation, seniors at the school must select a piece of classical literature, write a 10-page thesis on it, and then defend their stance on it before a panel of experts.

Every charter school can be different. The range allows parents to find the type of learning that fits them best, Mr. Johnson told The Epoch Times.

By the Numbers

“Nearly one in five students are now eligible for school choice in America,” Mr. Enlow said. 

And it’s no wonder the movement is gaining momentum.

Number crunchers have found that providing vouchers costs states less than providing public schools for all, Mr. Enlow said.

So it’s unlikely that states will try to switch back after creating a voucher system.

Moving away from school choice could suddenly raise a state’s educational budget. In Florida, he said, the voucher system is so large that putting all children using vouchers back into public schools would radically affect the state’s finances.

However, some organizations suggest that charter schools and private schools aren’t that much better than their public school counterparts.

According to an analysis of studies from the left-leaning Brookings Institution, voucher programs can result in a flood of new schools that often fail quickly. When students change to these new schools, their test scores decrease by margins like those seen after the COVID-19 lockdowns, researchers wrote in their analysis.

Giving parents a choice doesn’t automatically make their children’s schooling options better, the analysis suggests.

However, voucher programs do improve public schools, researchers wrote. That’s because when they’re faced with competition, public schools often work to do better.

A teacher waves to her students as they get off the bus at Carter Traditional Elementary School in Louisville, Ky., on Jan. 24, 2022. (Jon Cherry/Getty Images)

“Research on traditional vouchers suggests extreme caution when expecting new, favorable results simply because parents of children outside of public school can now spend public dollars on costs beyond tuition,” the Brookings Institution analysis concluded.

Another study by the liberal-leaning Urban Institute found that private K–12 schools in Florida produce significantly better outcomes for students than public schools.

That study concluded that students who use the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program (FTC) are as much as 99 percent more likely to attend college and 56 percent more likely to get a bachelor’s degree than public school students.

The FTC program, which started in 2001, originally provided income tax credits to corporations that contributed money to nonprofit scholar-funding organizations. Those organizations awarded money to students from poor families.

Florida’s school choice bill signed in 2023 opened the program to all students.

Any research that seems to challenge the success of school choice program results must be put into context, Mr. Enlow said.

“When you disrupt a child’s life, when you take them into a new school, they tend to do poorly, even outside of a voucher program,” he said.

But, he said, they typically quickly get on a positive trajectory.

Furthermore, even school choice advocates expect some private schools to fail, he said.

Over time, poorly performing schools will close, and parents will transfer to schools that provide a better education, Mr. Enlow said.

The difference is this: In a state with a voucher system, parents can move their children from failing public schools, he said.

In states without school choice, they’re often trapped without better options.

A teacher walks down an empty hallway while another teaches virtually (R) at Hazelwood Elementary School in Louisville, Ky., on Jan. 11, 2022. (Jon Cherry/Getty Images)

Parents Want Change

One of the unforeseen effects of the 2020 pandemic was that COVID-19 lockdowns changed how parents think about schooling, Ms. Doyle said.

“We had the biggest watershed moment in American education in my lifetime happen during the COVID-19 pandemic,” she said.

With children forced to learn from home, parents realized there were many different ways to do school, Ms. Doyle said. As a result, many parents switched their children’s educational path and realized “that you may not send your child to the same school for all 13 years of their K–12 education,” she said.

By observing classes taught by teachers to children at home using video conferencing, millions of parents got their first glimpse of what children were learning in school, Mr. Enlow said.

Many of them didn’t like it.

Parents have also had safety reasons to reconsider public school for their children.

In recent years, public schools have come under increasing scrutiny from parental rights activists for pushing left-leaning ideological content on children.

School districts across the country have ignited outrage for allowing teachers to present gender and sexual orientation as choices to small children.

Across the United States, parents have objected to schools’ exposing children to materials with graphic descriptions of pedophilia, incestuous homosexual rape, sex guides to non-heterosexual sex, and more.

West Contra Costa Unified School District literacy coach Margaret Goldberg reads to students at Nystrom Elementary School in Richmond, Calif., on May 17, 2022. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

In many cases, local school boards have ignored parents’ pleas to remove such materials from school libraries. In other cases, they’ve allowed teachers to keep children’s newly declared gender identities secret from parents.

Social media platforms are rife with videos of teachers bragging about their push to sway students on matters of LGBT and critical race theory ideology.

The federal Department of Education also announced support for “LGBTQI+ students, teachers, and staff” in schools.

Cases such as these have made parents who don’t want their children exposed to sexually explicit material or secretly gender transitioned wary of public schools, Mr. Enlow said.

But polls show they aren’t the main drivers behind enthusiasm for school choice.

“The top three things [parents] care about in schools are basically ‘educate my child,’ ‘help them become good active citizens,’ and ‘give them the skills necessary to get a job,’” Mr. Enlow said. “The least important things that they see schools needing to do are to fix social problems.

“The answer for us is let families be free to choose whatever works for them and let a free market flourish.”