School Choice K-12 Archives

From Israel to America and lots of places in between, government schools are failing. This should not surprise us.

“Our schools,” reports a knowledgeable observer, “are producing ignoramuses.” The average graduate, he explains, “does not know how to read critically, write expressively, or debate intelligently and politely.” Meantime, the unions are opposing huge, proposed increases in beginner-teacher salaries because, instead, they want higher pay for teachers with seniority, regardless of individual performance.

Are we talking about America here? No, though Americans can sadly and credibly claim similar circumstances. What you just read comes from writer Amotz Asa-El in the July 29-August 4 issue of The Jerusalem Post. In his article titled “How can Jewish Schools be Bad?”, the country whose schools he excoriates is Israel.

For more than 2,000 years, a thirst for learning has been a core element of Jewish culture. Asa-El writes,

So obsessed with education were the Jews that Jewish law decreed that a town that did not give its children a teacher must be excommunicated. And so unique did education make the Jews that a French monk noted in the 12th Century that “a Jew, however poor, if he had 10 sons would put them all to letters…and not only his sons, but his daughters” [too].

Education was a legacy, a quest, and a supreme value that went with the Jews wherever they wandered. That’s how the penniless immigrants who proceeded from Europe’s shtetls [Jewish enclaves] to the Lower East Side’s sweatshops produced by 1937 half of New York’s doctors and two-thirds of its lawyers.

One could reasonably assume that such a deeply rooted heritage would produce good public schools in a country defined by its Jewishness. But instead, says Asa-El, they are a “disgrace.” Not only are they academically bad, they also “nurture indiscipline.” He points out that it “is most commonly reflected in students’ total disregard for their teacher’s very presence in the classroom.” Moreover,

In worse cases, this indiscipline breeds vandalism during field trips, not only in Israeli parks, but even in places like Birkenau [a notorious Nazi concentration camp], where Israeli students carved their names into barracks’ walls.

The performance of American public schools, on average, is nothing to write home about either. Their disgraceful shortcomings are well-known and hardly need to be recounted here. You can check the Education section of Just Facts for the details. But guess what? I’ve heard the same complaints in almost all the 87 countries I’ve visited over the years. Even people who think their local public school is OK will decry the lousy and expensive outcomes in everybody else’s public school.

If a chain of private restaurants served bad food at high prices, it would be history in a hurry. Better eateries would spring up in their place, and customers would welcome such “creative destruction” as perfectly natural and beneficial.

Even in education, we can find excellence. Private schools and home schools are generally flourishing. These are the schools in which no parent or child is trapped by zip code. No unhappy customers are forced to patronize these options year after year. Distant bureaucracies and self-serving unions cannot bully their way into the classroom. Teachers are freer to get the job done. Fractious, distracting, intractable controversies are avoided because everybody pays for what they get and gets what they pay for—or they take a walk.

Public schools are government schools. Their common denominator is politics. Who in their right mind would even think to suggest that to improve restaurants, we should assign people to eat at restaurants by geography or zip code? Would a bad restaurant improve if we threw more money at it, rewarded its staff according to seniority instead of merit, or put politicians in charge of its menu? The reality in Israeli schools proves that politics can take even an impressive cultural heritage and trash it in just a few generations.

From Israel to America and lots of places in between, government is not the answer to problems in education. It is the paramount problem itself. Government politicizes education. It foists compulsory unionism on teachers. It rewards mediocrity and frustrates innovation and success. It stifles the very forces of choice, incentive and accountability that produce progress in every other walk of life where they are employed. The answer is more freedom, not more politics and coercion. Why is such common sense so infuriatingly uncommon?

Perhaps government conveniently forgot to teach it to us.

For Additional Information, See:

A New Direction for Education Reform by Lawrence W. Reed

The Spread of Education Before Compulsion by Edwin West

What 17th Century England’s State Church Had in Common with Today’s School Systems by Lawrence W. Reed

The Myth that Americans Were Poorly Educated Before Mass Government Schooling by Lawrence W. Reed

AUTHOR

Lawrence W. Reed

Lawrence W. Reed is FEE’s President Emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Global Ambassador for Liberty, having served for nearly 11 years as FEE’s president (2008-2019). He is author of the 2020 book, Was Jesus a Socialist? as well as Real Heroes: Incredible True Stories of Courage, Character, and Conviction and Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism. Follow on LinkedIn and Like his public figure page on Facebook. His website is www.lawrencewreed.com.

