Red states are fueling a public school exodus 

A new spirit of secession is fracturing our country. Republicans are carving out a red-state confederacy where they can impose their own laws and social mores in defiance of national majorities. 

To take the most obvious example, Americans strongly oppose abortion bans. That hasn’t stopped 21 Republican-controlled states from passing laws outlawing or severely restricting abortion.    

Now red states are applying this twist on John Calhoun’s doctrine of states’ rights and concurrent majorities to education. 

“The school choice movement continues to rack up dramatic wins in states nationwide, with particular strength this year in the Old Confederacy,” exults Michael Petrilli of the conservative-leaning Fordham Institute. 

Eleven states recently have passed laws making public subsidies for private schools — usually in the form of vouchers, education savings accounts and tuition tax credits — universal or near-universal.  

That’s a radical move for Republicans, who formerly justified their voucher proposals as expanding school options for disadvantaged families whose kids are trapped in low-quality public schools. 

GOP state leaders now proclaim their goal is “educational freedom” for all families, a cagey euphemism for what many have suspected to be their goal all along — privatizing education.  

Conservatives contend that school vouchers or “scholarships” that give parents a financial incentive to move their kids to private schools save money when the per-pupil cost is less than what public schools spend.  

Perhaps, but the new laws will make hundreds of thousands of parents with kids already in private schools eligible for generous subsidies — in Alabama, $7,000 a year. A sweet deal for them, but not for working families who’ll pay higher taxes to finance the GOP’s new windfall for families affluent enough to afford private schools.  

Petrilli notes that some states seek to avoid a taxpayer backlash by targeting low-income families (Georgia) or using a sliding scale to reduce benefits for the wealthy (Ohio).   

U.S. voters, however, seem leery of government support for private schools in principle. A poll last fall by my organization, the Progressive Policy Institute, found that only 34 percent of working-class voters without college degrees favor public funding for private school vouchers, while 60 percent want their tax dollars to go only to public schools. 

A battleground state survey by Democrats for Education Reform showed similar results: 68 percent of voters chose “creating more options within the public school system for families” over vouchers.  

Why do Republicans now feel emboldened to use taxpayer dollars to finance a general exodus from public schools? A major reason is lingering public anger over lengthy pandemic school shutdowns, often at the behest of teachers’ unions, that put children way behind in their learning.    

Many U.S. parents also feel voiceless when it comes to how their schools are run and what their kids are taught in school. Conservative parents are particularly incensed by what they see as progressive attempts to indoctrinate their children in “woke” orthodoxies around race and gender.  

The right also is filling a political vacuum left by Democrats’ unwise abandonment of public school reform and modernization. Under Clinton and Obama, the party led the fight to expand public school choice and raise academic standards. 

According to Bellwether co-founder Andy Rotherham, from 1992 to around 2016, U.S. students made steady gains in reading and math proficiency and achievement gaps narrowed.  

That progress plateaued in the Trump years before dipping precipitously during the pandemic. Around the same time, Democrats moved left under pressure from young progressives eager to remake the world and impatient with the prosaic work of fixing failing schools. 

Social justice activists found “structural racism” a better explanation for persistent achievement gaps than the poor quality of public schools in poor neighborhoods. In the prevailing climate of progressive virtue-signaling, renaming schools took precedence over improving them.  

Unfortunately, the Biden administration has taken its cue on education policy from the teachers’ unions, which myopically defend the K-12 status quo. The unions fear competition from public charter schools, the best of which outperform district-operated schools in educating low-income students and closing achievement gaps. 

The Democrats’ backsliding on public school choice and accountability has not gone unnoticed by voters, a majority of whom believe public education is headed in the wrong direction.  

The party has lost its historically large advantage in handling education, falling behind the Republicans in some polls. But they could regain it, by speeding up today’s glacial pace of evolution in K-12 schools. 

America is inching toward a post-bureaucratic model for public education better suited to the digital age. Democrats can hit the accelerator by lifting state caps on public charter schools to expand parental choice; shifting decisions from central districts to autonomous school leaders; adopting rigorous, world-class standards for core competencies; exposing high school students to the world of work and closing schools that routinely fail their students.  

Republicans no longer disguise their intent to privatize education. This is exactly the wrong prescription for bridging America’s deep political and cultural divisions. The GOP’s marketplace for primary and secondary education will surely stratify as rich families top off their vouchers to send their kids to the most exclusive private schools. 

It's hard to imagine a better formula for perpetuating class privilege and entrenching unequal opportunity. Or for aggravating our national disunion as red and blue America drift farther apart.  

By reinventing America’s public schools, Democrats also can reaffirm their historic role in cultivating civic unity and forging democratic citizens. 

The critical mission of public education, according to Al Shanker, legendary chief of the American Federation of Teachers, is to “teach children what it means to be American.”  

That’s not a job we can outsource to private schools and markets. 

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