The growing movement to fund students rather than government monopolies
The COVID-19 lockdowns have upended no part of our lives more than K-12 education, with virtually no public schools open for business with full-time, in-person instruction. The result has been pandemonium for students, parents, and educators, who are scrambling to make sense of school systems that are no longer capable of fulfilling their missions. The one constant? Critiques of school choice—especially by wealthy, well-connected liberals and progressives, such as Samantha Bee, who claimed on a recent episode of her TBS show Full Frontal, that charters have little oversight. As a matter of fact, charter schools are overseen by state and local education officials. Bee is joined in her contempt for charters by Joe Biden, who came out swinging in an interview with the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, saying, « Now a lot of these charter schools are significantly underperforming… » Corey DeAngelis, the director of school choice at the Reason Foundation and the co-editor of the new collection School Choice Myths: Setting the Record Straight on Education Reform, points to a meta-analysis by the University of California, San Diego, economists Julian R. Betts and Y. Emily Tang, which « conclude[s] that there’s about a 2 to 3 percent standard deviation increase in academic outcomes » at charter schools. DeAngelis, who holds a Ph.D. in education from the University of Arkansas, says widespread dissatisfaction with online education is massively increasing interest in school choice.