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“Our goal is to have a system in which every family in the U.S. will be able to choose for itself the school to which its children go,” the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman stated in 2003. “We are far from that ultimate result. If we had that, a system of free choice, we would also have a system of competition, innovation, which would change the character of education.”

Last week, Arizona lawmakers moved us much closer to that ultimate result. Legislators in that state, which already had some of the most robust school choice policies in the US, passed the country’s first universal education savings account bill, extending education choice to all K-12 students.

The education savings accounts, or Empowerment Scholarship Accounts as they are known in Arizona, had previously been available to certain Arizona students who met specific criteria, including special needs students and children in active-duty military families. This new bill, which the Governor Doug Ducey is expected to sign, extends education choice to all school-age children throughout Arizona.

Every family will now have access to 90 percent of the state-allocated per pupil education dollars, or about $7,000 per student, to use toward approved education-related resources, including private school tuition, tutors, curriculum materials, online learning programs, and more.

“Arizona is now the gold standard for school choice,” Corey DeAngelis, senior fellow at the American Federation for Children, told me this week. “Every other state should follow Arizona’s lead and fund students instead of systems. Education funding is meant for educating children, not for protecting a particular institution. School choice is the only way to truly secure parental rights in education.”

Several states have introduced or expanded school choice policies over the past couple of years, enabling taxpayer funding of education to go directly to students rather than bureaucratic school systems. In this week’s LiberatED podcast episode, I spoke with one education entrepreneur, Michelle McCartney, whose homeschool resource center is an approved vendor for New Hampshire’s Education Freedom Accounts, an education savings account program for income-eligible students that was implemented last year.

While McCartney sees a fully private, free market in education as the ideal circumstance, she recognizes that education choice policies are an important first step toward expanding education options for more families, and reducing government involvement in the education sector.

“If it was up to me we wouldn’t pay any money to the government and school would be entirely privatized,” said McCartney. “That’s how I believe it should be, but it’s not. So I think we can all sit here and have discussions about what would be the ideal circumstance, but I think sometimes we’ve got to roll with what we have, and if we can get any of that money back to the families I think that’s an important first step.”

Indeed, Milton Friedman also saw school choice policies such as vouchers as a first step in education reform, not a final one. Friedman popularized the idea of school choice policies, specifically universal school vouchers, in his 1955 paper, “The Role of Government in Education,” and elaborated on his views over the following decades up until his death in 2006 at the age of 94.

Friedman and his economist wife Rose wrote in their influential book, Free To Choose: “We regard the voucher plan as a partial solution because it affects neither the financing of schooling nor the compulsory attendance laws. We favor going much farther.”

While Arizona’s new legislation now makes it the forerunner in education choice policies across the country, West Virginia is close behind and begins to address compulsory attendance. Lawmakers there recently passed legislation that loosens state compulsory school attendance laws for participants in learning pods and microschools, two emerging, decentralized K-12 learning models that are gaining popularity across the country. West Virginia also passed an education savings account program last year, known as the Hope Scholarship, that extends education choice to nearly all K-12 students.

The education disruption over the past two years has re-energized parents and taxpayers alike. They are demanding more options beyond an assigned district school, embracing innovative learning models, and loosening the government grip on education. As Friedman envisioned, a choice-based system of education weakens the government monopoly on schooling and sparks innovation and competition to ultimately “change the character of education.”

We are seeing that change occur right before our eyes.

Listen to the weekly LiberatED Podcast on Apple, Spotify, Google, and Stitcher, and sign up for Kerry’s weekly LiberatED email newsletter to stay up-to-date on educational news and trends from a free-market perspective.

AUTHOR

Kerry McDonald

Kerry McDonald is a Senior Education Fellow at FEE and host of the weekly LiberatED podcast. She is also the author of Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom (Chicago Review Press, 2019), an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a regular Forbes contributor. Kerry has a B.A. in economics from Bowdoin College and an M.Ed. in education policy from Harvard University. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and four children. You can sign up for her weekly newsletter on parenting and education here.

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Lawrence W. Reed

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