Support for school choice is soaring

Cynthia M. Allen, Tribune News Service

If you’ve paid any attention to the very public, very divisive debates over school administration, policy, curricula and academic outcomes — in Fort Worth, Southlake and several other parts of the country — you know that we have yet to experience all of the aftershocks from two years of pandemic learning.

There has been tremendous dismay with educational content — from CRT education to what books are occupying school library shelves.

There has been frustration with poor academic results, in Fort Worth ISD in particular, so much so that the district could barely muster enough support to pass a bond for much needed upgrades on academic facilities.

And there has been exasperation with masking and quarantining policies that have kept healthy kids out of school for weeks, demoralised staff and caused immeasurable harm to students.

Thankfully, parents are seeking to make changes. Sometimes, it’s through protests and activism. Other times, it’s greater voter engagement. But as survey after survey suggests, while they’re pursuing change within public school leadership and institutions, parents are also looking for more and better educational options for their children.

And this might be the shiniest silver lining of pandemic learning yet.

A new poll released by the American Federation for Children and Invest in Education, and reported by National Review, shows broad and growing support for school choice. And importantly, it’s across all racial demographics and political groups. The survey found that majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents concurred with the sentiment that “parents should be in charge of decisions regarding their child’s education.”

(Why parents would ever disagree, but especially after the last two years, is a mystery to me.)

Support was even higher among Black and Hispanic respondents, whose children are more likely to be trapped in poorly performing public institutions. With regard to practical solutions, the poll also found high levels of support for education-savings accounts and for the federal tax-credit scholarship program proposed in the Education Freedom Scholarship Act and currently before Congress. It would allow individuals and businesses to receive a tax credit for donating to nonprofit scholarships that allow parents to send children to the school of their choice.

The study is hardly an outlier in post-pandemic times.  Earlier this year, RealClear Opinion Research survey found similar rates of support for more educational options for parents and students, with only 18 percent of respondents saying they do not back school choice — much lower than pre-pandemic levels.

In the National School Choice Week group’s survey, more than half of parents said that they were considering changing a child’s school or had considered doing so in the last year.

The top concerns were, no surprise, school quality and COVID-19 disruptions.

Meanwhile, parents who chose this year to home-school their children or send them to private school are twice as likely to be “very satisfied” with their children’s experiences compared to parents who send their kids to district schools.

Charters also have high levels of parental satisfaction. And home-school and private-school parents report significantly more academic, emotional and social development in their children than parents of public-school children.

All of this makes perfect sense given what the last two years have revealed about the state of public education. But options such as private, charter and home schools are not available to many parents. Even with North Texas’ robust charter school community, the highest performing charters have long waitlists.

And private or home schools are not financially feasible for many, particularly single parents or those who are economically disadvantaged, as about 80 percent of Fort Worth ISD students are — at least not without policy changes such as savings accounts or tax credits.

Those reforms are possible, especially because support for more options transcends what typically divides us. If parents can maintain the momentum that has helped them flip school board seats, they may be able to make something good out of two very difficult years for our kids.