Black Community News News and Commentary for Christians
Government schools competing in an open market? This is what school choice supporters have longed for — and it’s finally happening, thanks to more states passing school choice measures, freeing families from failing government schools.
An editor at The New York Times (NYT) could not have stated it any plainer with this headline: “Public Schools Try to Sell Themselves as More Students Use Vouchers.” A decline in births and a rise in school choice programs have created a “crisis” for government schools. Now they have to compete for students who have choices. An excerpt:
The threat is so great that some school districts are trying something that would have once seemed unthinkable.
School systems in Orlando, Newark, Memphis and dozens of other cities and towns have hired consultants who aggressively woo parents to convince them to enroll their children in local public schools.
As government schools seek to retain or attract students, consulting in this area likely will be big business. NYT featured a consultant in Memphis who created a firm called Caissa K12, which has over 100 clients.
Enrollment in government schools is down. A global pandemic played a part, but Americans are having fewer children. Schools in various states have closed and combined with other schools because of the shrinking pool of children. Now we have more acceptance of school choice. From NYT:
Because schools are funded on a per-pupil basis, the loss of 3,000 of the [Orlando, Florida] district’s 200,000 students could amount to a $28 million funding decrease. The district is considering consolidating and rezoning schools. It has also hired Caissa K12 to help it recruit back families tempted by other options.
The story featured a black mother in Florida who likes the idea of choice for her child. Florida gives families $8,000 per child for tuition for private schools. Jasmine Robinson’s six-year-old daughter said she was bored in school.
“Ms. Robinson said she believed district schools were overly focused on preparing children for standardized tests,” according to NYT. “She loved the fact that when she visited the private school, she saw first graders learning fractions.”
Star Parker, founder of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE) and CURE’s social policy consultant, has been a school choice advocate for many years. She wants parents to have the power and authority to educate their kids and send them to schools that reflect their values, as she wrote in a recent column.
Star agrees with President Donald Trump on shutting down the U.S. Department of Education.
“One of the beauties of America’s free enterprise system is failure is punished and purged, and success is celebrated and rewarded,” she wrote. “But this doesn’t happen in socialism. It doesn’t happen when markets are controlled by politics and not by business and the desires of consumers freely expressed.”
Tolerating failure is a losing strategy, as bureaucrats are learning. School administrators must compete for students, convincing parents that their product is the best. Competition creates excellent.
Government schools likely will tone down or dismantle homosexual and racial indoctrination, for example. Parents don’t want this. Star and her guests on an episode of CURE America spoke about indoctrination in schools.
“Currently, ninety percent of the nation’s K-12 students attend public schools. As parents increasingly recognize the harmful influences in public schools—such as the sexualization of children, promotion of fake Critical Race Theory, socialist indoctrination, and erosion of parental rights—a strong movement is emerging. These parents are not just pushing back against the radical agenda in the classroom but are also demanding policy changes that ensure funding follows their children to schools that align with their values.”
School choice advocate Corey DeAngelis is featured in this episode. Watch the video below for more.
