School Choice Is the Market Key to Education Success – Religion & Liberty Online

During every election, Americans fight over what children should learn. One administration revises history standards and establishes new civics priorities. The next infuses the curriculum with race and gender topics. School board meetings become political spectacles. Parents organize. Unions strike. Candidates promise to “take back” America’s classrooms. Both sides assume the same thing: Whoever controls government should control education. That’s unconscionable.

The debate over school choice is often reduced to funding formulas or standardized test scores. Those issues matter, but for those of us who champion parental control, the main issue is no different than the one precipitating the American Revolution. In short, school choice is about limiting government power. It recognizes that no president, governor, legislature, or bureaucracy should possess a monopoly over the education of America’s children.

And while Trump is leading the charge to abolish the federal bureaucracy, that problem is much older than the U.S. Department of Education. For centuries, governments have viewed schools not merely as places of learning but as instruments for social engineering. Curricula change. Political fashions come and go. The temptation to use education as a vehicle for ideological instruction remains. One of history’s earliest champions of compulsory education was Martin Luther. The goal was to enable every child to read Scripture. Tragically, governments soon discovered that whoever controls schools also has extraordinary influence over what future citizens believe about everything.

Centralized education expanded further through the Prussian model of standardized, highly disciplined pedagogy in the 18th and 19th centuries. Schools increasingly became tools for promoting civic loyalty, national identity, ideological homogeneity, and the priorities of the state rather than simply teaching literacy and numeracy.

Yet education should cultivate independent thinkers. But when the government holds overwhelming authority over schools, education inevitably reflects the priorities of whichever political coalition happens to be in power. And that reality should concern conservatives and progressives alike. If your political opponents eventually control the Department of Education, they will also influence what millions of children are taught.

The way to solve this problem is not to ensure that “our side” wins every election. We should reduce the amount of political power any government possesses over our children. And school choice does exactly that. It allows parents to choose among different institutions: district, charter, private, religious, microschools, homeschools, etc. Families with different values and children with diverse needs no longer have to battle over a single government-approved curriculum. A variety of schools, among other benefits, makes ideological uniformity impossible. It’s a safeguard against political propaganda and the rise of tyrants.

The evidence also shows that well-designed school-choice programs improve educational outcomes. In its 2023 national report, Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) compared charter school students with statistically similar students attending nearby traditional public schools across dozens of states. On average, charter students achieved the equivalent of 16 additional days of learning in reading and six additional days in mathematics during a single academic year.

What government-school union bosses won’t tell you is that the gains were substantially larger for students who have historically been underserved by the public education system, including low-income, black, and Hispanic students, especially those living in urban communities. Critics sometimes respond by pointing out that not every charter school performs well. But no one claims otherwise. CREDO found considerable variation. Some charter schools outperform nearby public schools by wide margins. Others perform worse. But that only strengthens the case for school choice.

No one argues that every restaurant, hospital, or college delivers the same quality. We don’t respond by assigning everyone to a single government provider. When customers are free to choose, successful institutions grow while unsuccessful ones improve or disappear. Even stronger evidence for this comes from studies using admissions lotteries.

When charter schools receive more applications than available seats, students are admitted randomly. We can compare lottery winners and losers who are otherwise quite similar. These studies resemble randomized controlled trials, allowing researchers to determine cause and effect. A meta-analysis published in the Journal of School Choice found that high-performing “No Excuses” charter schools produced annual gains of approximately 0.25 standard deviations in mathematics and 0.17 standard deviations in reading (effects considered statistically significant).

The question is not whether some charter schools succeed. The evidence proves that well-run schools operating in a competitive environment can produce meaningful improvements for many students, especially those with the fewest educational opportunities.

Parents, of course, care less about whether their child gains a few extra points on a standardized exam than whether that child graduates, succeeds in college, finds meaningful work, and becomes an independent, productive adult. On those measures, the case for school choice is even more compelling. A landmark study of Ohio’s EdChoice Scholarship Program followed students beyond K–12 education and into adulthood. Instead of focusing on standardized tests, researchers examined whether voucher recipients enrolled in and completed college. The results were striking.

Students who participated in the program were approximately 32% more likely to enroll in college and nearly 60% more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree than comparable students who remained in traditional public schools. The gains were especially pronounced for black students, boys, and students from lower-income families. And because college completion is one of the strongest predictors of lifetime earnings, employment, and upward economic mobility, these findings suggest that the benefits of school choice can extend well beyond the classroom.

Critics often argue that school choice helps only those students who leave public schools. Even that isn’t true. Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship Program has been studied for years by economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). As private-school options expanded, nearby public schools responded to the increased competition. Researchers found improvements in standardized test scores, reductions in absenteeism, fewer suspensions, and a better overall school climate, particularly in lower-income communities.

That result shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with basic economics. When families have meaningful alternatives, schools have stronger incentives to improve. Monopolies rarely produce excellence. Competition often does.

Education exists to serve children, not governments. A free society should not entrust any administration, agency or political party with the power to shape the beliefs of every child. Republicans do not want Democrats exercising that authority. Democrats do not want Republicans in charge of this. The safest arrangement is one in which no one possesses that power in the first place.

America already embraces this principle elsewhere. We scatter political authority through federalism. We disperse economic power through markets. We separate the branches of government because concentrated power is dangerous. Education should be no different.

School choice does not guarantee perfect schools. What it does is more important: It empowers parents instead of bureaucracies and encourages schools to earn families’ trust rather than draft students based on their zip codes.

Evidence suggests that school-choice programs raise achievement, increase college completion, and even improve nearby public schools through healthy competition. But even if those gains were smaller than the research increasingly indicates, the key arguments still stand:

The education of children belongs to families, not to the government. And school choice is one of the most important safeguards of a free society.