Thanks To BLM And The Teachers’ Unions, School Choice Keeps Winning

Opponents of school choice can’t be happy. The past three years have seen a flood of school-choice victories – and, ironically, we can thank two very “progressive” groups.

Two thirds of all states now have some form of private school-choice policies. Notably, 11 states have universal education choice, a policy no state had just three years ago. Even in states where school choice is still elusive, the dam is breaking. In Texas, opponents of education freedom were roundly defeated in the primaries this past spring.

What has transpired in these 36 months? As scholars who have closely studied and chronicled these developments, the only response we can give is that American parents rebelled against what happened four years ago.

So as people who fully welcome policies that liberate American families and leave them free to educate their children as they see fit, and not remain shackled to bad public schools set on indoctrinating their young children, we’d like to thank Black Lives Matter.

Yes, BLM.

If it weren’t for all the damage they have inflicted on society, we would consider sending handwritten thank-you notes to founders Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and the rest.

Without the chaos and violence created in 2020 by the BLM organizations — founded by these Marxists with the express goal of achieving systemic-wide societal change — combined with the radical gender ideology infecting local schools, parents maybe have been slower to demand an escape hatch to let them opt out of the indoctrination meted out in public schools.

They did, and the progress speaks for itself.

Of course, we don’t want to leave out the teachers’ unions. Bless them, they also did their part.

The shutdowns they demanded were the first instance of public schools breaking faith with families; failing to reopen their doors long after we knew it was safe for them to do so. In rapid succession, parents saw the second instance: emergency remote learning gave them a window into what their children were being taught, raising red flags in school board meetings across the country.

States responded, giving parents the ability to vote with their feet. And vote they did. The number of children exercising school choice – using a voucher, tax credit scholarship, or education savings account – has roughly doubled from the 2019 pre-pandemic level to nearly 1 million students.

Today, 19 states have Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) or ESA-style policies enabling families to choose schools and learning options that are right for their children. ESAs are accounts into which the state deposits a portion—usually 90 percent—of the money that would have been spent on a child in their district school.

The parents can use the money in the account to pay for private school tuition, online learning, special education services and therapies, tutoring, textbooks, and a host of other education-related services, products, and providers. And unused funds can be rolled over from year to year, and even rolled into a college savings account.

This year alone four states established ESA options: Wyoming, Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia. Louisiana went all-in with universal ESAs, opening up eligibility to every family in the state, regardless of income.

In Texas, up until this year, state legislators who call themselves Republicans had stood in the way of school choice programs out of concern for what it might mean for the district public school.

Well, this year the Lone Star State had elections. Six out of eight incumbent Republican lawmakers who had stood in the way of school choice lost their primaries or the runoffs.

This was a big win for Gov. Greg Abbott, who made school choice a hill to die on, and now more than ever looks like a reality in the Lone Star State.

If Texas finally adopts school choice, some 40% of all kids in the country would be eligible to choose a school other than their assigned district school. At that point, we can reasonably say that Milton Friedman’s vision of breaking the public schooling monopoly – some 70 years in the making – has come to fruition.

Which brings us back to how we got here. Four years ago, this country was caught up in one of its biggest political convulsions in decades, after BLM manipulated the tragic death of George Floyd to carry out their plan. We had weeks of rioting, burning, and looting.

As if the physical damage didn’t take enough of a toll, the stewards of our cultural institutions — our schools and universities, our libraries and museums, our theaters and movie studios, everyone involved in industries that create meaning and content — then capitulated and accepted as facts a number of falsehoods they should have had the confidence to dismiss.

America is systemically racist; white supremacy is the operating system of our society; the founding of America took place in 1619, when a group of Africans arrived in Jamestown, not 1776, when America’s founders signed the Declaration of Independence. These and other fabrications were accepted as facts.

The idea was to stain and destroy the idea of America. Rather than being conceived in liberty, everyone was told to believe that ugly racism and oppression was the post-partum reality.

Then there were the sexual delusions. Among these were that a man could become a woman or vice versa, or that children could be born in the “wrong body.” America circa 2020 thus fell into what can only be described as a moment of mass hysteria.

These ideas swarmed into our classrooms and children began to be indoctrinated into these hallucinations. Their purveyors intentionally targeted our schools, fully cognizant of the fact that if you capture a generation of children, if you interrupt the transmission of culture and facts and you change the narrative, you have created a new hegemony.

This movement had the wind fully at its back in 2020. The world was going its way.

But then something happened: parents and grandparents, especially mothers and grandmothers, started to fight back, a counterrevolution that gathered force in early 2021. They organized, went to school board meetings, and voted. They demanded the freedom to opt out of the frenzy. School choice was the way out.

They put pressure on politicians in states like Texas. And they voted out recalcitrant politicians standing in their way.

If you ask us, that is the reason why education choice has met the success it has.

So special thanks go to Randi Weingarten, Nicole Hannah-Jones, Ibram Kendi, and Robin DiAngelo. The school choice movement couldn’t have done it without you.

###

Lindsey M. Burke is the Mark A. Kolokotrones Fellow and Director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation.

Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, www.Heritage.org.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.